How racial demonstrations affected NFL attendance

Starting in 2016, former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began to garner attention outside the realm of football for controversially kneeling during the national anthem.

The move was quickly followed by other players across the league as a way to call attention to police brutality and the poor treatment of African-Americans in the U.S.

However, around the same time, the NFL also saw declines in attendance.

Fans erroneously claimed the drop was due to a protest against the NFL but a new study conducted by Texas A&M senior assistant Provost George Cunningham, Ph.D. suggests they were right but not in the way you might think.

Cunningham explained that markets with a high volume of explicit bias remained virtually unchanged. But what was interesting was what he found about markets with high volumes of implicitly racist people.

Cunningham describes people with implicit biases as, "Well-intentioned people who have a bias on an unconscious level," and says "as [those types of people] went up, attendance went down."

So yes, attendance did in fact drop but the drop was not due to a consciously staged protest.

Watch the full interview and hear the methods used in this study in the player above.