Former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick wants the world to know: He’s ready to be a slave again.
Kaepernick has once again announced that he is ready to return to the NFL. ESPN’s Adam Schefter relayed that a source declared that Kaepernick is “in the best shape of his life” and that “he would be a great fit for teams” that need a quarterback and want to win a Super Bowl. Kaepernick may have been out of the league for five years after two mediocre seasons left his career running on fumes, but his PR people are at the top of their game.
Colin Kaepernick is still working out and is said to be, in the words of one source, “in the best shape of his life. He wants to play. He’s ready play. He would be a great fit for teams with QB vacancies to fill who want to win a Super Bowl.” https://t.co/VAXfKlZ6E4
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) March 10, 2022
Of course, Kaepernick’s insistence that he really does want to play in the NFL (despite his career self-sabotage) has been bizarre for years now. After all, Kaepernick compared NFL teams to slave owners and players to slaves. NFL teams, in evaluating which players they want for their rosters, leave “no boundary respected” and “no dignity left intact,” in his words. In his unsurprisingly awful Netflix special, Kaepernick went as far as to depict players in chains while white owners bid over them.
And yet, Kaepernick insists that he still wants the slave owners to bid on him. Those chains don’t feel so bad when the San Francisco 49ers are paying you $114 million. But Kaepernick has money, a result of him selling out to Nike (a company with real slave labor ties). Kaepernick has to continue to claim that he’s looking for NFL offers to keep up the myth that he was a great quarterback struck down in his prime.
Reality never matched that narrative. In his final two seasons, Kaepernick finished with the second-worst and then the worst rating as a passer in the league, according to ESPN’s metrics. But that didn’t matter to his boosters in the media. Even Kaepernick’s conflicting narrative, that the NFL is basically just a modern-day slavers market, can’t puncture that bubble. Kaepernick wants to have his cake and eat it too, and his media supporters are happy to let it slide.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like Kaepernick will be signed and finally disprove the myth of his great talent once and for all. It is unfortunate for Kaepernick as well. After all, when was the last time someone wanted to be a slave and was turned down?
