The NAACP is asking some of America’s best black high-school football players to consider withholding commitments from public universities in eight states because of congressional redistricting. Current athletes are encouraged to consider transferring and using their NIL platforms to support the cause. The slogan is direct: “No Representation. No Recruitment. No Revenue.”
The campaign followed the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision striking down Louisiana’s intentionally created second majority-black congressional district as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Rather than leaving that dispute in the courthouse and statehouse, the NAACP is asking black athletes to carry it into their college choices, campuses, and locker rooms.
That is a heavy psychological load to place on a 17-year-old who may have spent a decade developing the talent, discipline, and confidence required to be recruited by Alabama, Georgia, LSU, Texas, or another major program. Universities want him, NIL money may follow, and the NFL may eventually follow that. At the moment when his talent has given him control over his future, he is being encouraged to see himself as a victim and act on that grievance.
Black Studies professor Elwood Watson called it “grossly irresponsible and unfair” to enlist young athletes in such a political fight, warning against turning them into “athletic guinea pigs or pawns.” Educator Rann Miller questioned asking young black athletes to sacrifice NIL and career opportunities when comparable sacrifices are not being demanded from the adults asking them to join the fight.
Sports psychology supplies another warning: mental fatigue. It is not simply being tired, but a state associated with sustained cognitive demands, reduced cognitive efficiency, impaired attention, and increased perceived effort. The athlete’s body may be capable of performing while his brain is required to process too much.
Now consider the NAACP’s ask, particularly the age of the people being asked. Research following decision-making from adolescence into adulthood has found that younger people place greater value on immediate rewards and that the capacity for planning ahead continues developing into young adulthood. The NAACP is asking athletes at this stage to weigh immediate political and social rewards against educational, financial, and professional opportunities that may not fully materialize for years—maps, representation, family expectations, teammates, transferring, and whether to use his NIL identity politically—all while coaches try to get him to read a defense and execute the next play.
A 2026 BMC Psychology meta-analysis involving 19 study records found mental fatigue associated with poorer reaction time, technical execution, and decision-making. The measured effects were roughly one-half of a standard deviation for reaction time, six-tenths for technical performance and two-thirds for decision-making, where the results were the most consistent.
Elite athletic performance seeks the opposite condition: flow. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described flow as complete absorption in an activity, where action and awareness merge, concentration intensifies and irrelevant thoughts are excluded. The athlete’s attention is consumed by what he is doing now.
I was a student of Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who used Walter Mischel’s famous marshmallow experiment to demonstrate the importance of time perspective. The child faced an immediate reward—one marshmallow now—or delayed gratification for two later. When researchers returned 14 years later, those who had resisted the immediate reward averaged 250 points higher on the SAT, got into less trouble and were described as better students, more self-confident, and determined. Zimbardo’s point was that “they were future-focused rather than present-focused.”
Put that against the NAACP’s call. The immediate reward is obvious: take a stand, demonstrate solidarity, and receive the approval accompanying the cause. The delayed reward may be worth millions over a lifetime: choose the university and coach offering the best chance to develop talent, earn an education, maximize NIL value and perhaps reach the NFL.
The marshmallow has simply become considerably more expensive.
Elon Musk supplied the cultural shorthand “woke mind virus,” warning against replacing individual “skills and integrity” with race and group identity and describing the constant injection of race into issues as “divisive and corrosive to society.”
Former college coach Tommy Tuberville put the football problem this way: if a quarterback effectively takes himself out of the common mission, “that tends to tear down your team” and takes the “moral loyalty out of it.” Before a game his players stood to honor America and afterward knelt to honor God. Coaches build common identity, loyalty and concentration because eleven individually talented players still have to perform as one.
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Reverse that process—introduce distraction, immediate political reward, victimization and racial division—and then expect it to disappear when the ball is snapped.
Colin Kaepernick gave us an opportunity to see what happened next.
On August 26, 2016, Kaepernick sat during the national anthem before a preseason game against Green Bay, explaining that he would not stand for a flag representing a country that “oppresses black people and people of color.” He subsequently began kneeling, turning an ordinary pre-game ritual into a national argument involving race, police and America.
The 49ers were already expected to be bad, with Las Vegas setting their preseason win total at only 5½ games. They finished 2-14, a 64% shortfall from that already miserable expectation. Kaepernick started eleven games and went 1-10, while his individual statistics—16 touchdowns, four interceptions and a 90.7 passer rating—were hardly disastrous.
In 2015, the season before the kneeling controversy, San Francisco surrendered 387 points. By 2016 it finished 32nd in yards and points allowed, surrendering 480 points—93 more than the previous season, a 24% increase. Kaepernick did not play defense, but his teammates shared the locker room, media attention, anthem controversy, and decisions about whether to participate, disagree or remain silent.
I began describing the phenomenon at the time as Self-Inflicted Degradation of Performance Syndrome, or SIDOPS—my term for grievance and resulting distraction degrading individual performance and spreading through a team’s shared environment. Work I published in 2017–18 compared protesting teams against Vegas expectations and asked whether a victim-based mental state and social contagion might show up in athletic performance—years before the 2026 mental-fatigue research reported measurable degradation in reaction time, technical execution and decision-making.
“Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” became a national rallying cry following the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, but Eric Holder’s Justice Department later found no credible witness who could establish that Brown was shot while clearly surrendering. Witnesses supporting that account were contradicted by physical evidence, changed their accounts or recanted, while investigators found no eyewitness who said Brown uttered “don’t shoot.”
The slogan survived the facts, just as grievance can survive the event that created it.
Ten years later, Kaepernick says the NFL is still “actively blackballing” him and that he no longer watches professional football: “I watch college football.”
Before the kneeling, Kaepernick had quarterbacked a Super Bowl team and earned a contract potentially worth more than $100 million. During the kneeling season he went 1-10 and never played another NFL game. Ten years later, he still describes himself as a victim of the league that once made him a star.
Now the NAACP is encouraging young black athletes to bring a similar grievance into decisions that may determine their own futures. Kaepernick’s career cannot prove what SIDOPS predicts, but it provides a warning of what may follow.
Before asking another gifted young athlete to organize his future around grievance, look at the scoreboard—and remember what happened to the last quarterback who took a knee.
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