What is NFL’s game plan for Kaepernick?
League’s workout offer to QB is bizarre and unprecedented
The NFL apparently wants us to believe it scheduled a workout and interview with Colin Kaepernick on Saturday in Atlanta out of the goodness of its heart, that it feels so sorry that Kaepernick has been out of work this long.
Except we know the NFL’s heart is dark, cold and the size of a marble. It hasn’t cared about Kaepernick’s employment status before, so why now?
So far, NFL officials aren’t talking — at least on the record. But this is an unprecedented step, and that’s not hyperbole.
Can anyone remember even one time when the league scheduled basically a combine workout for a single, veteran player?
During the regular season?
And offered video of the workout and interview to all teams, including the ones who choose not to attend?
It’s a startling move by the NFL, and it apparently even caught Kaepernick and his representatives by surprise. According to several reports, they had no input in scheduling the workout and were given two hours to accept or not.
Kaepernick’s people supposedly asked if the work out could be held on a Tuesday, when most teams hold work outs for free agents. (The Cardinals, for instance, had about 10 players in Tempe for workouts Tuesday.)
Or, maybe a Saturday or two down the line, not the one just four days away.
The NFL’s response apparently, was “here is the time and the place. Let us know within two hours if you can make it.”
It will be interesting to see just how many general managers attend. Many, including the Cardinals’ Steve Keim, spend Saturdays attending college games and/or traveling to the site of their teams’ games Sunday.
As for coaches, only those who have a reason to be in Atlanta on Saturday will attend.
Kaepernick appears to have accepted.
The last part of that — “can’t wait to see the head coaches and GMs on Saturday” — is Kaepernick winking to let us know he is aware of a game other than football being played here.
Kaepernick knows head coaches aren’t going to attend a workout on a weekend in November. And he likely knows there won’t be a lot of general managers there, either. If teams decide they need a representative there, they likely will send lower level scouts.
(On Wednesday, a Cardinals spokesman said they didn’t know if the team planned to have representative there.)
Every part of this, from the workout itself to the scheduling of it, is bizarre.
No team has had Kaepernick in for a workout, partly because his absence from the NFL has never been about his athletic ability.
It was always about his choice to kneel during the national anthem.
And owners — overwhelmingly conservative, white and male — caved to political and market pressures without much consideration that Kaepernick’s views about racial oppression and other social injustices were on the mark. What game is the NFL playing here? Why do something now for Kaepernick, after we watched inferior quarterbacks get jobs and start games the last three seasons?
Conspiracy theories abound. Maybe the NFL is afraid that Kaepernick will file another grievance alleging that owners, who were gifted the privilege of wealth and skin color at birth, are continuing to blackball him.
Kaepernick settled the first grievance for something less than $10 million.
Maybe the NFL believes Kaepernick is out of shape and will either decline the offer to work out on short notice, or accept it and look terrible, giving the league and its owners an out.
“See? He was never serious about playing in the NFL again.”
Or maybe, doggone it, Commissioner Roger Goodell and others in the NFL feel badly about how Kaepernick has been treated, realize Kaepernick’s absence from football had nothing to do with his ability to play football and want to do right by him, finally.
More likely, the NFL had a public relations goal in mind when it extended the invitation to Kaepernick on Tuesday. What that is, it’s not clear.
But if it results in Kaepernick becoming an NFL player again, I’m all for it.