People Are Furious After NFL Owner Makes Insensitive Comment About Protests

The owner of the Houston Texans is taking major heat for comparing NFL players to “inmates” in a “prison” to a room full of the league’s top officials, ESPN reports.

Robert McNair made the striking comment during an owners meeting at NFL headquarters in New York last week, where they met to discuss the ongoing social and political protest drama by players, fans and politicians.

“You can’t have the inmates running the prison,” McNair said of the players in an attempt to urge other league owners and NFL executives to consider how player protests are effecting teams’ business.

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Though some football owners agree with the thought behind his comment — that players should be required to stand during the national anthem — he was immediately criticized for his delivery.

Troy Vincent, a former NFL player who is now the league’s Executive VP of Football Operations, reportedly told McNair that he had been called many slurs during his football career — including the N-word — but he never felt like an “inmate.”

ESPN writes that McNair later pulled Vincent aside to apologize and the colleague accepted the apology.

But as McNair’s comment was read and slammed by fans, the Texans released a statement on McNair’s behalf Friday morning to publicly apologize for his insensitive analogy.

“I regret that I used that expression. I never meant to offend anyone and I was not referring to our players,” he wrote. “I used a figure of speech that was never intended to be taken literally.”

“I would never characterize our players or our league that way and I apologize to anyone who was offended by it,” the Texans owner continued.

In the 2017 season, player protests of the national anthem have been at the forefront of the league’s news, and NFL owners and executives have been hustling to determine the best course of action to contain the controversy.

The ‘kneeling’ movement was started by San Francisco 49ers Colin Kaepernick last year as a form of peaceful protest against racial injustice and police brutality. Other players joined in, but the movement grew rapidly after President Donald Trump categorized any player who kneels as a “son of a b—h” and called for the NFL to fire them.

Trump’s comments led dozens of players to either kneel or link arms during the anthem, and on Oct. 18 the NFL declared it would make no rule change to require players to stand after meeting with various players, owners and executives.

“We did not ask for it,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said of a policy change. “We spent today talking about the issues players are trying to bring attention to. Issues in our communities, to make our communities better.”

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