NFL OFFERING KAEPERNICK BARE MINIMUM
Saturday workout far from ideal time to put QB on display
If you told me a professional sports league had come up with a public relations exercise that turned into a public relations embarrassment before it happened and gave me three guesses to name the outfit, I would pick the NFL and decline the other two guesses.
And so, Colin Kaepernick. It emerged Tuesday — while this country was in the throes of a sports story that quickly morphed into a social-political one with a lot of ALL CAPS venting and the use of modern insults like libtard and snowflake — that the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback had been invited to work out for NFL teams. It was a throwback to a story that had long ago gone quiet, one that before this week was the last time I received a flurry of poorly spelled emails that called me names and accused me of not supporting the troops.
On Tuesday, all 32 NFL teams received a memo the free agent quarterback, who was the first player to garner attention for kneeling during the U.S. national anthem as a protest of police brutality and systemic racism and has been out of the league for three seasons, had been invited to a workout Saturday in Atlanta. Teams could send representatives and he would run through drills and talk to them, much in the same way draft-eligible college players show themselves off to pro scouts.
The timing of this is extremely odd. Kaepernick is 32 and has not played a snap in the NFL since 2016, when he had 18 total touchdowns, four interceptions and one win in 11 starts for an awful 49ers team. A lawsuit that alleged NFL owners colluded to keep him out of the league was settled in February. This is Week 11 of a 17-week regular season, far from an ideal time to even consider trying to integrate a player into a team’s offensive system at its most complicated position.
Saturday is also about the dumbest possible day to hold such a workout as teams are either travelling to road games or in final preparations to play Sunday. This seems like the kind of thing the NFL would have known on its own, but then again, this is the league that when investigating allegations of violence committed by one of its players sometimes forgets to ask if there is security camera footage available.
ESPN reported Kaepernick’s representatives asked to have the workout shifted to Tuesday, but were refused. They also asked to have it moved to the following Saturday, but were refused that, too.
Teams with a possible interest in seeing what kind of football condition he is in will have to send whomever they can find on short notice Saturday to Atlanta. Kaepernick does not know who might be there. No one knows why the league is doing this now or why it is insisting on hewing to an inconvenient schedule. It is almost as if the NFL wants to do the bare minimum to show Kaepernick was afforded the opportunity to resume his career.
Even that, though, makes little sense. To the extent that it was once an obvious embarrassment that the NFL’s teams, who all insist winning is everything, were too afraid to sign a player who might help them win at the game’s most important position, that sentiment has faded. The longer he was out of the game, the easier it was to justify why he was not being given a chance. At any point in the last three seasons there have been dozens of quarterbacks on NFL rosters with far less proven ability than Kaepernick and injury churn has resulted in all kinds of random players being handed starting jobs. Yet he has been out there, the third rail that no team has been willing to touch.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has always said, whenever the Kaepernick question was raised, that it is up to teams to make decisions about players. He would say that front offices are always trying to make their teams better, a statement that can be filed right next to his suggestions that it was a good idea for the Chargers to leave San Diego.
And now, for reasons only the NFL knows, they extend an offer to help Kaepernick return to the league that unofficially banished him. It doesn’t seem like a genuine offer and it has only served to fan the embers of a long-sincecooled controversy.
Maybe Goodell just figured it had been too long since the league had done something incompetent and he was feeling out of sorts.