In Harvard visit, author offers an inside look at the powerful, porous NFL

Friday, January 25, 2019 - 17:30 in Mathematics & Economics

“‘Politics has become a much bigger subject than the Super Bowl,’ [President] Trump boasted in the run-up to the big game. ‘This is usually Super Bowl territory, and now they’re saying that the politics is more interesting to people,’ he said. ‘So that’s good.’”  — Mark Leibovich, writing in The New York Times Magazine last Aug. 28 As a club of rich businesspeople and lucky heirs operating a billion-dollar cash cow, the last thing that team owners in the National Football League (NFL) wanted was to be swept into a political maelstrom, with the president pressing them to punish players who protested violence against African-Americans by kneeling during the national anthem. But that’s exactly what happened in 2017 and 2018 when President Trump seized on the protests, brought into the national spotlight by then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick in 2016. Trump’s efforts both galvanized his supporters and unsettled the NFL, which had...

Read the whole article on Harvard Science

More from Harvard Science

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net