Even Aaron Rodgers knows the bidness of football

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Today’s unsurprising revelation is that Aaron Rodgers, in this good-enough-to-be-unfair piece from ESPN’s Mina Kimes, thinks Colin Kaepernick should be on an NFL roster, and isn't because he decided to use his powers of speech and gestures to express his concerns over inadequacies in the national fabric.
 
This will change exactly zero minds, of course, because among other things, what could Aaron Rodgers possibly know about quarterbacking (I mean, other than nearly everything)? But Rodgers clearly gets why Kaepernick isn’t playing – because football is more a bidness than a sport, and has been since owners started paying seven, then eight, then nine, then ten figures to buy a team.
 
And we mention this because Rodgers also expressed in the story an open desire also become more active with the NFL Players Association and face the labor-management war to come on the front line, seemingly aware of how unpleasant that is likely to become. Again, because football is a bidness more than it is a sport.
 
And with the union in such obvious flux (there is a mid-October vote among player reps that could prevent anyone from challenging current president DeMaurice Smith), realists like Rodgers will become increasingly important for the negotiations to come. Issues like guaranteed contracts, increased health and safety benefits, player discipline and yes, players' freedom of expression, will have to be faced with greater urgency.
 
Rodgers, who will be 37 when the dress shoes hit the conference room floor, seems eminently qualified to become a force in those negotiations if he chooses to do so, and the players can use all the smart reps they can get. That is, if this is going to be nasty as everyone seems to saying it will.
 
And yet he may also know that talk four years’ out means a lot less than it does a year out. And who knows – by then, some team might have found that its quarterbacking void is so profound that it would even consider Colin Kaepernick. I mean, that’s not the way to bet, of course, but . . .

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