Stand for Kaepernick, Reid
A player protest to get both men signed is the right and just action
As NFL training camps opened this week, complete with interminable speculation about position battles, rookies who might make an impact and what players can or can’t do while “The Star-Spangled Banner” is playing, let’s remember two players who aren’t suiting up.
Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid are good enough to be playing for someone. That much is beyond debate. But the league has decided to make an example of them, a clear warning to its employees that only so much social activism will be tolerated even while it feigns a sense of respecting their desire to protest during the national anthem.
If the NFL were really concerned about its players, it wouldn’t be denying these two their well-earned right to make a living.
Rest assured, history won’t be kind when it looks back on the way Kaepernick and Reid were treated by the NFL.
“I do think that 100 per cent of the reason why they’re not on a roster is the other stuff that they’re standing for is outweighing the risk a team wants to take to put them on a roster,” New Orleans Saints tight end Benjamin Watson said.
Kaepernick and Reid are following the same path as social warriors who came before them. Muhammad Ali, who was stripped of his heavyweight boxing title and barred from the ring for more than three years after he refused induction into the military during the Vietnam War. Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who defiantly stood with their fists in the air on the medal podium at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics to protest the way Black people were — and still are — being treated in America.
Ali, Smith and Carlos were vilified at the time.
Now, they’re viewed at heroes — but only after making huge personal, professional and financial sacrifices to stand up for what they believed.
Kaepernick and Reid are making those same sacrifices.
“I do think it’s sad and I want those guys to be on teams because I know they’re good enough to play,” Watson said. “I hate to see them not be employed in the National Football League, where they should be, simply because they decided to protest and bring attention to systemic oppression, police brutality, injustice — all the things they stated over and over again, which I think are things that we all should be concerned about.”
As of Friday, Kaepernick has gone 572 days since his last snap in the NFL. But the NFL would have you believe he’s not good enough to play in a league that will employ just under 100 quarterbacks this season, many of them older than Kaepernick (who is still more than three months shy of his 31st birthday) and lacking a resume that includes leading his team to the Super Bowl.
Of course, we all know the real reason Kaepernick has effectively been blacklisted from the league — his decision to first sit, then kneel during the national anthem throughout the 2016 season, sparking a debate that carried all the way to the White House.
Reid bravely joined Kaepernick in his stoic, symbolic gesture, and carried on the kneeling when his former teammate was sidelined for the entire 2017 season.
Despite his qualifications — 26 years old, a starter in 69 of 70 games over five years with the 49ers, 10 career interceptions, a Pro Bowler in 2013 — Reid has been deemed unworthy of employment by each and every one of the league’s 32 teams.
Before there’s any more discussion between the owners and their non-blacklisted players about sitting or kneeling or staying in the locker room, the players should demand justice for Kaepernick and Reid.
While both have filed collusion grievances, the NFL has lots of highly paid lawyers who will surely try to drag this thing out as long as possible, soaking up prime seasons they’ll never get back.
But all those players who are lucky enough to have a job should be pondering what they can do to help get Kaepernick and Reid back on the field.
Maybe a one-day sickout during training camp. Or kneeling en masse before the first game. Perhaps, as a last resort, they should consider an actual strike.
Like Kaepernick and Reid, they need to be willing to make some huge sacrifices.
After all, they could be next.