About Roger Goodell’s mea culpa that the N.F.L. was wrong for not listening sooner to players who wanted to speak out and protest — an apologia he made without mentioning Colin Kaepernick’s name — Popovich is skeptical. “A smart man is running the N.F.L. and he didn’t understand the difference between the flag and what makes the country great — all the people who fought to allow Kaepernick to have the right to kneel for justice,” he says. “The flag is irrelevant. It’s just a symbol that people glom onto for political reasons, just like Cheney back in the Iraq war.”