For a guy who hates the NFL owners, Colin Kaepernick sure wants to work for them. Last fall the former NFL quarterback, who has won more renown as a woke activist than he ever did on the gridiron, likened the NFL draft to a slave auction: “What they don’t want you to understand is what’s being established is a power dynamic. Before they put you on the field, teams poke, prod and examine you searching for any defect that might affect your performance. No boundary respect. No dignity left intact.” But on Saturday, Kaepernick struck a dramatically different posture, practically begging for the slave owners to take him back onto the plantation.
Kaepernick was honorary captain of the Michigan Wolverines at the Michigan Football spring game in Ann Arbor, and according to Detroit’s WXYZ, he “threw as part of an exhibition put on by Wolverines Against Racism.” This was a clear signal in itself: Kaepernick may want to get back into the NFL, but he has no intention of giving up his far-Left agitation to get a job.
Kaepernick did more than just throw. He was kind enough to inform the assembled reporters how well he threw, and how good a good quarterback he was: “We still get out there and sling it. Really, getting out here for the exhibition was to show that I can still do it. It’s one of the questions my agent keeps getting, so we want to make sure we can come out, show everyone I can still play, still throw it.”
In case his point still hadn’t been made clearly enough, Kaepernick added a plaintive note: “I can help make you a better team. I can help you win games, I know right now the situation likely won’t allow me to come in and step into a starting role. I know I’ll be able to work my way to that and show that very quickly.”
How plausible is that? Not very. The last time Kaepernick was a starting quarterback, the San Francisco 49ers were 1-10. That was in 2016. The year before that, the 49ers were 2-6 in Kaepernick’s games. Now Kaepernick is 34 and hasn’t played in the NFL in five years. How likely is it that a quarterback who won three and lost 17 in his last twenty games in the NFL is going to reenter the league after a five-year layoff and suddenly be a winning quarterback? Only a bit more likely than my entering the NFL now, at 5’5” and age 60, having never played pro football at all or football at any level, and leading a team to the Super Bowl.
In other words, Kaepernick doesn’t really have a realistic chance to play in the NFL again at all. So why doesn’t he give up his quixotic quest to return? Why do we keep hearing him tell us how great he will be next time, once he gets back, as he throws in front of NFL scouts for the umpteenth time?
Related: That’s Adorable: Colin Kaepernick Still Hopes to Return to the NFL
The answer is clear: because Kaepernick is woke, and the NFL is woke now, too, and so like star-crossed lovers, they can’t give each other up. If Kaepernick were a conservative Christian with exactly the same record, no one would be taking him seriously about returning to the NFL, and he might not even have lasted as long as he did.
The WXYZ story tells the tale. Kaepernick “drew national attention,” WXYZ informs us, “when he began kneeling during the national anthem before games to protest police brutality and racial inequality. The protests turned political, with President Donald Trump calling on players to stand for the anthem. Trump has since changed his tune, saying in June 2020 that he would support teams signing Kaepernick.”
The protests “turned political”? No. The protests were political from the start and were based on the spurious premise that police were racist and singled out black people for brutal and demeaning treatment. Now, of course, that false claim has been embraced by some of the leading figures of the Democrat Party in the “Defund the Police” movement, and the NFL itself has realized that Kaepernick wasn’t a cynical opportunist with a head full of Leftist propaganda but a noble prophetic voice. WXYZ continues: “In February, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell told reporters that the former player ‘deserves recognition and appreciation’ for bringing up concerns about social justice and racism. He publicly apologized to Kaepernick last June for not listening to him enough and taking his concerns more seriously.”
How can the woke NFL let a hero like that go? But coaches also still want to win games, and so they can’t quite bring themselves to sign him, either. That means that Kaepernick’s appearance at the Wolverines Against Racism event was far from the last we will hear from him, or about his efforts to get back into the NFL. He’ll still be trying when his hair is gray and he spends his days regaling young socialists with stories of his days in the trenches, fighting The Man. His act will never get old.
