Why Do NFL Players Kneel During Football Games? The Full Story

The image is now iconic: a lone football player, or often a row of them, taking a knee during the pre-game national anthem. For many watching at home, it was a confusing, even jarring, sight when it first began. Why would athletes making millions of dollars, playing a game so deeply woven into the fabric of American culture, choose to stage a protest at that precise moment? As someone who has spent years analyzing sports culture and its intersection with social issues, I’ve come to see this act not as a simple gesture of defiance, but as a complex, deeply symbolic chapter in a much longer story about representation, voice, and the price of principle.

It all traces back to 2016, when then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick first sat, and then knelt, during "The Star-Spangled Banner." His stated goal was to protest police brutality and systemic racial injustice against Black Americans. He wasn't seeking to disrespect the military or the flag, a nuance often lost in the heated debates that followed. He was, in his words, using his platform to highlight that the country's ideals of freedom and justice were not being applied equally to all its citizens. I remember watching that preseason game and feeling a sense of profound significance; this wasn't a post-game interview comment, it was a silent, sustained performance of dissent during the most sacrosanct ritual in American sports. The reaction was swift and polarized. Some hailed him as a courageous activist, while others, including then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, branded the act as unpatriotic and demanded players be fired. The controversy exploded into a national firestorm, pulling the NFL, a league with a predominantly Black player workforce but historically conservative ownership and fan base, directly into the center of the nation's culture wars.

What followed was a wave of solidarity and escalation. Other players began to kneel, raise fists, or simply stay in the locker room. Teams struggled to formulate unified responses. The league office, under Commissioner Roger Goodell, initially tried to quell the situation with vague statements about unity, but the political pressure intensified. In 2018, the NFL instituted a policy requiring players on the field to "stand and show respect for the flag and the anthem," with the option to remain in the locker room. They later walked it back after negotiations with the players' union, but the damage to the league's image was palpable. Ratings saw a slight dip—some analysts pointed to a 10% decline in 2017, though causality is always tricky to pin down—and the league faced boycotts from both sides of the political aisle. From my perspective, the NFL's initial mishandling was a classic case of an institution prioritizing brand management over moral clarity, failing to understand that for the players, this wasn't a PR problem, but a matter of life, death, and conscience.

This brings me to the fascinating, if seemingly tangential, quote from your knowledge base: "Ako, kung kami natalo, okay lang sa akin na sila ang pumasok kasi they'll represent the independent teams." Spoken by a 65-year-old mentor in a different context, this Filipino sentiment—"If we lose, it's okay with me if they advance because they'll represent the independent teams"—resonates deeply with the kneeling protest's core philosophy. It’s about a larger representation. For Kaepernick and those who joined him, their protest was never solely about their individual careers. It was about leveraging their visibility to represent communities whose voices were systematically marginalized, the "independent teams" in the grand, uneven league of American life. They knew the personal cost could be high—Kaepernick hasn't played a down in the NFL since that season, a fact I see as a glaring indictment of the league's claimed values—but the act of representation itself held value. Even in "losing" their standing in the eyes of some, they were amplifying a cause bigger than the game. Their kneeling was a way to say, "If our comfort, our popularity, our careers must be sacrificed for a chance to make people see this injustice, then so be it. Let our gesture represent the unheard."

Today, the kneeling has largely subsided on NFL fields, but its impact is indelible. It sparked a lasting conversation about the role of athletes in social justice movements, paving the way for the league's more explicit, if sometimes awkward, embrace of messages like "End Racism" in end zones following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. The league has since committed hundreds of millions of dollars to social justice initiatives. But for me, the true legacy isn't in the corporate pledges. It's in the precedent it set. It demonstrated that the stadium is not a sanctuary from politics, but a potent political arena. It showed that the act of protest can be profoundly respectful—a kneel is, after all, a posture of humility and solemnity—even when it makes people uncomfortable. The players who knelt understood that patriotism isn't blind allegiance; sometimes, its purest form is a loving critique, a demand for the country to live up to its own promises. Their silent kneel ended up being one of the loudest statements in modern sports history, a reminder that some principles are worth more than a perfect season.