Name: The NFL’s Colin Kaepernick Excuses Look Even More Damning in Retrospect
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The NFL’s Colin Kaepernick Excuses Look Even More Damning in Retrospect

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Filed under:Kaepernick always deserved a job in the league. Don’t forget how its teams tried to pretend otherwise.The NFL wanted Colin Kaepernick to vanish. It didn’t want to act to get rid of him—that would anger the millions of people who believed in his fight against systemic racism and police brutality. But it also didn’t want him to be around anymore—that would anger the millions of people who felt Kaepernick’s peaceful protest of kneeling during the national anthem in 2016 was an attack on America. The league just wanted him to go away.And so it took a course of inaction. The NFL never suspended Kaepernick; the quarterback simply never found his way onto a roster in 2017, 2018, or 2019. This inaction pissed just about everybody off. Kap’s supporters were convinced that he had been blackballed from the league, while President Donald Trump urged his base to stop watching NFL games and Commissioner Roger Goodell spoke publicly about while reportedly “.” Last December, Goodell .RelatedThere was just one error with the NFL’s approach: Kaepernick was right. The league seemed to think that it could ignore police brutality simply because it had “moved on” from Kaepernick, but police officers kept killing Black people. Hundreds of American cities have held Black Lives Matter demonstrations following the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and kneeling has become one of the international symbols of the movement. . In 2016, Kaepernick was villainized for protesting during the anthem; in 2020, for saying he would “never agree with anybody” who protested in that way.Soon, the NFL and just about every other major corporation in the United States had to do what Goodell never wanted: pick a side. On June 5, he finally issued a statement saying the lives of Black people—a group that includes 70 percent of the NFL’s players, two of its 32 head coaches, and none of its team owners—matter.We, the NFL, condemn racism and the systematic oppression of Black People. We, the NFL, admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest. We, the NFL, believe Black Lives Matter. — NFL (@NFL)Goodell was responding to a player-generated video that features many of the league’s biggest stars, including Patrick Mahomes, Michael Thomas, Saquon Barkley, Tyrann Mathieu, and DeAndre Hopkins. In it, the players asked the NFL to “condemn racism and the systematic oppression of Black people.” The wording in the Goodell video and the wording in the players’ video differs in one notable way: While the players asked the NFL to “admit wrong in silencing our players for peacefully protesting,” Goodell said that the league “admits we were wrong for not listening to NFL players and encourages all to speak out and peacefully protest.” Goodell was willing to admit to a failure to listen, but refused to admit to “silencing” anyone—after all, he’d tried his best to do absolutely nothing.✊ — Saquon Barkley (@saquon)The NFL’s path of inaction was entirely dependent on one thing: claiming that Kaepernick went unsigned purely for football reasons. That way, the league could make him disappear without banning him or disavowing his message. And those football reasons have an air of plausibility. Kaepernick regressed after leading the 49ers to a Super Bowl berth in 2012; in 2016, he had the worst season of his career as the 49ers finished 2-14.But any arguments that Kaepernick fell out of the league for football reasons alone are misleading and incorrect. Kap has the 24th-best career passer rating of all time. He is 17th on the all-time leaderboard for adjusted yards per attempt, and 14 of the 16 players ahead of him are Hall of Famers or current NFL starters. (The two others: Peyton Manning and Tony Romo.) And those are just throwing stats. Kaepernick is also one of the best rushing quarterbacks in league history, ranking ninth all time in QB rushing yards per game. Kaepernick had a down year in 2016, but his statistics were still about league average (16th in adjusted yards per attempt, 17th in passer rating, 21st in QBR). The 49ers went 2-14 largely because they allowed 30.0 points per game, tying them for the 17th-worst scoring defense in NFL history.As ESPN’s Bill Barnwell explained in 2017, before age 30 barring a career-altering injury or off-field incident. Then it happened to Kaepernick. Sure, he had a bad season by his own standards, but plenty of quarterbacks who have never had a good season continued to find work with NFL teams. The league’s collective refusal to sign Kap couldn’t have stemmed solely from the Niners’ 2016 record; all five quarterbacks who started for the 2016-17 Cleveland Browns, who went a combined 1-31 over two seasons, landed NFL jobs during the 2019 season. And it couldn’t have stemmed solely from his stats; Nathan Peterman, who throws interceptions at a higher rate than any quarterback since the 1970s, has been almost continually employed in the NFL since being drafted in 2017. Kaepernick has the fourth-best interception rate of all time, tied with Tom Brady and Russell Wilson.In 2017, I wrote about . It was the most wrong I have ever been in a sports article. Signing Kap should have been so easy: He had and . But teams signed inferior players, time and again. They made their rosters worse because they feared backlash that could come from signing a popular philanthropist. It was cowardice, plain and simple, and now former league employees are saying as much. Joe Lockhart, the NFL’s executive vice president for communications and government affairs from 2016 to 2018, on May 30: “No teams wanted to sign a player—even one as talented as Kaepernick—whom they saw as controversial, and, therefore, bad for business.”Now that the NFL finds it prudent to pick a side—the one that the majority of the country has picked—I want to revisit the bad-faith excuses the league made for not employing Kaepernick. When asked about the potential of signing Kaepernick, NFL teams and coaches repeated a peculiar pattern of BS. The first step was acknowledging that Kaepernick was . That way they could appear to be supportive. But the second step was giving some inane, hyperspecific football reason that prevented them from offering him a contract. In taking that tack, they thought they could avoid taking a side. But by trying to offend nobody, the NFL, its teams, and its coaches made their own uniquely spineless choice.Kaepernick became a free agent in 2017 after opting out of a completely unguaranteed contract with the 49ers. If he hadn’t, most had expected the franchise’s new front office and coaching staff to release him instead of continuing to pay him more than $10 million per year. Both of these things were reasonable. The team was transitioning into rebuilding mode, and Kaepernick was one of the top QBs on the market.Yet while several of the other 31 NFL teams had clear needs for Kaepernick, only one expressed interest: the Seahawks, who’d faced Kaepernick in a series of memorable matchups, including the 2014 NFC championship game. Seattle for a workout alongside Austin Davis, who had spent the previous season as a third-stringer for the Broncos behind Trevor Siemian and Paxton Lynch. Kap came to town and that he was comfortable backing up Russell Wilson. Yet in early June the Seahawks decided to go with Davis, the far less proven and effective option.So what went wrong? Per Gregg Bell of the Tacoma News-Tribune, the Seahawks chose not to sign Kaepernick because he was too good.sign Austin Davis as their vet QB they've sought, because he's a backup &amp; team sees Colin Kaepernick as a starter it doesn't need— Gregg Bell (@gbellseattle)I have spent three years thinking about this rationale. Surely, something was miscommunicated, right? Doesn’t everybody agree that it’s better to have a good backup quarterback than a bad one? There’s simply no way the Seahawks actually passed on Kaepernick because they thought he was too talented to be a backup, is there?In a press conference last Thursday, Pete Carroll reflected on that 2017 decision and reiterated this reasoning:Pete Carroll said he regrets that the Seahawks weren't the team to sign Colin Kaepernick in 2017. Kap visited and Carroll said the Seahawks didn't feel it was the right fit because they felt he was a starter, and he said he was certain Kap would be starting somewhere that season.— Brady Henderson (@BradyHenderson)It’s baffling! The Seahawks had the chance to sign Kaepernick, but thought he would be signed elsewhere else to start, and … just let him go? Why not at least sign him and try to trade him to one of the teams that supposedly wanted him as a starter? Why let another team land a starting-caliber QB who wants to play for you? If the implication was that Kaepernick didn’t have the proper demeanor to serve as a backup, that doesn’t align with his career—remember, he started the 2012 season as the Niners’ backup but took over after Alex Smith got injured and led San Francisco to the Super Bowl. If anything, Kaepernick’s résumé shows that he’s a great backup.The Seahawks were slated to bring Kaepernick in again in 2018, but according to ESPN . (Carroll ) In the past few weeks, Carroll has spoken glowingly about Kaepernick. , he said that “we owe a tremendous amount” to Kaepernick and called him “extraordinary” and “courageous.” If Carroll wanted to make up for past wrongs, he could give Kap a shot in training camp, but , “Football-wise, it doesn’t seem to fit us.”The Packers started 4-1 in 2017 and seemed bound for the playoffs until Aaron Rodgers broke his collarbone in a Week 6 loss at Minnesota. After Rodgers went down, Green Bay head coach Mike McCarthy was asked whether the team could sign Kaepernick—the quarterback who beat McCarthy’s Packers in the 2013 and 2014 playoffs, the former during a game in which he had 263 passing yards, 181 rushing yards, and four touchdowns. NFL Films .McCarthy huffily answered those questions by saying he had no interest in bringing in an outside quarterback; he had “three years invested in Brett Hundley” and “two years invested in Joe Callahan.”Don't think Mike McCarthy has any interest in answering questions about Colin Kaepernick. — Steven Ruiz (@theStevenRuiz)The Packers didn’t bring in any outside players, instead choosing to fly or flop with their existing backup QBs. They flopped: Green Bay went 3-6 with Hundley as its primary quarterback and missed the playoffs. Hundley threw 12 interceptions in 11 games—more picks than Kaepernick has thrown in any season of his career. Callahan, who seems to be the only modern-era QB to play NFL snaps after coming out of a Division III college, managed to produce one of the strangest stat lines I’ve ever seen: He went 5-of-7 passing for 11 yards, giving him of any quarterback with at least five completions in league history. As previously noted, Kaepernick ranks among the top 20 in adjusted yards per attempt.After the 2017 season, the Packers sold stock in both of their backups. They cut Callahan in April 2018, and traded Hundley to the Seahawks for a sixth-round draft pick in August. If McCarthy genuinely valued his years spent working with those players, why did the team immediately get rid of them after the season? I guess even McCarthy realized that those investments weren’t worth much.Just one week after Rodgers went down for the Packers in 2017, the Cardinals’ Carson Palmer broke his arm, an injury that effectively ended his career. Naturally, reporters asked Bruce Arians if the team might bring in Kap. After all, Arians had endorsed Kaepernick’s skills that September, saying he was “.” But Arians explained that Arizona simply couldn’t sign him: The Cardinals wouldn’t add Kaepernick, or any quarterback, . “We’ve never had more than two [quarterbacks] on our roster since I’ve been here,” Arians said. “So we’re really where we always are. We may look for a practice squad arm.”Of all the excuses coaches made for not signing Kaepernick, this is the easiest to expose as untrue. In the very moment that Arians claimed the Cardinals never carried three quarterbacks, the team was carrying three quarterbacks: Palmer, Drew Stanton, and Blaine Gabbert, the player who briefly competed with Kaepernick for San Francisco’s starting QB job in 2016. Gabbert won that competition in training camp, but threw more interceptions in six games (six) than Kaepernick did (four) in 12. Gabbert was demoted to third-stringer by the end of that season. In 2018, Raiders coach Jon Gruden for any team considering signing him, but Kap won the job back, and since then the quarterback he ultimately beat out has kept getting jobs.Gabbert was not an exception in Arizona. In fact, there are years of evidence that Arians’s claim was total BS. The Cardinals seemingly always had three quarterbacks on their roster during his tenure. In 2013 ; in 2014 ; in 2015 . The only season in which Arians coached the Cardinals and they didn’t consistently have a third rostered quarterback was 2016, although there were a few weeks when practice squad QB Zac Dysert was promoted to the active roster.Arians contradicted himself further just a few weeks later after making this two-quarterback proclamation. On November 13, the Cardinals re-signed Barkley after Stanton sprained his knee. He remained on the roster for the rest of the season, giving the Cardinals three quarterbacks once again.Barkley, of course, is worse at quarterbacking than Kaepernick in virtually every meaningful way: Kap has thrown 72 career touchdown passes and 30 interceptions; Barkley has thrown 10 career touchdown passes and 21 interceptions. Somehow, Barkley got the Cardinals job in 2017 and then played for the Bills in each of the past two seasons.Arians carried three quarterbacks out of training camp again in 2019 as head coach of the Buccaneers. Jameis Winston’s backup was Blaine Gabbert. It’s always Blaine Gabbert.Two weeks after Palmer suffered his injury, Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson tore his ACL. (2017 was a bad year for quarterback injuries!) Texans coach Bill O’Brien was asked about Kaepernick, and sounded intrigued by the idea of signing him. “Colin Kaepernick’s a good football player,” : “Hasn’t played football in a while.”Today, if someone said Kaepernick hadn’t played football in a while, I’d be inclined to agree. He’s been out of the league for three years. But in 2017, this logic was questionable—Kap had been an NFL starter for most of the past five seasons.But just one day after O’Brien said Kaepernick hadn’t been in the league for a while, his Texans signed Josh Johnson—a quarterback whose last NFL pass came in 2011. Johnson, a lackluster player who had an 0-5 career record and a 1-to-2 touchdown-to-interception ratio, was clearly worse than Kaepernick, having served as a third-stringer on the 2014 Niners for whom Kaepernick started. More importantly, Johnson failed to meet the very simple “hadn’t played football in a while” standard O’Brien had set. Kap had played in a Super Bowl more recently than Johnson had played in a game!Now, O’Brien is supportive of players who protest—he even says he this season. But three years ago, the Texans didn’t even consider going to Kap after backup Tom Savage got injured, forcing T.J. Yates to start. Without Watson, Houston went 1-8.Few teams have ever been as cursed by quarterback injuries as Washington in 2018. Starter Alex Smith suffered a gruesome injury that November; two years later, it has yet to fully heal. Backup Colt McCoy went down four days later; two weeks after signing in the wake of Smith’s injury, Mark Sanchez—Mark Sanchez!—was asked to start. All in all, Washington would start four quarterbacks during the 2018 season.After McCoy got injured, people asked then–head coach Jay Gruden about the team’s interest in signing Kaepernick, at this point two years removed from his last stint in the league. His response had to do with system fit.Jay Gruden said QB Colin Kaepernick was discussed but said there's "not a lot of time to get a brand new QB and a system installed and taught in a couple days. He's been talked about and discussed, but we'll probably go in a different direction."— John Keim (@john_keim)There were a lot of reasons to dismiss this excuse as bogus at the time. Gruden runs a West Coast offense; Kaepernick ran a West Coast offense while playing for Jim Harbaugh in San Francisco. Before the 2018 season, Gruden traded for Smith, who had also played for Harbaugh with the 49ers. Sanchez played two years for Chip Kelly, who coached Kap in 2016 with the 49ers. And after McCoy got injured, Washington signed—and here’s where things get really funny—Josh Johnson, who still hadn’t thrown an NFL pass since 2011. Johnson played for Harbaugh at the University of San Diego and in the pros with the 49ers. He had nearly the same system experience as Kaepernick—except, I guess, for those few months on the Texans. Gruden said he couldn’t sign Kaepernick because he was looking for a system fit. All while he kept signing players who played in the exact same systems that Kaepernick did.Washington was forced to play Sanchez just a few weeks after signing him off the street. Steven Ruiz of USA Today behind Sanchez, and noticed that virtually all of them were plays that Kaepernick had run with the 49ers. The team started 6-3 in 2018, and would’ve needed to go just 4-3 the rest of the way to win the NFC East and 3-4 to make the playoffs. Instead, it went 1-6 with a band of non-Kaepernick quarterbacks.Teams will surely be asked again about the potential of signing Kaepernick, and now the football reasons seem to make more sense. He has been out of the league for three years. Arians, no longer beholden to his two-QB excuse, said last year that Kaepernick ” But let’s not forget how we got to this point. For three years, teams pretended they had extremely specific football reasons for not signing a quarterback who clearly belonged in the league. It seems like the only system Kaepernick didn’t fit was one where hiding behind cowardly excuses is preferable to taking a stand.After a lengthy investigation, the league suspended the Phoenix Suns governor for a year and fined him $10 million, but should have done much moreJason and Austin discuss how performances by Green Bay, Dallas, and Miami this weekend affect their placementPlus, will the Rock appear at WrestleMania?A sportswriter introduces his son to the pomp and perils of NFL fandomVan and Rachel discuss the killing of rapper PnB RockSean and Amanda are joined by writer-director Zach Cregger to discuss the biggest movie in America

Filed under:Kaepernick always deserved a job in the league. Don’t forget how its teams tried to pretend otherwise.The NFL wanted Colin Kaepernick to vanish. It didn’t want to act to get rid of him—that would anger the millions of people who believed in his fight against systemic racism and police brutality. But it also didn’t want him to be around anymore—that would anger the millions of people who felt Kaepernick’s peaceful protest of kneeling during the national anthem in 2016 was an attack on America. The league just wanted him to go away.And so it took a course of inaction. The NFL...

The NFL’s Colin Kaepernick Excuses Look Even More Damning in Retrospect

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