ROGER GOODELL OFFERS APOLOGY TO COLIN KAEPERNICK: ‘I WISH WE HAD LISTENED EARLIER’. “It is not about the flag. The message here, and what our players are doing, is being mischaracterized,” Goodell said. “These are not people who are unpatriotic, they’re not disloyal, they’re not against our military. What they were trying to do was exercise their right to bring attention to something that needs to get fixed. That misrepresentation in who they were and what they were doing was a thing that really gnawed at me.”