Black NFL Players Protest Rush Limbaugh’s Effort to Buy Rams

Controversial conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh has recently been involved in a high-profile bidding effort to purchase the NFL’s St. Louis Rams, but his prospects may be quickly put to rest as some prominent black players are beginning to speak out against him, according to the NY Daily News.

One such critic is Mathias Kiwanuka, a Giants’ defensive end who recently said he will never play for the Rams if Limbaugh purchases the team.

"All I know is from the last comment I heard, he said in Obama's America, white kids are getting beat up on the bus while black kids are chanting 'right on,'" Kiwanuka told The Daily News. "I mean, I don't want anything to do with a team that he has any part of. He can do whatever he wants, it is a free country. But if it goes through, I can tell you where I am not going to play."

"I am not going to draw a conclusion from a person off of one comment, but when it is time after time after time and there's a consistent pattern of disrespect and just a complete misunderstanding of an entire culture that I am a part of, I can't respect him as a man."

The Jets’ Bart Scott expressed the same sentiment on Thursday, protesting the idea of a Limbaugh-owned team, and calling the controversial radio host “a jerk,” among other things. “I can only imagine how his players would feel,” Scott stated. “I know I wouldn't want to play for him.”

Scott specifically criticized Limbaugh for a controversial statement he made in 2003, when he referred to Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb as “overrated” and said that the media was “very desirous that a black quarterback do well."

"It's an oxymoron that he criticized Donovan McNabb," Scott said. "A lot of us took it as more of a racial-type thing…What he said was inappropriate and insensitive, totally off-base. He could offer me whatever he wanted, I wouldn't play for him. ... I wouldn't play for Rush Limbaugh. My principles are greater and I can't be bought."

Donovan McNabb also spoke about the Limbaugh situation in a press conference this week, saying, "If he's rewarded to buy [the Rams], congratulations to him. But I won't be in St. Louis anytime soon."

So what will come of Limbaugh’s dream of owning of a professional football team? Is there a place in the NFL for a man who once famously quipped that the league “all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons?"