The frenzied first few days of 2018 NFL free agency are winding down, with the bulk of high-profile players inking multimillion-dollar contracts. One player, though, has been waiting patiently by the phone: Eric Reid, a safety with the San Francisco 49ers who has been a leading voice in player protests the last two seasons.
The safety market is a bit jammed right now, what with Tyrann Mathieu, Kenny Vaccaro, and others still available and the Seattle Seahawks fielding possible trade offers for Earl Thomas. So there’s a non-zero chance that Reid will find a suitor once a few superior talents fall off the board. There’s no denying Reid’s abilities on the field.
The former first-round draft pick is only 26 years old, and in 13 games last year, he showed his versatility, shifting from free safety to strong safety and even logging some time at starting linebacker after Navorro Bowman was released in October. With two interceptions and 67 tackles recorded in 2017, he’s amassed 10 and 327 respectively in his career, been named to an all-rookie team, and earned a trip to the Pro Bowl in 2013.
Even though he suffered a mild knee injury, by the end of the year, 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan described him as “great” and said he was “playing his best football.”
And yet, nothing. No offers. No rumors of offers, even, at a time when agents and various hangers-on are bombarding NFL reporters with all manner of gossip about what player might catch the gleam of some general manager’s eye.
For his part, Reid isn’t holding back as to why he remains unsigned: He says it’s because he participated in on-field protests about state-sanctioned violence and the inequitable treatment of blacks by law enforcement.
“The notion that I can be a great signing for your team for cheap, not because of my skill set but because I’ve protested systemic oppression, is ludicrous,” Reid tweeted March 15, 2018. “If you think is, then your mindset is part of the problem too.”
The blame, according to Reid, shouldn’t be placed on NFL GMs. Instead, it’s NFL owners who have made it clear that they want nothing to do with him. “People who know football know who can play. People who know me, know my character,” he wrote.
Reid was one of the first NFL players to take a knee at the start of the 2016 season. He continued last year, spearheading a coalition comprised of current and former players which demanded funds from league to address social justice issues. Reid left the coalition in November, alleging that the NFL was attempting to neuter the group’s impact and message and buy off the protesters. (There are numerous prior examples of the NFL using its ample financial resources in an attempt to win the PR war and put an end to a spate of negative press.)
As Reid told Slate at the time, “[NFL Commissioner] Roger Goodell is trying to make this as easy for the owners to agree to as possible so that — again, their goal is to end the protests.”
In an interview with the New Orleans Times-Picayune, he went further, describing the relatively meager sum the NFL will be contributing as “reactionary.”
“I think it's great they want to help our communities. It's going to take more than $3 million, which is what [the NFL] gave the Coalition for systemic oppression,” he said. “It's a long fight.”
This is not to say that Reid is definitely being blackballed, as is the case for his former teammate Colin Kaepernick. An ongoing lawsuit filed by Kaepernick may unearth some proof of a concerted effort by the NFL to exile him, but in the interim, two teams have already said the quiet part out loud when it comes to players who have protested.
Earlier in March 2018, Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross told the New York Daily News that he’d somehow force his team to stand during the anthem then quickly tried to walk it back. Sources told the Houston Chronicle that no one who kneeled would ever suit up for the Houston Texans, though the team denied that the line existed.
But Reid has already accepted the possibility that he may be similarly and unjustly sidelined. “It's a possibility,” Reid said at the end of the season. “There are probably teams that won't want to talk to me because of it. I'm hopeful that I will be on a team next year, but if not, again, that's okay with me.”
The suspicion that football’s powers that be view his activism as an unnecessary distraction has been on Reid’s mind since August.
“If I’m not on a team next year, I’ll be at home unhappy that I’m not on a team,” he said. “But I’ll be satisfied that I did what I believed was right. And that’s being a voice for the voiceless and standing up for the oppressed.”
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.