What the NFL needs is more Colin Kaepernicks

In a few weeks, the NFL will conclude an unusually politicized season. Most notably, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick kept up a long protest against the national anthem, occasionally joined by others around the league. In response, companies dropped sponsorships, fans burned jerseys and league executives denounced the protesters as traitors.

The controversy was so intense it might have even hurt the NFL’s (otherwise stratospheric) TV ratings.

Many of Kaepernick’s critics asserted that sports and politics don’t mix. That’s wrong. As research my colleague Emily Thorson and I conducted shows, sports fandom does correlate with political attitudes. And one issue that has dominated American politics in the 21st century is intertwined with sports culture: economic inequality.

No other form of escapism so consistently embeds a narrative based on meritocracy. Winners succeed, sports tell us, because they work hard. Rare is the exultant athlete, hoisting the trophy, who refers to the team’s offseason free-agency binge that helped them buy the championship. Rare is the sportswriter who can resist the heartwarming tale of a superstar born into poverty, hustling out of the ‘hood into fame. Rare is the fan who doesn’t swoon for the underdog upsetting a heavy favorite.

“That’s what America is all about,” ESPN’s Jon Gruden summarized. “A kid comes out of nowhere to become the No. 1 draft pick.”

The pervasiveness of that attitude helps explain a puzzling fact about our era of pronounced inequality. Though the top 0.1 percent and bottom 90 percent of Americans now have about the same share of the nation’s wealth, and the U.S. lags behind much of Europe in terms of upward income mobility, belief in opportunity hasn’t abated. The Pew Research Center finds that substantial majorities of Americans think economic success is a product of individual initiative rather than outside forces.

Sports offer a persuasive script for articulating that capitalist catechism; and there might be an empirical relationship between the two.

This fall, we fielded a nationally representative survey that asked about sports fandom and political attitudes. A series of standard questions measured respondents’ tendency to attribute economic success to personal effort rather than structural advantages – for example, whether hard work and ambition determine if people get ahead or whether growing up with wealth and high-quality education might explain one’s financial position. Controlling for demographic and ideological variables, we found that sports fans are more likely than non-fans to believe economic outcomes reflect meritocratic processes – practice, ability, dedication.

We just don’t know why. Horatio Alger-types might be attracted to sports as a cultural tableau that ratifies their worldview. Or perhaps sports discourse inculcates values that support a winner-take-all economy. Notably, there was no relationship between income level and the likelihood of being a fan, so it seems 1-percenters and poverty-liners alike love sports, even as they explain the former’s lot in life much more charitably than the latter’s.

But the study makes a few things clear. The data should dispel the fantasy that sports can somehow be insulated from politics. Frankly, we don’t need data to prove that claim. History is strewn with moments of metaphorical political triumph by athletes – from Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson through the current era of activism among NBA superstars, the University of Missouri football team, and Kaepernick’s protest. Most fans tend to assume, though, that when the hoodies come off and the “hands up” come down, the games know no partisan stripe.

Another mistake.

By offering tidy metaphors for meritocracy, sports also implicitly tell us tales about why economic inequality persists. As such, we could benefit from more athletes engaging in political consciousness, and not merely limited to issues of racial injustice.

Players might embrace a posture of humility that acknowledges luck – luck of genetics, luck of gameplay – as much as effort determined their fate. Tying their protests to charitable giving, as Kaepernick has done, could set a powerful example. Leagues might recognize the rules they institute to help level the playing field, such as salary caps and draft orders, could have instructive real-world analogs. Forgoing tax dollars for new stadiums – which don’t boost economic growth, create almost no jobs and constrain public spending for decades – would be a start.

And media and fans might begin to treat political agitators like Kaepernick, in life, as they’ve treated Muhammad Ali in death: less dismissively and disdainfully.

All this might represent a modest corrective to the narratives that sports culture otherwise promotes and help us empathize with those living on the wrong end of meritocracy and inequality. There is no question that in sports, as in life, winners work hard. Losers often do, too. In valorizing the former, we ought not to forget that about the latter.

This story was originally published January 15, 2017 at 8:17 AM with the headline "What the NFL needs is more Colin Kaepernicks."