Ostracised Colin Kaepernick can still stand and deliver

The time since Colin Kaepernick last played in the NFL has encompassed a US presidency, Patrick Mahomes’s entire career and even Tom Brady’s retirement and unretirement.

Colin Kaepernick and his teammate Nate Boyer

The time since Colin Kaepernick last played in the NFL has encompassed a US presidency, Patrick Mahomes’s entire career and even Tom Brady’s retirement and unretirement.

But in recent days, the activist quarterback has launched a reinvigorated, albeit unlikely, campaign: More than five years since his last game, he’s still training and angling for another shot in the sport that has shunned him.

After releasing a video on social media of a throwing session, Kaepernick spent the past week barnstorming across the country working out with NFL players. He threw with Seattle Seahawks receiver Tyler Lockett in Arizona on March 14 before conducting workouts in Houston on March 15, Dallas the next day and Atlanta on March 18.

The people who have participated in the workouts praise his fitness and abilities.

NFL teams are frantically searching for quarterbacks. The question: Will any team give the 34-year-old quarterback a shot?

It’s a question that ties NFL executives in knots. “Does that guy deserve a second shot? I think he does, somewhere,” said Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll, whose team just traded Russell Wilson and needs a quarterback. “I don’t know if it’s here. I don’t know where it is. I don’t know if it’s even in football.”

The people who have seen Kaepernick’s workout over the past week have been more bullish.

“He could play for any one of these 32 teams. He looked great,” says Rischad Whitfield, a trainer who oversaw one of his sessions last week that included several current NFL receivers. “Five years? You’d think he just finished playing football during the regular season in the NFL.”

A return is reasonably a longshot. During Kaepernick’s last season with the San Francisco 49ers, in 2016, he started protests during the national anthem to call attention to racial injustices such as police brutality. The ramifications of that movement played out for years — for both the NFL and the quarterback.

Kaepernick has gone unsigned ever since and filed a since-settled grievance, against the league and all 32 teams, that alleged he was effectively blackballed because of his outspoken political views. Meanwhile, as some players continued to protest throughout the sport, then-President Donald Trump repeatedly attacked the demonstrations as unpatriotic while assailing the NFL for allowing them to continue.

The barbs dragged the country’s most popular sport into a direct feud with the sitting president while dividing fans over the politically polarising issue.

Yet the NFL in 2022 exists in a different landscape than years past. Trump is no longer president. And the league has also tacked to the left on social issues.

Against that backdrop, Kaepernick publicised his renewed push to get signed. He wrote on Twitter that he has been working out for the last five years in case an opportunity arose. But he added he missed throwing to “professional route runners.”

“Let’s do it bro!” Lockett tweeted 10 minutes later. “Me and my brother will come run routes for you.” That led to a workout in Scottsdale, Arizona with Lockett and his brother Sterling, a receiver at Kansas State. By the next day, he had posted a seven-minute video to YouTube of the session.

On March 15, he landed in Houston, where he conducted another workout overseen by Whitfield, who’s nicknamed the “Footwork King” and trains stars such as Odell Beckham Jr. Whitfield says a number of current NFL receivers participated, including the Philadelphia Eagles’ Greg Ward and the Buffalo Bills’ Marquez Stevenson.

David Robinson, the trainer who oversaw the workout in Dallas, said he spoke with the receivers, including ones on NFL teams, after the workout. They agreed he was better than some of the players they have seen on the quarterback depth chart for their clubs.

“He can easily come in and be a No. 2 quarterback in the NFL right now and eventually be a starter once he gets the rhythm of the playbook down, ” Robinson said.

Wall Street Journal