NFL players continue to kneel during the national anthem. President Donald Trump continues to tweet about it. And now Vice President Mike Pence has been injected in the mix, staging a walkout of Sunday’s game between the Indianapolis Colts and San Francisco 49ers after players protested during “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Caught in between it all, a handful of team executives told Yahoo Sports their front offices are becoming weary of the cyclical back-and-forth driven by the involvement of Trump’s administration.
“Right now, we have to have two meetings every Saturday,” one NFC executive told Yahoo Sports. “One with the [player] leadership group, and then another with [the owner] to talk about what we expect on game day. That’s a couple hours, but it’s something that ends up on your mind every day, [because] you can’t go more than two days without the president saying something. Every day it’s like ‘OK, what did he say today?’ … We’ve tried to shut that out. But football energy is definitely going into it every week, on something that’s completely outside of the job you’re supposed to be doing.”
On Sunday, a second NFC executive expressed exasperation at Pence’s staged walkout of the Colts-49ers game, saying it illustrated the difficult spot that front offices have been placed in this season.
It’s “so tiring at this point,” the executive said. “The [government is] jumping into it. Say [our owner] wants to invite someone like Pence or even Trump to our game. I don’t even know how to have that talk. You can’t say ‘no,’ you know what I’m saying? But, of course, it’s going to cause all kinds of distractions. … We [in the front office] have no say. It’s making it an impossible distraction for everyone involved.”
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