$100 million in police training should count as a win for players--Here's how to get there.
How much does a beer cost at an NFL game?
$10? Let’s call it $10, to use a round number.
How long does it take, at an NFL game, to sell 2,000 beers? Not long, surely. Probably the vendors under the stadium sell 2,000 beers to late-arriving fans in the time it takes to play the National Anthem.
Let’s do some simple math, and then use that math to tackle the question of addressing player protests in the NFL.
Selling 2,000 beers for 10 buck each is $20,000. If each NFL team contributed $20,000 per game during the season to a pool, the annual team contribution would be $320,000 (16 games times $20k per game). If all 32 NFL teams made the same $20k/ game contribution, the total pool in a year would be $10,240,00.
Obviously, the $20k per game per team could come from anywhere, not just beer sales--which only the home team would have, anyway. I used beer sales as an example to show how quickly and simply the multi-billion dollar industry called the NFL could generate a $10m pool of cash in a year.
Now: Suppose the NFL billionaires (team owners) and millionaires (players) agreed to contribute $10m per year for 10 years--$100 million—to create a training program for cops to prevent cops shooting unarmed people, who seem too often to be black.
Set up a $100m study and training program development at a major university in an affected community, like at Washington University in St. Louis, near Ferguson, or at Northwestern in Chicago.
Look who could benefit from a program like that:
- Cops—they don’t have a stake in bad policing.
- Cities—they cut down on wrongful death payments.
- Communities—they get cops they can trust.
Right now, NFL players and owners are in a box: The players have a righteous cause they are protesting, and don’t want to back down from. The owners want good relations with players, and they want to cut down on the PR problem of player protests, which the Racist Scum-in-Chief uses as an excuse to bludgeon black people and encourage his white cracker base.
Is it worth $100m over 10 years to get out of the box? I think so.
Could both players and owners take credit for a win by creating a program to help police improve policing? I think so.
Does this approach solve the underlying problem of bad policing? No—but done right, it would be a step in the right direction. A complex problem won’t be solved in a single stroke anyway, but putting $100m toward solving it couldn’t hurt.
Here’s the real math: NFL wins, Colin Kaepernick and NFL players win, communities win, cops win. America wins, and Trump loses.
