When the NFL unanimously voted to allow its players to participate in Olympic flag football at the 2028 Los Angeles Games, many fans saw it as a dream scenario, as it allowed their favorite football stars to showcase their talent and be appreciated on a global platform. But for athletes like Darrell Doucette, who’ve been carrying the flag football movement for years, it stirred up a different set of emotions — flirting between frustration, pride, and concern.
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Doucette, if you didn’t know, is the loudest and most respected voice in the national flag football scene today. A decorated veteran of Team USA, he has won international titles since 2020, with five gold medals, and was among the earliest advocates for the sport’s Olympic inclusion.
But it’s the NFL community that’s now begun circling around the opportunity to play the format after its inclusion on the grandest stage of them all. Naturally, Doucette is urging fans, officials, and the media not to forget who built the foundation.
“The flag guys deserve their opportunity. That’s all we want,” the flag football star told the Washington Post. “We felt like we worked hard to get the sport to where it’s at, and then when the NFL guys spoke about it, it was like we were getting kicked to the side.”
His concerns aren’t without reason. While NFL athletes bring fame and athleticism, flag football is a different game altogether. Doucette, who once controversially claimed he would be “better than Patrick Mahomes“ at flag football due to his superior understanding of the game, has doubled down on his view that tackle football experience doesn’t directly translate.
“You can’t really compare flag football and tackle football,” the quarterback said. “These are things that we practice and we work on to become great. Those guys, they don’t understand it yet.”
Simply put, both the NFL and the flag football community have made their stance on the topic clear, and evidently, the distance between their opinions is for everyone to see. Luckily, NFL analyst Trevor Sikkema seems to have a solution to this problem. Through his latest posts on X, Sikkema is proposing a bold and surprisingly simple solution: settle it on the field.
“The solution is very simple,” Sikkema wrote on the microblogging site. “The national flag football team versus the NFL flag football team in the Coliseum on July 4th of 2027 on ESPN, winner goes to the Olympics.”
That said, the journalist’s take wasn’t dismissive of Darrell Doucette’s claims, for in his eyes, they are as valid as it gets. But despite that, Sikkema made it clear that he believes NFL players may eventually prove superior in a hypothetical matchup between the two sides.
“I don’t disagree with Doucette. He’s won titles for this country since 2020. I’d say the same damn thing! Flag is a different game. I think the NFL guys would win, but if I was him I’d say ‘prove it’ too.”
While it’s unlikely that fans will be lucky enough to see a blockbuster showdown as Sikemma proposed, what we do know is that the NFL has committed to a qualification and tryout process ahead of the Olympics. Meanwhile, USA Football has reaffirmed that players like Darrell Doucette, who have helped build a “gold-medal standard” in international competition, are still in the mix.
But with tensions quietly rising, the analyst’s idea could be more than just entertainment. It might be the fairest way to answer a growing question in American sports: Who really deserves to wear the red, white, and blue in flag football’s Olympic debut?
