{"id":1054,"date":"2019-03-27T03:33:48","date_gmt":"2019-03-27T03:33:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sportsnewsforyou.com\/?p=1054"},"modified":"2019-03-27T03:33:48","modified_gmt":"2019-03-27T03:33:48","slug":"no-nfl-player-protests-are-not-harming-papa-johns-pizza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/?p=1054","title":{"rendered":"No, NFL Player Protests Are Not Harming Papa John’s Pizza"},"content":{"rendered":"

Papa John\u2019s, a chain restaurant that makes arguably <\/span>awful pizza yet still boasts over 5,000 locations worldwide, saw its stock price drop by 11% this week, wherein CEO and founder John \u201cPapa John\u201d Schnatter saw his net worth tumble by $70 million. (Do not weep for Schnatter; Forbes still pegs his personal balance sheet at around\u00a0$801 million.)<\/p>\n

To calm the frazzled nerves of investors, Schnatter and COO Steve Ritchie hopped on a conference call to bravely announce that the lower-than-expected earnings were someone else\u2019s fault: NFL players protesting state-sanctioned violence and systemic racism. <\/span><\/p>\n

Papa John\u2019s, which <\/span>renewed its sponsorship agreement with the league on Aug. 4, thus retaining the company\u2019s status as the \u201cOfficial Pizza Sponsor of the NFL and Super Bowl,\u201d is miffed that the NFL didn\u2019t rewrite the rules in order to bar players from doing anything but standing and saluting during the national anthem. Papa John\u2019s contends that players\u2019 protests have made pizza-hungry, patriotic fans across the country less likely to purchase pizza.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe NFL has hurt us,\u201d Schnatter said <\/span>during Wednesday\u2019s call. \u201cWe are disappointed the NFL and its leadership did not resolve this.\u201d Schnatter added that the failure to clamp down on political activity showed a lack of \u201cleadership\u201d on the NFL\u2019s part and \u201cshould have been nipped in the bud a year and a half ago,\u201d presumably when Colin Kaepernick first began protesting.<\/p>\n

It is true that NFL broadcast ratings are down this year. Moreover, Papa John\u2019s does advertise heavily during games and has sponsorship agreements with 23 teams. That said, how exactly has Papa John\u2019s determined that the decrease in viewers has directly led to a decline in sales? They won\u2019t say, and per ESPN, \u201cCompany executives declined to disclose exactly how much money in projected sales Papa John\u2019s lost from its association with the NFL.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s certainly the kind of information you\u2019d think a COO would come armed with if it were going to point the finger at a corporate partner. After all, they\u2019re saying outright that the NFL needs to crack down on protests in order to bolster their bottom line. Further, the decline in Papa John\u2019s earnings doesn\u2019t seem to have a one-to-one relationship to NFL protests, as ESPN\u2019s Bill Barnwell handily pointed out on Twitter:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

None of Schnatter\u2019s logic seems to add up. <\/span>Chain restaurants overall are seeing lower sales numbers, and all televised sports are garnering fewer eyeballs, largely because of cord-cutting.<\/p>\n

In February, <\/span>Ritchie complained that the 8% drop in NFL ratings for the 2016 season was causing Papa John\u2019s sales to flag, though he then pegged it as having only \u00a0\u201cplayed a small factor in some of our performance,\u201d and didn\u2019t cite protests at all. <\/span><\/p>\n

This appears to be just like when Schnatter tried to falsely and preemptively <\/span>blame Obamacare for lost revenue and threatened to increase prices. Papa John\u2019s is grandstanding about its CEO\u2019s\u00a0pet political cause, hoping it will deflect attention away from a subpar earnings report and equally subpar pizza.<\/p>\n

Considering what should have been a mundane conference call is already being drowned out by <\/span>ridiculous partisan noise-making, in that respect, Schnatter has already succeeded.<\/p>\n

Share image by Michael Zagaris\/San Francisco 49ers\/Getty Images.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Papa John\u2019s, a chain restaurant that makes arguably awful pizza yet still boasts over 5,000 locations worldwide, saw its stock price drop by 11% this week, wherein CEO and founder John \u201cPapa John\u201d Schnatter saw his net worth tumble by $70 million. (Do not weep for Schnatter; Forbes still pegs his personal balance sheet at…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1054\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}