Miami Dolphins’ Kenny Stills drop nothing to do with anthem kneel

Four players on the Miami Dolphins knelt during the playing of the National Anthem. Kenny Stills dropped a touchdown pass. One has nothing to do with the other.

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There was plenty of before and after fallout from four Miami Dolphins players taking knee during the National Anthem. A silent demonstration or silent appeal for change in the American legal system that has divided a nation. Following the kneel downs by Kenny Stills, Arian Foster, Michael Thomas, and Jelani Jenkins, many took to Twitter to express their displeasure.

I took to PhinPhanatic before the kick-off to express mine.

The Dolphins’ Ryan Tannehill threw perhaps his best deep ball of his career and Kenny Stills had a good five steps on the nearest Seattle defender and 10 yards to the endzone. And he dropped it.

It was only a matter of seconds before Twitter erupted with #Karma comments.

As much as I thought the decision was wrong on September 11th, 2016, it’s just as wrong to call Stills out for kneeling and then dropping the pass. I am pretty certain that he was not thinking, “Yeah, I knelt for the anthem and now I’m going to put an exclamation on that by scoring this damn touchdown!  That’s right look at me!”.

More likely he was thinking, “Dude, seriously don’t ‘eff’ this up”. The truth is Stills made a boneheaded mistake and lost his concentration. He simply took his eye of the ball and began his turn towards the endzone too soon.

It was a mistake but the Dolphins didn’t lose the game because of it. They lost because they couldn’t replicate it the rest of the day. Had Stills scored the touchdown there is no way to know how the Seattle team would have responded or how the Dolphins defense would have responded. Afterall, when Tannehill did put the team in the lead, the defense fell short in stopping the Seahawks.

Hopefully Stills will learn from the misstep and the next time he will keep his focus a mere one second longer before walking into the end zone but it’s still not fair to put the two issues as one.

To be honest, I had a Tweet ready to go but I never posted it as I realized it was bad taste and would only serve to create a bigger issue out of something that was already too big of an issue.

Others didn’t feel that way and so be it. Stills did what he thought was right and the dropped pass only gave others more reason to criticize.

What we should be focusing on however is the fact that Ryan Tannehill threw a perfect pass. And that alone should give Dolphins fans a little more hope. Even if he overthrew his first pass on the teams final drive.