In youth sports there is something known as the “slaughter rule” which stops contests when one team is hopelessly behind the other – being slaughtered. In Little League baseball the rule is invoked when one team is ahead by 11 runs. In Pop Warner, middle school and some high school football the rule is activated when a team is ahead by 35 or more points.

If the showdown between President Trump and the NFL over players kneeling during the national anthem were a sporting event, the slaughter rule would have been invoked long ago. NFL attendance is down, television ratings are down, and as a result income is down. The NFL is getting slaughtered and it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys.

President Trump once again showed his ability to correctly judge public attitudes when he said that players who knelt during the anthem were “SOBs who should be fired.” Liberal heads exploded, of course, but as with so many topics the president may have been unartful in his words – but was spot-on in expressing what millions of Americans felt. Personally, I don’t think SOBs was strong enough language, and wish he had used his description of Haiti to describe the players’ brains. The NFL came to the defense of Colin Kaepernick and the other players who were symbolically burning the flag. They attacked the president in vile terms. The league has been getting slaughtered since and deservedly so.

Since the anti-police, anti-military, anti-anthem, unemployed but multi-millionaire quarterback Colin Kaepernick started his kneeling stunt, in-stadium attendance for regular season games is down over 14%. Sympathetic television networks, attempting to hide the huge swatches of empty seats, stopped taking “long shots” of stadiums. Shots from the Goodyear blimp became either close-ups of the field or such long shots that the viewer can’t discern the empty seats from the occupied ones.

The drop-off has been particularly noticeable during the playoffs since there are fewer games to monitor. For instance, the NFL had a disastrous first playoff weekend when it came to ratings. As Sports Illustrated (a Kaepernick apologist and supporter of anthem-kneeling) was forced to admit, “numbers have been down all season and it was more of the same for the wild-card games. Titans-Chiefs viewership was down 11%, Falcons-Rams was down 10%, Bills-Jaguars was down 10%, and Panthers-Saints was down 21%.”

Television networks sell ads far in advance based on guaranteed ratings. When those ratings fall short the networks have to refund advertiser dollars. So far this year the ratings drop has cost networks tens of millions of dollars in refunds.

The numbers didn’t get any better as the playoff’s progressed. “Outkick The Coverage,” a sports blog centering on football, found that the NFL had 23 million fewer viewers for this year’s playoff action. The blog took a look at the TV ratings and found that every game was down by millions of viewers and ratings fell to a 10-year low. Their bottom line conclusion was not a pretty one for the NFL: “Adding all these numbers up 120.8 million viewers watched the NFL divisional round playoffs in 2018 vs. 144.1 million who watched in 2017, a decline of 23.3 million total viewers.” As Mr. Ed used to say, that ain’t hay.

The upcoming Super Bowl will likely get its usual strong ratings. The New England Patriots long ago replaced the Dallas Cowboys as “America’s team.” Dare I suggest part of the reason also is that fans who tuned out the regular season and playoff games know that Patriots owner Robert Kraft, coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady are Trump supporters?

It is important not to let what started all this get lost in the mists of time. A 27-year-old multi-millionaire who has never really worked a day in his life decided that America was such a horrid country that, in his words, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color … . There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” His conscience and his pocketbook apparently are not in sync, as he doesn’t mind making millions of dollars in this rotten country that oppresses and murders people of color.

Kaepernick was referring to law enforcement officers in his “people getting away with murder” comment. He has socks that show pigs wearing police hats, and has said that the men and women in American law enforcement set out daily to murder black people. He’ll tell you that the American military is used to subjugate people of color around the globe. And in case you think he is just a run-of-the mill leftist instead of a true moron, he praised Fidel Castro as a “great leader” who has done many “humanitarian things” for the people of Cuba.

THIS is the man that our leftist media both inside and outside of sports has put on a pedestal. The flag is a symbol of oppression; police are pigs; some law enforcement officers start every day intending to kill black people; the military exists to oppress people of color and Fidel Castro was a humanitarian leader. If Kaepernick were really concerned about black people being killed he should go to Chicago where nearly 600 of them were killed by criminals last year. Or he should go to a Planned Parenthood office, the organization that kills 400,000 unborn black babies every year.

The NFL has been fully cowed and co-opted by Kaepernick, his small number of followers who play the game and his large number of sycophants in the media. Even in the face of surveys showing that nearly 75% of Americans disapprove of the protests, the league has pledged nearly $100 million toward “social justice” organizations. It’s their money, so they can throw it at far-left mirages if they wish.

It’s also the fans’ money – and viewership – and they have the right to do with those commodities as they wish. Those wishes now have precious little to do with supporting the NFL. The fans do not think police officers are pigs or that law enforcement personnel set out every day to murder black people. They respect America, its military and its flag. They respect a president willing to call out an un-patriotic, ignorant athlete deep in the fever swamps of ultra-leftism. As the NFL continues to get slaughtered, if you listen closely you might hear these fans celebrating the slaughter of the NFL: “Two, four, six, eight … who do we appreciate? Trump … Trump … Trump.”

Bill Saracino is a member of the Editorial Board of CA Political Review.