Over the last three years, football fans and political pundits have been arguing that former NFL player Colin Kaepernick deserves another shot in the league and that there is a conspiracy in the league to not sign him.
Sports analyst Jemele Hill blamed Kaepernick’s banishment from the league on his race, despite the fact that the majority of NFL players are black. Kaepernick even attempted to sue the NFL for collusion.
But let’s be realistic here. Politics aside, Kaepernick is not that good at football. The numbers don’t lie.
Since the NFL merger in 1970, Kaepernick is the second-worst quarterback who has at least 1,500 pass attempts in terms of sack percentage. Since 2007, no quarterback has been sacked more often than Kaepernick, who has been taken down on 8.3% of the plays when he drops back to pass.
Even worse, advanced stat metrics show that Kaepernick ranks only ahead of former Jaguars quarterback Blake Bortles in adjusted net yards per pass attempt. This means that his tendency to hold onto the ball too long and take sacks ended up killing his team’s offensive drives on a regular basis.
As a starting quarterback, Kaepernick is more of a hindrance to NFL teams than he is a valuable player.
It was rumored at the end of the 2017 season that Kaepernick, who was benched in favor of journeyman Blaine Gabbert midway through the season due to poor play, would be released by the San Francisco 49ers. Instead of being released, Kaepernick decided to opt-out of his contract with his former employer.
In an increasingly quarterback-centric NFL, if teams believed they could win with Kaepernick, they would be lining up to sign him. In football, winning cures everything, and teams are willing to put up with distractions if the end result is a chance at a Super Bowl ring.
Look no further than Michael Vick, who was arrested for being involved in a dogfighting business and spent 21 months in a federal prison. The Philadelphia Eagles made the decision to give Vick another chance despite the PR nightmare it provided and the distraction it created in the locker room. Why? Because at the end of the day, NFL teams care about one thing: winning.
If teams aren’t interested in signing Kaepernick out of desperation to win, naturally, they would be interested in signing Kaepernick as a backup, right?
Reports even surfaced in June, claiming that NFL teams were evaluating the idea of bringing back Kaepernick as a backup quarterback, not a starter.
Unfortunately for Kaepernick, backup quarterbacks are not typically allowed to be distractions. They are expected to be seen and not heard. The last thing a team wants is to have a benchwarmer garnering all of the media attention and headlines.
Remember, this is a player who wore socks depicting police officers as pigs to practice. Given his track record of making controversial political statements, there is no reason to expect that these antics would stop if he were given another chance.
Why waste a valuable roster spot on a player who used his last opportunity to catapult his career in left-wing activism?
The bottom line is that even if Kaepernick wants to play in the NFL again, he does not deserve another chance in the NFL. The only person he has to blame for that is himself.
Thomas Hern is the co-founder of the Ohio-based conservative marketing company, H&F Strategies.
