The National Football League’s risky decision to largely embrace and allow players’ politicized national anthem protests did not bode well for the league’s favorability with fans, according to recent polls.

NFL free agent Colin Kaepernick began protesting against racial injustice in the U.S. by choosing to kneel while the anthem was played before his games during the 2016 season, and other players have followed suit in varying numbers since then. Now two recent polls are showing that American viewers are tired of the politicization of a previously beloved sport, as they worry that football has lost touch with its loyal fan base.

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The Washington-based Winston Group, a right-leaning organization, conducted its poll analyzing the NFL’s favorability ratings among fans from the end of August through the end of September, the Washington Examiner reported. During that length of time, the NFL’s overall favorability fell from 57 percent to 44 percent. In addition, the sport fielded the highest unfavorable rating of any major sport polled, at 40 percent.

“More critically for the NFL, the fall-off in favorables occurred among important audiences,” Winston’s analysis read. “Among males, NFL favorables fell 23 percent, going from 68 percent to 45 percent. In looking at a more specific audience, males 34-54, NFL favorables fell 31 percent, going from 73 percent to 42 percent. Among this group the NFL has a surprising negative image, as it went from +54 percent in August to -5 percent in September.”

Winston’s August poll found that the NFL had the second-highest favorability rating out of five major categories: Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association, college football, and college basketball. Out of the five contenders, the MLB had the highest favorability rating at 61 percent, with a 13 percent disapproval rating. But in September, the poll found that the NFL had plummeted to fifth place while MLB remained in first place.

The Winston Group surveyed 1,000 registered voters at the end of August and at the end of September.

In another poll released by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, only 31 percent of Americans approved of NFL players’ national anthem protests, while 52 percent expressed their disapproval. Of the poll’s respondents, 55 percent of African-Americans approve of the protests while 19 percent disapproved. As for the poll’s white respondents, 62 percent disapprove of the national anthem protests while 25 percent approve.

As another piece of bad news for the protesting NFL players, the AP poll found that approximately six in 10 Americans agree “that refusing to stand for the anthem is disrespectful to the military” and that such a form of protesting is “disrespectful to the country’s values and the American flag. Additionally, roughly six in 10 African-Americans said they believed that a national anthem protest wasn’t disrespectful to the country and its values.

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The AP poll surveyed 1,150 adults from September 28 to October 2.

Although the national anthem protests had petered out throughout 2017 and failed to garner as much coverage as they enjoyed initially, President Donald Trump reignited the controversial issue during a rally in Alabama on September 22.

“When people like yourselves turn on television and you see those people taking the knee when they are playing our great national anthem — the only thing you could do better is if you see it, even if it’s one player, leave the stadium,” Trump had said. “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a b**ch off the field right now. He is fired.'”

In retaliation against the president, scores of NFL players protested the national anthem at their games, either by kneeling, as Kaepernick had done, or by standing with their arms locked, or by refusing to come out on the field at all during the anthem.

Trump issued more tweets about the controversy, including one on September 25 in which he said, “The issue of kneeling has nothing to do with race. It is about respect for our Country, Flag and National Anthem. NFL must respect this!”

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And now the first four weeks of the NFL’s season suffered a 10 percent drop in television viewership ratings compared with last season’s first four weeks, Nielsen found, clocking in with an average of 14.2 million viewers for games, for the NFL’s lowest average of any previous season.

Although the polls showed that a majority of Americans believe along with Trump that protesting during the national anthem is a sign of disrespect for the country, the AP poll found that a majority of 55 percent of Americans don not approve of Trump’s calls for NFL coaches to fire protesting players. Meanwhile, 31 percent of Americans approved of the president’s firing call.

(Photo credit, homepage image: “Touchdown!”…”or at least it Will Be!”, CC BY 2.0, by Karyn Christner)