Fact Check: 5 NFL Teams Announced They Will Fire Players 'On The Spot' for Kneeling During National Anthem?

Claim:

On May 20, 2024, five NFL teams announced that they would fire players "on the spot" if they kneeled during the national anthem.

Rating:

Labeled Satire ( About this rating? )

On May 20, 2024, the America's Last Line of Defense Facebook page posted a claim that five different NFL teams had announced a "zero tolerance policy" on kneeling during the playing of the national anthem. The story began as follows:

The NFL may be dropping the ball by not supporting Harrison Butker, but at least some of the teams are coming to their senses.

"There are five teams with zero tolerance policies for anthem kneeling, and we think the list will grow."

It's a start.

The story was shared by other users in Facebook posts (some of which predated the May 20 post) and people in the comments section seemed to believe it was real. However, as with all posts made by the America's Last Line of Defense (ALLOD) network of pages and websites, the item was labeled "satire" and was not a recounting of real-life events. The Facebook page describes itself as follows before directly noting that it is a satire/parody page:

The flagship of the ALLOD network of trollery.
Nothing on this page is real.

Trollery indeed — the administration page itself pokes fun at the idea that the story was real in the comments section:

We sent ALLOD Sportsball Analysticator Tara Newhole to the five teams to see if there was any merit to the story, but she refused to go.

"It's a crock of bullhonkey," she said in protest, "You've been doing this same dumb story for like two years now and it was already over way back then. When is enough gonna be enough?"

For Snopes, it's only been about half a year of "this same dumb story" as of this writing. Since the 2023 NFL season began, we have fact-checked numerous articles originating from the ALLOD network of satire sites that made claims about protesting the national anthem.

For background, here is why we sometimes write about satire/humor.

Sources:

Facebook . https://www.facebook.com/ALLODSatire/posts/pfbid0DkPJns7oeKdtyk96uS9raNvfYKtoCKAnoCgjqPLZgtgMqWvNGi4yjS19eWhjByYql . Accessed 22 May 2024.

Log in or Sign up to View . https://www.facebook.com/login/ . Accessed 22 May 2024.

--- . https://www.facebook.com/login/ . Accessed 22 May 2024.