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The original phrase was coined by a socialist and is often used by people who do think the Marchers are all Marxists. We have neutral words, like entryism, and it's possible that the OP meant something neutral, but I'm on a platform where I don't think people are so obviously using it as a perfect substitute for entryism.
I'm totally fine shrugging my shoulders and saying I don't have proof of that, because I'm not going to do a deep dive into the NFL and its politics. But then we're left with the position of simply not knowing one way or the other.
I was indicating what incidents I could find that matched the description. I don't know what the OP was necessarily referring to sought to indicate what seemed likely. But even granting your point about Atheism+ and all that, why should I assume the NFL was subject to the same thing? Atheism+ was about the split between people who would go on to be SJWs and the Skeptics/Anti-SJWs.
Whether the blue tribe would shrug isn't the point. We're asking about the intention behind the slogans and rhetoric being deployed, not whether one tribe would or wouldn't react.
Moreover, one issue with this line of analysis is the asymmetry in what ideas are part of the status quo or not. The idea of non-whites facing systemic discrimination isn't in the water, it is the water. Why this matters is that people who don't have an axe to grind against the status quo on this point don't, in my view, engage with politics the same way as those who do. Put simply, as long as blue-coded messages are the water and red-coded ones aren't, you cannot point to the disparity in promotion and claim a conspiracy because people don't need a conspiracy to "support" the water.
And it's also a reference to Mao's "Long March" during the Chinese Civil War. Several of modern China's space program rockets are named after it as well.
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That's what I'm getting at. There's no conspiracy to make the NFL blue, because the NFL turned blue as a result of a conspiracy that came to fruition years ago. The nutso-types claiming that the NFL is fixed so that Kelce will win the Super Bowl for the purpose of benefitting the Democrats are expressing a feeling of unsettled-ness. But it's not a mustache twirling, cigar chomping villain actively fixing games like Meyer Wolfshein; it's in the air, thanks to a decades long process of conservative retreat from the institutions making room for the Left.
Is this what you meant by "Long March through the Institutions?" I have never heard that phrase be used to describe conservative retreat over leftist entryism.
They are two sides of the same coin. Prior comment on the topic.
The OG Long March is widely seen by revisionist historians as being stage managed by KMT forces, who didn't put real effort into destroying the Communists under Mao, preferring to let them shuffle off into the hills never to be seen again. In the same way, the Long March Through the Institutions, leftist entryism as you put it, has been largely unopposed. Conservatives have been criticizing academia since the Eisenhower years, probably before!, and leftists walked in to the vacuum. Conservatives assumed that the crazy college kids would never hold power, and they were wrong. Just like Chiang Kai-shek was wrong about Mao's forces dwindling in the mountains.
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