Kaepernick Wasn’t a Superstar. He Didn’t Have To Be.
A mediocre quarterback had a lot more to lose by speaking out.
As sports leagues go, the National Football League takes particular care in crafting its public image.
Just look at how they construct their season. NFL football is a weekly, extended television show: Six hours of Sunday afternoon game action gets bracketed by pregame shows, postgame shows, and the chaser of featured Sunday night and Monday night games. On Monday and Tuesday mornings, sports talk radio, newspapers, and team-centric blogs recap the week’s contest; the rest of the week they talk about the next game and muse on trends, injuries, and personnel decisions. Fantasy football leagues invite participation (along with the critical ingredient for any sports league, gambling) from the draft throughout the regular season.
The NFL gets you involved and talking. Its success lies in its ability to fill media — radio, digital, print, and television — with content. Understanding this, teams do their best to control what narratives drive that content.
And that is the central reason why Colin Kaepernick is not playing in the NFL.
Kaepernick’s situation pops up now and then; this week’s rehashing came in the wake of the Super Bowl, as critics derided the NFL’s back-patting commercials touting a commitment to social justice. The widely-accepted version of his story goes something like this: Because of his protest of police brutality, NFL teams refuse to sign Kaepernick, a top-flight quarterback who had taken the San Francisco 49ers back to the Super Bowl. NFL owners, this line of thinking goes, are refusing to sign an elite player solely because of his controversial views.
There are two problems with this narrative. First, and most obvious, is that it isn’t true. Second, it obscures the real story through needless embellishment.
Typically, this allegation pops up in social media discussions about Kaepernick, though it got a big boost last fall with his inclusion in the latest release of Madden NFL football. The preeminent sports video game franchise didn’t just include Kaepernick as a free agent available to sign; it ranked him as a “starting-caliber quarterback.”
That would have been a slam-dunk description in 2012 and 2013 when Kaepernick took over under center for San Francisco 49ers, leading the team to their first Super Bowl since the Jerry Rice era. But by the time Kaepernick started taking a knee in 2016, he had been injured and ultimately benched. When a new coaching staff took over in early 2017, Kaepernick opted out of his contract rather than allowing the team to release him. Opting out would have allowed more time to find a starting opportunity; that opportunity never came, and now four full seasons have passed since Kaepernick last took a snap.
Hard statistics show he was at best a passable quarterback, and contemporary analyses weren’t exactly high on his performance in what will probably turn out to be the latter years of his career. Even the most glowing reviews suggested he was, at best, someone who could compete for a starting job. In other words, not an unquestioned starter.
At this point, it’s a good idea to think about what the quarterback position means, particularly on the professional level. Studies show that a quarterback is a football franchise’s most important person. NFL teams certainly behave like they believe those studies, and do their best to get the right fit at quarterback. Broadly speaking, a team’s quarterback situation usually falls into one of these three categories:
Group 1: The team has an obvious, unquestioned starter. Think of Patrick Mahomes in Kansas City or Russel Wilson in Seattle. A team like this might sign Kaepernick, but with no pretenses that he would have a chance to prove himself as a starter barring injury.
Group 2: The team has a starter, but there is potential to make a change. This type of team either has a young prospect they envision as a long-term starter (such as Daniel Jones of the New York Giants); an aging starter susceptible to injury or ineffectiveness (Ben Roethlisberger in Pittsburgh); a mid-career veteran with whom fans may grow impatient (like Kirk Cousins in Minnesota); or a steady, veteran placeholder for a recently drafted prospect (Alex Smith on every team he has ever been on).
Group 3: The team has a number of options, and either goes into training camp with an open competition or otherwise lets performance dictate who gets the nod as a season progresses. (Often, this results in Ryan Fitzpatrick starting for that team at some point and winning two exciting games.)
For Kaepernick, Group 2 and Group 3 offer the best path back to an NFL roster. But this is where narrative comes into play again. Remember, NFL teams know that when they aren’t playing, their local media markets still buzz with discussion. And quarterback is the most visible position on a football team.
Now, put yourself in the shoes of an NFL general manager of a team in Group 2 or Group 3. When you make a personnel move, you have to think about the public image. What happens if a player steps onto a team without a settled quarterback situation and comes out on the short end of a difficult football decision? And how does that situation change if instead of signing someone like, say, Nick Foles versus Kaepernick?
Look at some hypotheticals from this past season alone. Imagine that Kaepernick, not Carson Wentz, was the quarterback of the Philadelphia Eagles this year when former coach Doug Pederson switched to the freshly drafted Jalen Hurts (whom Pederson imagined as the quarterback of the future)? Imagine Kaepernick, not Joe Flacco, was the number two option for the New York Jets behind the struggling Sam Darnold. Or imagine Kaepernick in the mix for the Chicago Bears, where neither Mitch Trubisky nor Nick Foles did much to distinguish themselves for the first half of the year.
Imagine sports talk radio, blogs, or Twitter in Philadelphia, New York, or Chicago under these circumstances. Imagine the backlash anywhere if Kaepernick gets benched or released. And if the quarterback who takes Kaepernick’s place in this hypothetical is white, then it invites overt racial division among a fan base, if not within a locker room.
None of this chatter would matter if Kaepernick was a guaranteed starter. Had he proven his talent, then a team eager for wins would have picked him up. But he didn’t. That forces a typical NFL GM into a choice: Sign Kaepernick, and possibly invite a hornet’s nest of distractions if he doesn’t realize his upside; or sign someone who has exhibited a roughly similar skill set, but who carries less baggage.
You can see where a GM, envisioning a scenario where mid-week chatter about the team morphs into a debate on race relations in America, might choose the safer course and take a pass on Kaepernick. And if one GM does it, others will follow.
This understanding also adds something to the story that the dominant narrative does not. Maybe Kaepernick did not sacrifice NFL superstardom for his beliefs. Yet he may have sacrificed a career as a middling, backup quarterback. If that sounds like an insult, go into any sports bar in America during happy hour (post-COVID, of course!) and ask if anyone would trade their current job to be a backup quarterback. Unless you stumble onto a location shoot for a State Farm or Nationwide commercial, chances are you’ll find a bar full of takers.
Kaepernick’s absence from the league probably wasn’t the work of a handshake agreement among old white men in a smoke-filled lounge at an NFL owners’ meeting. His lack of an opportunity to prove himself is more likely the result of an insular industry that too often suffers from groupthink — and is frequently more concerned with public perception off the field than putting the best product on it.
Incidentally, that may be fine for Kaepernick, who may not even want back into the knee-bending, concussion-inducing league in the first place. When Warren Moon had to fight the NFL’s racism (the belief that black players were not smart enough to play quarterback) he went to Canada, lit up scoreboards north of the border, and made himself impossible to ignore. Kaeppernick turned down the Canadian Football League and passed on the now-defunct Association of American Football and the XFL. (No judgment there: If I had a choice between sharing my views with the world as an activist or getting my skull rattled by 300-pound defensive ends for a living, I’d pick the former.)
All of this is important because whether you agree or disagree with Kaepernick’s opinions and stances, his advocacy warrants accuracy.
Those who try to embellish the truth only serve to tarnish the truth. To appreciate what he gave up for his protest, it remains important to understand the realities facing Kaepernick — a fringe quarterback who, at best, would have to compete for a roster spot when he made his statement. That’s the type of player who NFL GM’s stay away from. It’s the type of player who, if their career is their sole focus, probably keeps his mouth shut and his head down.
Colin Kaepernick didn’t do either of those things and probably gave up any chance to continue an NFL career because of it. Nothing about the truth does anything to lessen that sacrifice; in fact, understanding the truth honors what Kaepernick stood for by taking a knee.
