The most unsettling part of the Kaepernick situation for the NFL

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The Colin Kaepernick rally told us a lot about not very much, and very little about a very big thing.

Then again, it wasn’t really designed to settle much. Kaepernick is the ethereal face of a slowly growing awareness of a world outside the office in sports, an awareness that reflects our societal chaos but flies in the face of the NFL’s far more structured, mythologized and rigidly ordered world.

And that may be the most unsettling part of this for the league. It isn’t that Kaepernick doesn’t have a job as much as the knowledge that the owners have decided, whether individually or en masse, that the business matters more than the sport.

This is a hard sell for rational football fans who have held the sport as the reason this all matters. Kaepernick’s detractors have exhausted their arguments about his inadequacies (counter: he did not drop from 28 to 125 among quarterbacks for any known football reason) or his contract demands (counter: neither he nor his agent have ever discussed money or other terms in any way with any team or his powers of distraction (counter: nobody has any shred of evidence that he was a distraction at any point to any player or coach but has been a hell of a distraction for the media).

So what they are left with is this: Football is a business, and owners have a right to run it the way they want.

“Owners have a right to run it the way they want.” Yay billionaires! You’re not a 49er or Raider fan, you’re a Jed York or Mark Davis fan. Feel better?

So now it's an owners' decision, as we always knew it was, and since almost no owners understand football as well as their football people, it means that the important thing isn’t the game but everything around it, including faux patriotism and avoiding criticism for being insufficiently mindful of the iconography.

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We have known this from the moment the Super Bowl became a week-long commercial and trade show about 30 years ago, but this is a more stark reminder that the business is the real game, and the game we watch and pay for is merely the okey-doke.

And ultimately, we are using all of this not for the benefit of the game but for the only thing that really seems to excite us any more – screaming at those who disagree with us. Maybe if we did that during the National Anthem, we could all get what we really and truly want -- perpetual rancor.

Hmm, sounds like a great nickname for an expansion team. And the business wins again.

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