Why Do NFL Players Kneel During Football Games? The Meaning Explained

I remember the first time I saw it. It was a preseason game, and the camera panned across the sidelines during the national anthem. One player, then a few, took a knee. My initial reaction, I’ll admit, was confusion mixed with a touch of that classic sports fan irritation: “Just play the game.” But as a researcher who spends his days digging into the “why” behind cultural phenomena, that curiosity quickly took over. The gesture, simple yet profoundly disruptive, demanded context. The question of why NFL players kneel during football games isn’t just about sports; it’s a window into a decades-long struggle for racial justice, free speech, and the very soul of American patriotism. The act itself is a silent protest, but the noise it has generated—from the highest offices in the land to local barstools—reveals the deep fissures in our national conversation.

The story truly entered the national consciousness in 2016, when then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick first sat, and then knelt, during “The Star-Spangled Banner.” His stated goal was to protest police brutality and systemic racism against Black Americans, highlighting a pattern of unarmed Black individuals being killed by law enforcement. He chose the anthem specifically because, as he said, it’s a symbol of freedom and justice that he felt was not being extended equally to all citizens. The gesture was a deliberate, peaceful form of nonviolent protest, rooted in the same tradition as the sit-ins of the Civil Rights Movement. It was never, as some have mistakenly claimed, a protest against the military or the flag itself. Kaepernick even consulted a former Green Beret and fellow NFL player, Nate Boyer, on how to make his protest more respectful, which led to the shift from sitting to taking a knee—a posture familiar in military ceremonies for the fallen. This nuance, however, was often lost in the heated political rhetoric that followed.

The backlash was swift and severe. Critics, including then-President Donald Trump, framed the act as disrespectful to the nation and its armed forces. “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now,” Trump famously said at a rally, urging owners to fire players who knelt. This politicization transformed the gesture from a specific protest against racial inequality into a broader, more polarized symbol about patriotism itself. The NFL, caught between its players’ right to expression and pressure from segments of its fanbase and powerful political figures, initially fumbled the response. They implemented a short-lived policy requiring players to stand or remain in the locker room, a move widely seen as capitulation that only inflamed tensions. The league’s viewership, according to some analysts, dipped by nearly 10% in the 2016 and 2017 seasons, a decline often attributed—rightly or wrongly—to the controversy, though cord-cutting played a massive role. For me, this was the most fascinating part: watching a multi-billion dollar sports league become the primary battleground for a national debate it never asked for.

This is where the perspective from your provided knowledge base offers a poignant, if metaphorical, parallel. The quote, “Ako, kung kami natalo, okay lang sa akin na sila ang pumasok kasi they’ll represent the independent teams,” speaks to a seasoned coach’s acceptance of a loss if it means a greater representation for underrepresented groups—the “independent teams.” In a way, this mirrors the calculus of the kneeling players. They understood the personal and professional risk. Kaepernick hasn’t played a down in the NFL since that season, a fact most analysts attribute to blackballing, a stark reminder of the cost of protest. They knew they might “lose” in the court of public opinion or jeopardize their careers. But their action was about something bigger: forcing a conversation and representing a community whose cries for justice were being ignored. They were, in essence, representing the “independent teams” of American society. The backlash they faced proved their central point about systemic power and who gets to define respectability.

Today, the kneeling protest has evolved. Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the NFL underwent a significant, if belated, shift. The league admitted it was wrong for not listening to players earlier and committed over $250 million to social justice initiatives—a number that, while substantial, some critics argue is a drop in the bucket compared to league revenues. During the 2020 season, we saw entire teams locking arms or staying in the locker room for the anthem. The gesture became more normalized within the league’s ecosystem, though it remains a potent and divisive symbol outside of it. From my perspective, the protest achieved its most fundamental goal: it started an unavoidable conversation. It made millions of Americans, including myself, research terms like “systemic racism” and confront uncomfortable statistics about policing. It challenged the notion that sports arenas are apolitical spaces; they never were. They are stages where our national identity is performed and, occasionally, contested.

So, why do NFL players kneel? They kneel to mourn. They kneel to protest. They kneel to exercise a constitutional right in the most public square they have. They kneel, ultimately, to ask a country that celebrates freedom on its fields to examine why that freedom is not equally protected on its streets. The gesture is a powerful paradox: a sign of profound respect for American ideals, performed through a break with traditional ritual to highlight the nation’s failure to live up to them. While the peak of the controversy may have passed, the issues it highlighted have not. Every time a player takes a knee, however infrequently it happens now, it serves as a silent echo of a demand for accountability that is still, years later, waiting for a full-throated answer. And as someone who values both the clarity of protest and the complexity of history, I’ve come to see that knee not as an insult, but as an invitation—a challenging, difficult, but necessary invitation to look closer.