With more and more professional football players speaking out on political issues, Ithaca College professor Stephen Mosher says fans must accept that athletes have opinions about events off the field.
Mosher’s comments were featured in a CNN.com article about the National Football League’s unsuccessful efforts to avoid politics since Colin Kaepernick first took a knee during the national anthem to protest racial injustice.
“The public simply has not done the work to see the players as anything but vehicles for their entertainment,” Mosher told CNN.com. “Players in the 21st century simply have had enough of the ‘gladiator thing’ and are expressing themselves as human and citizens.”
An expert on sports and politics, Mosher teaches in the Department of Communications Studies at Ithaca College.