Tight-lipped Kaepernick making noise a year later
Happy anniversary, Colin Kaepernick.
Saturday was the one-year anniversary of Kaepernick becoming a free agent, a status he maintains because the NFL has a vast surplus of fantastic quarterbacks.
Some haters remember March 3 as the day Kaepernick walked away from his $14 million 49ers contract. Those critics wallow in willful ignorance of the facts. The 49ers informed Kaepernick they would not pick up their option, thus allowing him to opt out and get a one-week head start on his job hunt.
The extra time did him no good. We’re all set at quarterback, said teams who then signed quarterbacks off discard piles, indoor-football rosters, and out of TV studios.
So much has happened in a year. Even with Kaepernick grayballed (blackball-lite?), the trickle of protesters became a torrent, thanks to the president. The NFL owners, desperate to end the protests, offered to donate tens of millions to social-justice causes. An alliance of players sympathetic to the protests split into factions — one side seeing the owners’ offer as a sign of progress, the other seeing the offer as a bribe, and acceptance of the money as a sellout of the cause.
Kaepernick, meanwhile, sued the owners for locking him out. That legal business has been publicly quiet, but remains high on the owners’ anxiety list.
Kaepernick supporters ran into snags. Chris Long ,a free agent last winter, found his phone mysteriously silent. Eric Reid, who knelt beside Kaepernick from the start, is a free agent now, and we’ll see.
What Kaepernick started, quietly and at first unnoticed, has grown and spread, and isn’t going away soon.
In the year that has passed, he has done no interviews. But for a silent man, Kaepernick continues to make a lot of noise.