NFL continues to show its values...hint: it's $$$

In August, the NFL agreed to terms on a sponsorship deal with headphone maker/mall kiosk giant Bose, making it the “official sound” of the NFL. On Saturday, the league publicly reiterated the sponsorship’s terms, noting that players could not wear any competing headphones during pre- or postgame interviews until 90 minutes after the game had ended.

On Sunday, Colin Kaepernick, who had been in an endlessly overplayed commercial for Beats by Dre last year, wore a pink pair of Beats headphones to a postgame press conference. By Thursday, Kaepernickhad been fined $10,000 by the league.

I don’t really care about headphones, but put that figure into context. Earlier in the week, the NFL fined Broncos tight end Julius Thomas $8,268 for his illegal chop block on Calais Campbell,3 who will miss the next three weeks with an injured MCL. It would have somehow been just a tiny bit worse for Thomas to bring a pair of unapproved headphones onto the field and smack Campbell with them.

More distressing is how quick the league was to fine Kaepernick. It took no more than three days to find out what had happened and bill Kaepernick for offending a corporate sponsor. Never mind that it took the league 46 days to realize it should have suspended Ray Rice for more than two games. Or that it took Roger Goodell 11 days to hold a press conference after TMZ aired the second Rice video. It took NFL arbitrator Harold Henderson 23 days to decide on Josh Gordon’s appeal. Hell, I’m pretty sure it’s taken a couple of weeks to play out some of these Thursday Night Football games in their entirety.

That last sentence made me LOL.

They fined Kap $10k for wearing the headset.

I'm sure Beats paid that $10k because it was probably work $1 million or more in free publicity.