NFL Owners Sure Came Off Like Dumbasses When They Met With Players About Protests

On Monday, The New York Times teased us with a maddeningly coy report about Eagles owner Jeff Lurie calling Donald Trump’s presidency “disastrous” during last October’s players-owners meeting about national anthem protests. The Times, which acquired an audio recording of the three-hour meeting, has now gotten around to publishing some more goodies.

You can read the Times’s full writeup of the meeting here. You’ll largely come away with two impressions: That the owners spent the meeting doing everything they could to dance around the issue of Colin Kaepernick being blackballed, and that these guys are pretty dumb.

How do advanced age and generational wealth affect a person’s ability to have a meaningful discussion about a heavy subject? Not well, it seems. The Times reports that the meeting was full of school-room invocations of Wise Men Of History—Falcons owner Arthur Blank quoted Thomas Paine while Dolphins owner Stephen Ross brought up Martin Luther King, Jr.’s march on Selma—and failed metaphors. Bills owner Terry Pegula was in rare form:

Pegula complained that the league was “under assault.” He unloaded a dizzying flurry of nautical metaphors to describe their predicament. “To me, this is like a glacier moving into the ocean,” he said. “We’re getting hit with a tsunami.” He expressed his wish that the league never be “a glacier crawling into the ocean.”

Meanwhile, Texans owner Bob McNair, who’s been a real dickhead about this whole situation, was attempting to rap with the youths:

The Houston Texans owner Bob McNair was more direct. He urged the players to tell their colleagues to, essentially, knock off the kneeling. “You fellas need to ask your compadres, fellas, stop that other business, let’s go out and do something that really produces positive results, and we’ll help you.”

And then Pegula came back with whatever the hell this idea is:

Pegula offered that he thought the league was battling a perception and “media problem.” He said it would be great for the league to find a compelling spokesman — preferably a player — to promote all of the good things they were doing together. He suggested that the league could learn from the gun lobby in this regard.

“For years we’ve watched the National Rifle Association use Charlton Heston as a figurehead,” Pegula said. “We need a spokesman.”

Don’t ever get old. Don’t ever get rich.