Ten years after walking onto a Seattle sideline and offering Colin Kaepernick a suggestion that reshaped one of the most polarizing demonstrations in American sports history, former NFL long snapper and U.S. Army Green Beret Nate Boyer says he still views the act as patriotic and remains dismayed by the hostility it provoked.
Boyer, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan before a brief NFL career, approached Kaepernick during the 2016 preseason after the then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback had sat during the national anthem before a preseason game. Rather than criticize, Boyer suggested taking a knee instead, a gesture he felt honored service members while still allowing Kaepernick to protest racial injustice and police brutality. Kaepernick adopted the suggestion, and the kneel became the defining image of a movement that spread across professional sports, college athletics, and youth leagues over the following years.
In a new interview with The Guardian marking the tenth anniversary of the gesture, Boyer said the backlash the protest generated was, in his view, more disrespectful than the protest itself. He described being struck by the volume and tone of criticism directed at him and at Kaepernick.
“I was stunned by some of the responses,” Boyer said, according to The Guardian. “People who had never served, telling me what the flag meant. People who had never been discriminated against, telling Black Americans how to feel about their country.”
The interview comes as Boyer’s Merging Vets and Players (MVP) foundation continues to expand. The organization pairs combat veterans with former professional athletes to address challenges including post-traumatic stress, isolation, and the transition to civilian life, and has grown into one of the more visible peer-support networks in the country.
What happened
Boyer crossed paths with Kaepernick in August 2016 at Seattle’s CenturyLink Field, where the 49ers were playing a preseason game against the Seahawks. Kaepernick had sat on the bench during the anthem the previous week, a quiet act of protest that had not yet drawn national attention. Boyer, then a Seahawks long snapper, asked to speak with him after the game and proposed kneeling as an alternative, reasoning that a bent knee would signal respect for service members while preserving the protest’s visibility.
The exchange, by Boyer’s account at the time and in subsequent interviews, lasted only a few minutes. Kaepernick agreed. He knelt during the anthem the following week, was joined by teammate Eric Reid, and within weeks the gesture had spread across the NFL, the WNBA, and youth soccer matches. It also became a central flashpoint in a national argument over patriotism, race, and the rights of athletes to use their platforms for political expression.
Why it matters
Boyer’s continued public defense of the kneel matters because he is one of the few figures with a combat service record who was present at the protest’s creation and has remained willing to speak about it. His intervention gave the gesture a rhetorical bridge to military audiences, and his description of the backlash, delivered a decade later, frames the dispute as one in which he believes the loudest critics were often the least connected to either the military experience or the lived experience of racial discrimination they invoked.
His remarks also arrive at a moment when the legacy of the kneel is being actively renegotiated. The NFL has since moved its official position away from mandatory on-field anthem participation, in part under pressure from players and sponsors, and the league has publicly committed to social-justice initiatives through its Inspire Change platform. Whether those commitments have translated into structural change for the player who began the protest remains contested.
Background and context
Kaepernick’s anthem demonstration began as a personal response to a series of high-profile killings of Black Americans by police and what he described as a failure of the country to address systemic racism. In choosing to sit, he said, he wanted to draw attention to a crisis he felt was being ignored, not to insult service members. Boyer’s suggestion reframed the protest in a way that, for some viewers, softened the visual rupture of a player sitting while others stood.
The reaction was swift and polarized. President Donald Trump, then a candidate, publicly urged NFL owners to “fire” any player who knelt, and several owners publicly disavowed the gesture. Crowds at some games booed players who knelt, while others cheered. Military families were divided, with some veterans and active-duty service members supporting the right to protest and others viewing kneeling during the anthem as fundamentally incompatible with the symbol of the flag.
Kaepernick opted out of his 49ers contract after the 2016 season and has not played in an NFL game since. He filed a grievance alleging that team owners had colluded to keep him unsigned. The NFL and Kaepernick, along with Reid, settled the grievance in February 2019. Financial terms were not disclosed. In 2018, the league adopted a policy requiring players to stand for the anthem if they chose to be on the field; the policy was paused that same year and effectively replaced in 2020 by guidance that allowed players to remain in the locker room during the anthem.
Analysis: Boyer’s framing of the backlash as more disrespectful than the protest itself reflects a long-running argument among some veterans and civil rights advocates that opposition to the kneel often conflated patriotism with conformity. It also underscores the asymmetry in how protest is received in the United States, where the form of a demonstration, kneeling versus standing, has frequently been treated as more newsworthy than the substance of the grievance it expresses. His position carries weight precisely because he is a combat veteran, a credential that many of his critics invoked against Kaepernick but that he himself deployed in support of the protest.
Analysis: The tenth anniversary of the kneel coincides with shifting cultural and corporate attitudes toward athlete activism, but the structural consequences for Kaepernick personally have not changed. No NFL team has signed him since 2016, and the collusion settlement, while a formal acknowledgment of his grievance, did not return him to a roster. Boyer’s continued advocacy underscores a persistent tension between the NFL’s stated commitment to social-justice initiatives and the treatment of the figure most associated with one of the league’s most consequential player-led movements. That tension is unlikely to resolve on its own; it is the kind of institutional question that tends to surface only when external pressure, whether from the public, from players, or from the press, makes avoidance more costly than engagement.
What to watch next
The anniversary of the kneel is likely to bring renewed attention to a question that has lingered for a decade: whether Kaepernick will ever return to an NFL field. No team has publicly committed to signing him, and at 38, the quarterback’s on-field viability is a separate question from the political one. But the symbolic weight of any return would be considerable, and the league’s posture toward him remains a measurable indicator of how seriously it treats its own stated commitments.
Boyer’s MVP foundation is also likely to draw more attention as the anniversary cycle continues. The organization’s growth, from a small peer-support effort to a network operating in multiple cities, reflects a broader recognition that the transition from military or professional sports careers into civilian life can be isolating and that peer-based support has a role to play alongside clinical care. The foundation’s profile, and Boyer’s, will likely rise as the anniversary produces new interviews, documentaries, and retrospectives.
A third thread worth watching is the broader question of anthem policy in professional sports. The NBA and WNBA have generally allowed players to remain in the locker room during the anthem without controversy. The NFL’s 2020 guidance, which leaves the decision to individual teams and players, has held, but it remains technically provisional and could be revisited by the league or by a future owner’s push for a stricter rule. Any such move would reignite a debate that the league has, for several years, tried to keep quiet.
Conclusion
A decade on, the kneeling protest that Nate Boyer helped shape has outlived the news cycles that first greeted it, embedded itself into the vocabulary of American civic life, and exposed fault lines that were already present long before Kaepernick sat down on a San Francisco sideline. Boyer’s continued insistence that the protest was patriotic, and that the reaction to it crossed lines of civility and respect, is not a new argument, but it is one that the country has not yet fully reckoned with. The anniversary is likely to produce more reflections like his. Whether those reflections translate into institutional change, whether for Kaepernick or for the players who followed him, is the question that the next decade of the NFL will answer.
Sources
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/sep/02/nate-boyer-colin-kaepernick-national-anthem-protest-nfl
Source: Guardian International
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Story synopsis gathered from: Guardian International — source
