NFL's most outspoken liberal players are struggling to get hired

Consider, if you will, three prominent off-season stories.

Let’s start with that of Colin Kaepernick, who remains without a team having already spent a year on the sidelines in the wake of his protesting the treatment of African-Americans by kneeling when the US national anthem was played at the start of games.

NFL teams have hired substance abusers, men accused of beating girlfriends or wives, and other criminals. But a man who simply exerted his rights under the First Amendment of the US Constitution to highlight an issue that should bother anyone with a scintilla of decency and who broke no league rule in so doing? Too rich for our blood. Think of the fan reaction. Sorry, the conservative fan reaction. Liberals have less of a problem with divergent views.

Kaepernick’s tale gained a twist recently in the form of story number two – that of Eric Reid.

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Reid isn’t as well known as Kaepernick, especially on this side of the Atlantic. He plays safety, one of the sport’s less visible and less glamorous positions on the defensive side of the field.

Two of these line up as starters for each of the league’s 32 teams. Pro Football Focus, which ranks players, has Reid at number thirty, rating him as above average for the position.

Plenty of older, lower ranked safeties have found themselves new teams (or have re-signed with their old ones) during the current offseason.

So what makes Reid, who is 26 and in his prime, different?

It is that he was the first player to join Kaepernick, and spoke loudly in support of him.

The fact that he has, like the quarterback, said he will not protest this year, doesn’t seem to matter. He appears to have been blacklisted.

Which brings us to story number three, that of Josh Rosen.

Rosen would seem to be in a very different category to the first two. He’s white for starters, and he hasn’t played a down in the NFL, having spent the last three years playing as an amateur for his university, UCLA.

But the darts have still been flying at him for being outspoken, and for giving every impression of giving a damn about his fellow man, despite being loaded (his mother is descended from the family that founded the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, his father is a successful surgeon).

Rosen’s sins have included wearing a F*** Trump headband while out playing golf (which he Instagrammed) and vocally speaking up about a college football system that makes millionaires of coaches and administrators while denying its players any opportunity to make money off their sport or even their names (selling so much as an autograph can get you banned under its ludicrously strict definition of amateurism).

Some “football people” have reportedly suggested that he might be happier “doing humanitarian work” (attracting the ire of star defender JJ Watt among others), this despite the fact that he’s spent three years playing for free for a major programme, enduring a couple of concussions in the process, when he could have taken his pick of fancy colleges before doing whatever he wanted.

Some have suggested that he’s not as committed to the sport as he needs to be because he’s rich, despite a lot of quarterbacks coming from comfortable backgrounds. It’s an unusually technical and cerebral position, and those from families with the ability to afford camps and specialist coaching get a leg up.

Rosen has had to put up with an absurd amount of rubbish when compared to the quiet, conservative kid, who hunts in his spare time and has a Make America Great Again headband in his locker.

All this could, of course, all be part of the pre-draft noise machine, when the American football media focusses on anything that will make a story in the absence of anything much meaningful happening.

Rosen, arguably the most pro-ready quarterback from this year’s college crop, could easily be among the top five players taken and probably will be given the dearth of quality quarterbacks in the league (which again, only serves to highlight Kaepernick’s situation).

But every year there’s a notable player or two who falls down the lists. Every year there’s someone like Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers whose draft day tumble later has people scratching their heads and asking “how did that happen?”.

Will that be Rosen’s fate?

Before the start of the last season I went head to head with esteemed colleague John Rentoul over the sport’s issue with head trauma, which has made him reluctant to watch.

I’m less bothered by it, given players can make an informed choice, as some have by quitting early, than I am with the increasing tendency to shut out players for expressing views that its conservative establishment seems incapable of coping with. A conservative establishment that gushes over a flag that is supposed to symbolise ‘the land of the free’.

NFL: Not For Liberals? Let’s see. Let’s see if Reid gets signed and where Rosen gets drafted. Let’s see if someone finally has the courage to give Kaepernick another shot.