You certainly can’t blame him for taking the opportunity, but it sure seems like the NFL cobbled together a hasty pro-day style workout on literally four days notice for Colin Kaepernick to nip any and all talk of him not being in the league in the bud.
News broke late last night that the white-balled former Niners quarterback will be holding a workout on Saturday, otherwise known as “the day most NFL teams a preparing to play on Sunday and that most NFL scouts are spending watching college football”. That news broke before the NFL reached out to Kaepernick’s team, essentially creating a no-win scenario for Kap.
If he takes the Pro Day work out on four days notice and then no one shows up and/or he doesn’t get signed, the NFL can once and for all “prove” that Kaepernick’s continued exclusion from the league is merit based. If he says “no”, the NFL can shrug it’s shoulders and say “welp, we tried”, seemingly free to continue exclude him from the league and being able to say it’s his own fault.
Kap really has no choice here, and that’s the ingenious part of all of it. It’s so genius that it’s surprising it took three years for the NFL to figure it out. He’s boned, well and truly, unless some team finds it in themselves to break from the pack and believe he can contribute. And there’s no reason to believe any NFL team is going to want to go against the Powers That Be, not when they’re more than halfway through the season.
This should all be a reminder not of the NFL’s benevolence, but of their petty disregard for social justice issues and their true disdain for Kap taking on the shield. Colin Kaepernick should still be gainfully employed, or, at the very least, should’ve been an afforded an actual opportunity to show that he no longer belongs in the NFL.
The NFL’s savvy here is would be admirable if it wasn’t so despicable. Their token gestures with the Player’s Coalition and Jay-Z provide them cover from ignoring social justice issues and nuzzling their pre-dominantly black player base. A thrown together work out for perhaps the one player that proves they are full of shit is just what they need to make this issue go away.
There are still those idiots misguided souls who think the NFL is a meritocracy. They bring up Tim Tebow, mentioning him as the prime example of how sometimes a guy isn’t worth signing, forgetting/ignoring that Tim Tebow was drafted in the first round, trades for literal actual draft picks, and participated in off-season programs for both the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles. Even Tim Tebow, who was never a tenth as good a quarterback as Kap, managed to, at the absolute literal least, kick around a few NFL teams for a few weeks during the off-season. Even Tebow was able to log some garbage time minutes in the the fourth preseason game. Even with Tebow, the NFL gave him actual opportunities with actual NFL teams in actual (pre-season) football games, long after all of us realized Tebow was completely garbage.
This workout represents Kaepernick’s last shot at any sort of NFL career, and even if he insists he’s ready after 3 years, it’s hard to imagine he’ll find himself employed after this. It won’t be in a game, and it will be in a situation where it’ll be exceedingly difficult for anyone with decision making power to show up, which of course assumes they want to show up, or, more to the point, that they will be allowed to show up.
The NFL will have more ammunition to suggest that the reason Kap isn’t in the league isn’t because he took a knee to protest police brutality and the President and his rich NFL brethren don’t like it, but because he’s simply not good enough. Smart people know that’s bullshit, but there are far more idiots out there when it comes to Kap than anyone is comfortable with.
But here’s the strange thing. Two teams that won’t be training for the weekend are the Steelers and the Browns, who will have played earlier in the week. The Steelers aren’t going to make a change now, seeing as Mason Rudolph is actually playing reasonably well … but what if Kap got signed by the Browns? Kap to Odell? Woah…
I still foolishly hold out hope.
#JusticeForOstrichBoy