Colin Kaepernick was the start of what can be a better NFL

There’s this child I know — and I’m withholding names on purpose here — who once walked into a room where me and his father sat, proceeded to extend his right hand, which was covered in feces, and say, “Daddy, look.” The father had changed hundreds of the 3-year-old’s diapers. He probably thought he had a good handle on things. He’d never seen the kid reach reach down the back of his pants and with a smile — god how he beamed — present his own excrement like a present. The father shot up from his seat, picked up his son, held him so that the child’s hands would be equidistant from his face and any furniture, and threw him in the tub.

I think about this story when I think of the current state of the National Football League. That proud and brave (and very good) little toddler taught me an important lesson: There’s a good way to force people in power to deal with you, and that’s to confront them with the shit they have to deal with.

Colin Kaepernick flummoxed the NFL in a way that it had never been flummoxed before when he protested the national anthem last season. The league, and its teams, didn’t handle it well. Despite throwing 16 touchdowns and only four interceptions, he is still not on an NFL roster. Teams contorted themselves to justify this decision. Anonymous GMs claimed he was trash in college (he wasn’t) and that he wasn’t good anymore (he sure looked pretty decent). The Ravens stuttered by publicly announcing that they were wrestling with the decision to sign the quarterback who played against them in a Super Bowl as a backup. Then they asked their fans, in a poll, what they thought.

Kaepernick got an NFL franchise — one in a cartel of businesses that uphold themselves as beacons of Spartan egalitarianism, guided by Football Reasons — to make a personnel decision by Clap-o-Meter. The Ravens ultimately decided to pass after taking Ray Lewis’ word for it. The point stands: Kaepernick made NFL franchises lose their cookies and abandon their well-marketed principles by making them supremely uncomfortable.

Here’s where there’s hope that the NFL can be better than it is. After you’re confronted with something you don’t know how to deal with for the first time, it’s hard to be as surprised the next time. Shit you don’t want to deal with becomes an ever-present possibility, and in that way it’s normalized. This has been the preseason of protest in the NFL. Veterans like Marshawn Lynch, Michael Bennett, and Macolm Jenkins have all demonstrated during the national anthem. The Browns staged the largest anthem protest yet. All of those players will play this season, and their actions portend a season in which protest is the norm. If enough players are doing it, teams won’t do anything about it. They can’t blackball everyone.

If the the last year in America taught us anything, it’s that some things can be repeated into existence. It’s easy to feel so inundated by the way things are that you start to believe they’ll never change. That was the NFL, making fistfuls of money while, more and more, getting players to capitulate to owners and selling a product that has, for a couple decades, been boring and basic and largely what you expected when you flipped on the TV.

Like the drone of white noise, the NFL came to be accepted as part of the background. Even if it was bad, it was the Thing You Do On Sundays. Knowing something is bad isn’t the same as acting on it. People do lots of terrible things out of habit. That is until the record skips, the noise stops, and then silence feels like a new reality.

Last season, Kaepernick was the biggest story of an NFL season in which football was a side show in America. Viewership dropped significantly while the country dealt with more important things. The football was the same as always; in fact slightly better by one metric: It featured the most regular season games decided by seven points or fewer in NFL history. That’s 135 ostensibly close games that, even accepting a very good argument that quality of play is going down, should have drawn viewers to their sets. They didn’t.

You may be sick of the Colin Kaepernick Story. That’s an important feeling. Football is one of the biggest, most American things that exist. It dies outside these borders. And until now it has thrived as a complex distraction to escape from boring times. It’s an easy game to get lost in, with inscrutable rules and micro-decisions to scrutinize. It’s also an easy game to tune out, with so many breaks between periods and plays. For so long, football demanded only as much attention as you wanted to give it. Now that there’s chaos in its context, it might not feel the same. Football thrived in good enough times that escaping was easy. These days it likes to remind us that escape is impossible, from anthem protests to Robert Kraft handing Donald Trump a Super Bowl ring.

We’re entering a season in which, for the first time in a very long time (ever?) it feels as if players have shaped the league in their image more than owners have shaped it in theirs, even if only slightly. They’ve done it by asserting their individuality into existence. And if you’re of the opinion that the NFL would be a better product if players were more than superhumans who have been forced into the same uniforms like sleeves of Kraft Singles, then this is really encouraging. If the NBA is a life preserver for the sinking American sports landscape, NFL players are flailing to latch on.

An NFL that actually lets players be people isn’t that farfetched. NFL teams like the Seahawks, Falcons, Colts, and 49ers have all begun embracing newfangled things mindfulness training and the idea that individual mental clarity can be a means towards achieving team goals. Dan Quinn is one its biggest proponents.

One of the pillars of this training gets at the reason Rausch started Vision Pursue in the first place. Most people, Rausch explains, don’t abide by an “expanding A” view of the world, meaning they derive their sense of self-worth from their accomplishments, leading to an existence in which they can never truly be satisfied ... Quinn says this problem describes him in a nutshell. “I was always this person that was looking to the next and the next,” he says. “Sometimes, I think I missed out on the present moment, on the experiences I had and the jobs I had that were so much fun.”

A few more player-friendly coaches won’t shift the prevailing wisdom of NFL owners overnight. Owners are old and rich, and those are hard people to sway. Still, an increasingly more mindful NFL feels antithetical to the one we know. A league that knows that it can have fun and engage its players as individuals along the way towards completing its very important business seems new and good. There is no turning back now — I believe that. — and though it hasn’t been yet, the top will be affected at some point.

The NFL doesn’t have to suck in all ways. Oh, the Jets, Browns, Jaguars, 49ers, Rams, and company will make sure there’s still putrid football to watch (I mean, look at this), but the assumption that players will stoop to the NFL’s stodgy, outmoded way of things forever, I think, is wrong. Yes, the NFL is big and powerful and making Scrooge McDuck money despite what the ratings say. It is also capable of flying into a soul-rattling panic, just like any of us when we’re confronted by something that has no fear presenting the shit we need to see.