Quote: (09-25-2017 12:21 PM)TravelerKai Wrote:
I have a strange feeling that Mike Tomlin might have gone too far. Steeler fans are as blue collar and military as people get. The rooney family is very conservative and patriotic. There might be a storm going on behind closed doors.
I'm not sure if they will fire him but if he doesn't stop it might happen. They are probably grappling with the fact that firing anybody would self destruct the team and how best to contain the damage if the antics won't stop. Perhaps suspensions could work. Cutting players over this would hurt your roster too badly.
With respect to these protests Tomlin and the Steelers are a microcosm of the issues at play here on multiple levels.
The Steelers are owned by the Rooney family, who as you've said are conservative and patriotic, and widely held up as an example of the ideal NFL owner. The Steelers are a first class organization and have been very successful to boot. Pittsburgh itself is a very working class, blue collar town and the Steelers, from the ownership right down to their style of play on the field are very representative of the city itself.
One of the reasons the Rooneys are held up as paragons is because of The Rooney Rule, which is an initiative introduced by Dan Rooney that declared that at least one minority candidate had to be interviewed for head coaching and top management positions as part of the process. Mike Tomlin, the current Steelers head coach is put forth as a great example of the of the rule, given that he came out of nowhere at the time, but impressed so much in his interview that he was given the job. I hesitate to claim that but for the rule he wouldn't be a head coach, let alone for one of the A-list NFL teams, but the links between his hiring and the specific organization's worldview can't be ignored.
So you have an organization in the Steelers which goes out of its way to be loudly and overtly 'not racist' in its hiring practices and decides to hire a black man to one of the most prestigious coaching jobs in American sports. Then that same black man, from that same prestigious perch, instructs his team not to come out for the national anthem, which whether he meant it or not amounted to a tacit support of the protests. Protests, which to paraphrase Kaepernick, were happening because supporting the anthem would be to support a country which is oppressing minorities.
Mike Tomlin is not an oppressed man, but even if he wanted to take the stand for those he feels are oppressed, doing so from a position which is the very representation of your lack of oppression is odd to say the least, and insulting to most.
Similarly the average NFL viewer probably leaned towards Trump in the election, but like most people in Current Year America, go out of their way to be 'not racist' in their everyday lives.
They turn up on Sunday wanting to turn their brains off for a few hours to watch football but instead are treated with the protesting of the flag and the national anthem, the implication being that supporting the anthem/flag is to support oppression of minorities.
That is going to rub people the wrong way, and to the extent that the players in the NFL and other sports continue to one up each other to see who can engage in the most ornate anthem protest, the more they are going to turn off the viewing public to their cause. The public won't necessarily stop watching games, but they'll definitely tune out the underlying political argument more and more.
It will be a slow but sure red-pilling of a very large group of people (sports fans) who will come to the realization the SJW stuff will not stop until it is in literally every facet of one's life and continue again until every last one targeted succumbs to the SJW mindset. That's a recipe for disaster.