RUSH: Hey, folks, what would do more damage to the National Football League: Losing a season because of the virus or playing a season with mostly empty stadiums and politicizing every game with the players kneeling and opposing the national anthem? What would be more damage to the NFL, do you think?

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RUSH: So, what would be the best thing for the National Football League? Let me just take an updated survey. You think they’re gonna play? (interruption) You do. (interruption) You think they’re gonna play, Brian? (interruption) Brian is a big Tampa Bay Buccaneer fan, before even Tom Brady signed up. Mr. Snerdley is a Cowboys fan. (interruption) Dak Prescott? (interruption) Well, who cares. He signed the franchise tender and they didn’t give him a long-term deal so he’s gonna make $33 million this year. That’s the franchise tag number. Signing a long-term deal could go either way. The salary cap next year is gonna plunge. They’re gonna have to make some adjustments.

The league knows they’re gonna lose their shirt this year, the owners, and next. They want to write off all the losses in two years. The players want the losses spread out over 10 years. I said the players. The players don’t even know what the hell this is. This is the players’ leadership, the union leadership is trying to argue for 10-year amortization schedule and the write-off of the losses.

This is my point. I, frankly, don’t see how they’re gonna play. I mean, even if they don’t allow fans in. And in California and Pennsylvania, Philadelphia just announced no large gatherings will be permitted to the end of the year or some such thing, same in California. So the idea of having fans in there is not even possible in Los Angeles or Santa Clara where the 49ers play, Eagles in Philadelphia.

I just don’t see how they’re gonna do it. But we’ll see. But this is the source of my question. And this is not a new question for me. Ever since the league made it clear they’re gonna try to play, I have had serious doubts ’cause there’s been one thing, one thing that has been guiding the National Football League and the NBA and Major League Baseball. You know what that one thing is?

Hope. They’ve been hoping that something happens with the virus that makes everything better. They’ve been hoping that it’ll go away. They’ve been hoping there will be a therapeutic discovery. They’ve been hoping that there will be a vaccine. They’ve been hoping that they find a way to get the players to stop scratching their crotches and spitting.

They’ve been hoping for any number of things, and none of the stuff they’ve been hoping for has happened. So the question is this. What would do more damage to the NFL long-term: Lose a season because of the virus — just shut down, don’t play it — or play the season with empty stadiums after having thoroughly politicized the game?

If the season is canceled because of the virus — there are no games — then maybe the NFL would come to its senses about playing to anthems kneeling during the actual anthem. Maybe they would come to their senses about celebrating Marxism with a pro-Marxist group called Black Lives Matter.

Maybe they would find a way to get the politicization of the game out of it. Maybe they’d find a way to end these never ending debates about things that have absolutely nothing to do with football. To date — and this is a very important point — to date, from the beginning of professional football to the present, players have been compensated like entertainers.

The players are acting now, some of them, like they want to be compensated like politicians. The number of players who actually want to be seen as politicians instead of entertainers, well, let’s throw the politicians’ pay scale at ’em and let’s take away 90% of their entertainment salary. You want to be a politician? Well, this is what politicians make, 200 grand a year. That’s not even the league minimum for rookies.

So let’s say they try to play the season. There are no fans. All you got is television, and before every game there’s a bunch of players during the two national anthems taking a knee during the American national anthem. And here’s the media hyping it, talking about what great, courageous guys they are, and then interviewing them.

You know, TV is gonna have to make some adjustments, like interviewing players during the game. They’re gonna have to do something. They’re gonna have to get some concessions from the owners and from the league because having games plays in these mammoth stadiums with no fans is going to totally change the experience, so they gonna have to do something.

Can you imagine interviews with players, “How was it to kneel? What was going through your mind as you kneeled during the anthem?”

“I tell you what was going through my mind, Jim, I hate racism. I hate bigotry. And I simply despise the way the cops are treating us, and I was honored to do it, I was honored to kneel during that.” And they think people are gonna watch this.

“What did you think when you were kneeling during the anthem? Did you players have a meeting before the game? Did you all decide to do it?”

“Yes, we did. We wanted to come together and express our opposition to police brutality and America.” Okay.

“What were you thinking when you got your first touchdown grab?”

“I was thinking how much the cops probably hated seeing me do it.” Can you imagine this stuff? Because this is what the NFL is on the way to becoming. So would they be better advised just to not even play this year and try to let all this stuff cool down, or would that even work? Would this pent-up frustration carry over to the next season, whenever it is?

And, by the way, if they don’t play this season and if there isn’t a vaccine, if there isn’t any therapeutic, then how could they play next season? So I went back to the archives. And I have a story from January 8th of this year in a trade publication about advertising called Ad Age. And here’s the headline. “NFL Games Account for Nearly Three-Quarters of the Year’s Top 100 Broadcasts,” in 2019.

This is a stunning number. Seventy-five percent of the top 100 broadcasts, television broadcasts were NFL games. So TV is just a delivery system for football now. Now, January of 2020, life was normal then. This is a couple months before the virus. Well, I mean, it’s as normal as anything was normal with the left having lost its mind four years ago. But January 2020. This illustrates what a massive dilemma that shutting down sports in America has, particularly football.

And let’s throw college football in there on Saturday in terms of ratings and advertising, advertising rates. Football is the biggest business for American television in America. This tells me it’s gonna be the networks that are the hardest hit. What are the networks gonna do to replace this programming? Seventy-five of the most watched 100 telecasts are football games, NFL games? Where are they going to replace the advertising revenue? And without the advertising revenue, how in hell are they gonna pay the rights fees the NFL thinks that they still deserve?

You would be astounded, losing money in the NFL is impossible. Dan Snyder may have figured out a way, but I don’t think he has. The NFL, the NFL teams, it’s impossible to lose money because of the television check you got every year as an owner. Where are these advertising dollars gonna go? I mean, what are the advertising rates gonna be for wherever the beer guys go, the truck guys, the Ford, the F-150, where are they all gonna go?

I guarantee you wherever they go, it’s not gonna be nearly as expensive as advertising the NFL was. And you throw in the fact there’s not gonna be any college football this year, that’s another huge hit to TV. The ripple effect that this is all going to have on TV is incomprehensible right now. Everybody thinks, “Well, we may play, we may not play.”

Then throw baseball in, throw all the other sports. They all add up to humongous advertising dollars and revenues that the networks are not going to get, that the leagues are not gonna get. The league isn’t gonna get ticket revenue. It’s not gonna get the TV rights revenue. If they play they will, but the TV networks are still never gonna make back their rights fees with no fans in the stands.

And if the politicization of the game continues and the TV ratings plummet, I don’t know that anybody but the bean counters at the TV networks have actually taken the time to the calculate the hit that they’re gonna face. The ripple effect is one thing, but it’s gonna be devastating to smaller cities who make major income from football. And not just major cities. Cities like Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Houston, Miami, New England. The amount of money that pours into these communities every football season, college and pro, it ain’t gonna happen.

Then you get into these small university towns like Madison, Wisconsin; Austin, Texas; Chapel Hill; Gainesville, Florida; College Station, Texas; Lawrence, Kansas; Columbia, Missouri; Athens, Georgia; South Bend, Indiana. Zilch, zero, nada. All of these leftists that run these colleges and all these leftist college towns are about to find out how wonderful and valuable football is.

Right now they’re feeling their oats because they think canceling everything is gonna get rid of Trump. “Yeah, we’re gonna cancel the economy; we’re gonna cancel the NFL; we’re gonna cancel football; we’re gonna cancel this; we’re gonna cancel that; we’re gonna cancel school; we’re gonna make it look like Trump’s responsible for all of this.” And then they will try to make Trump responsible for the massive losses that will happen because of no football.

Here’s some quotes from a July 13th article on college football. It ran in Yahoo Sports. You ready? “A nameless, anonymous Power Five athletic director -” power five university — “‘Right now, I don’t see a path, in the current environment, to how we play.’ ‘Ultimately, no one is playing football in the fall,’ said a high-ranking college official. ‘It’s just a matter of how it unfolds. As soon one,'” of the big-time college commissioners conferences makes a decision that they ain’t playing, that’s gonna be the end of it.

And they’re holding off because they’re hoping, they’re hoping that something happens. They’re hoping that Dr. Fauci comes up with something. Maybe all it would take, if Dr. Fauci would say he thinks football could be safely played, then it would be okay. If Dr. Fauci said that at a press conference at the White House, if Dr. Fauci said that in a press conference from his own office. I’m joking here, folks. They’ve got nothing but hope. (interruption) No. No, no, no. Don’t misunderstand. I’m not trying to say that I would be joyous over these circumstances happening to people.

This is all gonna have a horrible, horrible impact on the country at large that nobody can see yet. You know, these leftists and the Democrats that are really trying to make all this negative stuff happen. It’s all about one thing. It’s all about getting rid of Trump. Everything they’ve tried has failed. So now they’re willing to just tank the entire country to do it and take everybody and everything with them. And they might succeed. Look how easy it was to erase a three-year, robust, unprecedented, growing economy. We did it in two months. We destroyed it in two months.

Now we’ve got Dr. Fauci, all these other people advocating that we re-shutdown when there’s no evidence that the first shutdown did anything. There’s no evidence the first shutdown stopped — how in the hell can anybody think the first shutdown worked when we’re looking at the statistics of today? And don’t try to say that we reopened too soon. The shutdown didn’t do anything to stop the spread. It didn’t even really flatten the curve all that much. All it did was delay what was going to happen anyway and destroy the economy at the same time.

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RUSH: No, I don’t know what it is. The Official Program Observer just asked me if I know what this Washington Redskins scandal is supposed to be. All I know is that earlier this week the Washington Post was supposed to have an article that was gonna blow the lid off whatever the Redskins are doing. It was gonna be Tuesday. Nothing happened on Tuesday. So I’m waiting for it to drop on Wednesday. Then they said, no, no, no, it’s coming Thursday, which is today. Nothing’s dropped. So I don’t know what it is.

Everybody thinks that is the new name or that it is Snyder announcing that he’s selling the team or it is the minority owners announcing that they’re selling their — There are three minority owners. Fred Smith, FedEx, who, by the way, is a great guy. There’s another minority owner named Dwight Schar, who is also a great guy. I know both of them. I know Schar a little better Fred Smith, but they’re quality people.

I don’t know the third minority owner. His name is Rothman. Supposedly all three of them want to sell their stake in the Redskins. But all three of them combined don’t have anywhere near the percentage that Snyder does, so their ownership does not grant them any power in the boardroom, in team policy, club policy. You know, they get to prowl sidelines before the games. They get to have a suite, they get to travel on their team charter if they want, but they got their own airplanex so that wouldn’t be any big deal.

So, no, I don’t know what everybody’s been breathlessly awaiting. But it’s easy to guess. It’s either the announcement of the name — you know, there’s some people who think that Snyder’s running a giant scam on everybody. On Monday they announced that the Redskins are done as a name, the team name, done, and that a new name will be announced at some point down the road. What if they don’t announce a new team name this year? The media’s starting to think they’ve been had.

And I’m just telling you, folks, it isn’t gonna matter.
There ought to be parties right now. They ought to be celebrating. They got rid of the name Redskins, right? They’re not happy about it. They are as angry — the media, now — and suspicious as they were before the Redskins announced they were gonna get rid of the name. The Redskins have announced the name is gone. Redskins is gone. And nobody’s satisfied. Nobody that’s been demanding this all these years is satisfied. They never are. They’re never happy.

We need to learn. Don’t give ’em diddly-squat. Don’t give them anything. It doesn’t make ’em happy. It just makes ’em want more. Who are they anyway? Okay. So you don’t like Redskins. Well, screw them. Just like the offended. What makes the offended right? “What’s you’re saying offends.” So screw you. Don’t be offended. Take it somewhere else. I’m not automatically a rotten, bad person because you’re offended by me. Screw you. “I’m so sorry. What can I do?” Nothing because these people are incapable of happiness.