Sheffield: My Take On Cole Beasley's Five-Day Quarantine

Cole Beasley of the Buffalo Bills was sent home this morning after coming into contact with a vaccinated trainer who tested positive for COVID-19. Beasley was tested immediately, and those tests thankfully came back negative. So you'd think Cole Beasley would be cleared to return to practice considering he now poses zero threat of spreading the virus, but the NFL's protocols sent Beasley home to quarantine for five days because he's unvaccinated.

The takeaway is simple: The NFL is abusing their rights as a private company and discriminating against unvaccinated players. Even ESPN's Adam Schefter is in on it:

Notice how Schefter frames it so that Cole Beasley is at the forefront of that tweet, even though Beasley tested negative for the disease itself. The trainer who tested positive is merely an afterthought at the very end of this propaganda tweet.

But the main issue here is that Schefter and most other major sports talking heads will defend the NFL's protocols simply because they agree with the outcome. They may say that the NFL is a private business with the authority to do as they please. However, these same pundits said nothing about private entities enforcing their own rules when American sprinter Sha'Carri Richardson was denied entry to the Olympics because she violated the rules against marijuana. Many of them agreed with me when I said that the rules against marijuana use were outdated and needed to be changed. Yet they defend the NFL's abuse of power because it pushes protocols they approve of.

A month ago, Beasley made a similar argument about the COVID vaccine in the NFL, and he was told by many in the media to give in or find another job. Would it have been okay for me to tweet that Sha'Carri Richardson should ditch the blunt and find a job where she could pass the clearly written down protocols? Of course not, because I would sound like a loser who argues against marijuana restrictions.

It is possible -- in fact, it's easy -- to argue against a protocol without defending the fact that the Olympics and the NFL can make up any rules they want.

The evidence is now clear: Our media is perfectly fine with authoritarian protocols as long as their goals align with the end game -- to turn the vaccinated against the un-jabbed. So much for uniting us.