Language barrier

I get what Houston Texans owner Bob McNair was trying to say. And that, not what he actually said, is the problem here.

What he actually said we all know by now: That the NFL can't have "the inmates running the asylum." Which is an old-as-Methuselah bit of idiom, and whose obvious translation in this instance is that the NFL can't have the players running the show.

And that's the problem.

Like it or not, see, the players are the show. There isn't a show without them.

They are proud men who have spent their lives being, yes, coddled and cottoned to, but who also do not abide being trifled with. And the owners, and the power structure they represent, have trifled with them in big ways and small for years.

They consistently lied about the concussion issue for almost two decades until finally forced by the overwhelming weight of evidence to acknowledge it. They used up and discarded the players who built the league, climbing over a pile of broken lives to enrich themselves. And they continue to disrespect their African-American employees in particular, saying (at least in incorrigible blowhard Jerry Jones' case) that by God they're going to stand for the national anthem or be fired.

That this had the undeniable whiff of massa laying down the law was perhaps inevitable, given that the reason for the kneeling -- an act in no way disrespectful to America or the flag or "the troops", considering it was endorsed by a military man himself -- was to protest the egregious shooting of African-Americans by law enforcement.  The owners seem to have dismissed this very real issue out of hand, or at the very least given it the shortest of shrift.

And so of course the players felt disrespected themselves, and therefore naturally overreacted to McNair's use of the word "inmate" to describe them. That it was the use of a common idiom and was not intended literally to characterize the players as inmates didn't matter. What did matter is that the owners have historically regarded the players as, if not inmates exactly, something of equal value. And the players know it.

Even though they are the only real value the league has.  Even though, again, there is no league without them.