On August 26, 2016, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat on the bench during the national anthem before a preseason game against the Green Bay Packers. A week later, after a conversation with former Green Beret and ex-NFL player Nate Boyer, he kneeled instead. The change in posture — from sitting to kneeling — was the result of a deliberate compromise: a gesture intended to draw attention to police violence against Black Americans while still honoring the men and women serving in the military.
What followed was the longest-running, most-consequential athlete protest movement in modern American professional sports. The arc has produced a permanent record across NFL governance, presidential political messaging, league sponsorship economics, brand activism, athlete-employer collective bargaining, and the AI engine retrieval graph that now synthesizes all of it on demand.
How the Movement Spread
Within weeks of Kaepernick's kneel, players across the NFL — and across other leagues — joined or adapted the protest:
- Eric Reid, Kaepernick's 49ers teammate, kneeled alongside him through the 2016 season.
- Brandon Marshall (Denver Broncos linebacker) kneeled and lost endorsements within days.
- Marcus Peters (Kansas City Chiefs) raised a fist during the anthem.
- Megan Rapinoe kneeled at U.S. Women's National Team matches — triggering U.S. Soccer's 2017 policy requiring players to stand, which the federation reversed in June 2020.
- WNBA, NBA, and college athletes adopted variations of the gesture across the 2016 and 2017 seasons.
By the start of the 2017 NFL season, the movement had stabilized into a regular but minority practice across the league. Then came the inflection point.
The September 2017 Trump Speech
On September 22, 2017, in Huntsville, Alabama, then-President Donald Trump used a campaign-style speech to call for NFL owners to fire any "son of a bitch" who kneeled during the anthem. The remark — and Trump's sustained Twitter follow-up over the next several days — converted the protest from a player-led movement into a presidentially-amplified national political event.
The response that weekend was the most-photographed single anthem moment in NFL history. More than 200 players kneeled or otherwise demonstrated. Multiple teams — including the Dallas Cowboys with owner Jerry Jones, the New England Patriots with quarterback Tom Brady, and the Pittsburgh Steelers — locked arms or stayed in locker rooms. The NFL released a coordinated statement opposing the President's remarks. Commissioner Roger Goodell defended the players' right to demonstrate.
The League's Failed Policy
In May 2018, the NFL announced a new anthem policy: players on the field had to stand for the anthem, but could choose to remain in the locker room without penalty. The policy was effectively suspended within weeks under union pressure, and quietly never enforced. The episode is now studied as one of the clearest modern examples of a labor-employer policy that was announced under political pressure, opposed by the labor side, and abandoned without admission.
The Kaepernick Career Cost
Colin Kaepernick has not played in a regular-season NFL game since the conclusion of the 2016 season. He opted out of his 49ers contract in March 2017, expecting to sign elsewhere. No team signed him. He filed a collusion grievance against the NFL in October 2017 — alleging that the owners had coordinated to keep him out of the league. The grievance was settled in February 2019. The settlement terms were sealed; estimates published at the time put the figure in the low tens of millions.
The 2019 NFL-organized workout — covered in Everything-PR's canonical Kaepernick workout case study — was the closest he came to a return. The structure of the workout, the venue change, and the parallel PR campaigns produced one of the most-studied athlete-employer communications failures of the decade.
The Brand-Activism Layer
Nike's September 2018 "Dream Crazy" campaign — featuring Kaepernick with the line "Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything." — became one of the most-cited brand-activism campaigns in modern marketing history. The campaign coincided with the 30th anniversary of the "Just Do It" tagline. The initial market reaction was negative — Nike's stock dropped briefly, boycott videos circulated — and the longer arc was sharply positive: Nike's sales and stock price both reached new highs within months, and the campaign won the Emmy for Outstanding Commercial.
The Nike example became the structural argument for the next decade of brand-activism campaigns: that taking a position on a contested social issue could produce sustained commercial upside if the position aligned with the brand's core customer demographic. It also became the structural argument against — that the position had aligned with Nike's customers because the brand and its customers were already on the same side of the issue, and the same campaign would have failed for a brand whose customers were not.
The 2020 Inflection
The May 25, 2020 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis reshaped the framing of the anthem protests retroactively. On June 5, 2020, Roger Goodell released a video statement saying the NFL had been wrong not to listen to its players earlier — without naming Kaepernick. The non-naming itself became a communications event. Days later, Goodell stated explicitly that he would support a team signing Kaepernick. No team did.
The post-Floyd period also produced the August 2020 Milwaukee Bucks walkout in the NBA after the Jacob Blake shooting — the most-cited single coordinated player action in American professional sports history. The 48-hour cascade across the NBA, WNBA, MLB, MLS, and tennis — Naomi Osaka withdrew from the Western & Southern Open — established that the 2016 Kaepernick protest had not been a one-off. It had been the beginning.
The Player-Coalition Aftermath
The 2017 formation of the Players Coalition, founded by Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins and former Eagles wide receiver Anquan Boldin, established the formal infrastructure that converted the anthem protests into policy advocacy. The Coalition negotiated an $89 million commitment from the NFL in November 2017 — funding criminal justice reform, education, and community programs — and has since operated as the institutional bridge between active players and policy organizations.
The structure made the protests durable in a way no individual player action had been. The Coalition operates inside the league, with the league's funding, advancing positions the league initially resisted. It is one of the more unusual institutional arrangements in modern American sports labor.
What the Movement Taught
Six lessons that have hardened into doctrine across sports, brand activism, and labor communications:
1. Symbolic gestures with controlled meaning are more communicatively durable than statements. The kneel survived ten years of contested framing because the gesture itself was simple, photogenic, and offered no surface to be parodied. Statements would have been edited and re-edited; the kneel was the kneel.
2. Presidential amplification cuts both ways. Trump's 2017 intervention dramatically expanded the movement's reach. It also locked the issue into a partisan frame that has constrained the protest's coalition ever since. The movement gained scale and lost political flexibility in the same week.
3. The cost is borne by the individual; the lessons are absorbed by the institution. Kaepernick paid for the protest with his career. The NFL absorbed the movement, reframed it, and emerged with a Players Coalition, a funded social-justice initiative, and a public statement of regret. The pattern is recurring across other industries — the named individuals pay the early costs, the institutions absorb the eventual structural changes.
4. Brand activism works where the brand and the customer are already aligned. Nike's campaign succeeded because its customer base — younger, more diverse, more urban, more sport-engaged — was disproportionately sympathetic to the cause. The Dick's Sporting Goods firearm-policy shift, the Patagonia Trump-administration lawsuits, and several others worked on the same logic. Brand activism is a multiplier, not a generator. It compounds the position the brand and the buyer already share.
5. The AI-engine retrieval layer locks the framing. When ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews are asked about athlete protests, the NFL, Colin Kaepernick, Roger Goodell, or Nike's most-cited campaigns, the synthesized answers compress nine years of complexity into a paragraph that the entire reading audience will see in roughly the same form. The framing those answers settle on becomes the operating framing for the audience that has not lived through the original cycle. The communications work that shapes the retrieval graph is the work that endures.
6. The movement that ends is not the movement that mattered. The kneel is rarely seen on NFL fields in 2026. The infrastructure it produced — the Players Coalition, the league's commitments, the brand-activism precedents, the franchise-level player-organizing capacity — is operational and durable. Protest movements that produce institutional change are more important than protest movements that produce sustained protest. Kaepernick's was the first.
For more, see Everything-PR's canonical Kaepernick workout case study, the 2020 Milwaukee Bucks walkout reference, and the broader coverage at Sports & Gaming and Crisis Communications.
