It’s already too late for the NFL to make up for blackballing Colin Kaepernick

He apparently still wants to play. But his best years, and the lessons they would have taught, are gone.

Roger Goodell did not say his name, but we could read between the lines.

“We, the National Football League, admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest,” Goodell said in a statement reacting to nationwide protests following the death of George Floyd.

It was an admission we didn’t need to hear. We already knew the NFL was in the wrong for suppressing the voices of black players and, specifically, the voice of Colin Kaepernick. We already knew the NFL was in the wrong for prematurely putting an end to his career.

Though Roger didn’t utter his name, many interpreted his apology as an apology to Kaepernick and suggested he take it a step further: Ensure that Kaepernick has a spot on a roster before the start of the 2020 season.

While it would be nice to see Kaepernick back in the league, it would not be the happy ending we were all hoping for when it became apparent that the former 49ers quarterback was being shunned by NFL owners. We are far past that point, unfortunately. The league cannot repair the damage it has already done to his career. Even if some team decides to give Kaepernick a chance, we’ll never have a chance to see the quarterback he could have been had his career not been put on hold.

Three seasons have passed since Kaepernick last played. He’s now 32, his athletic prime having come and gone. At that age, NFL quarterbacks are typically transitioning into the second act of their career. Having logged thousands of reps, both in live games and practice, the position just comes easier. They learn to read defenses more efficiently. They’re more comfortable in the pocket. They cleanly pick up on things that may have been noise earlier in their careers.

The development of an NFL quarterback is a lot like that galaxy brain meme. By the time a quarterback gets to his early thirties, his mind is operating at peak efficiency.

When we last saw Kaepernick on an NFL field, you could see the beginning stages of that transformation. You could see him start to do the things you now hear his skeptics say he wasn’t capable of doing.

He grew more comfortable in the pocket.

He was starting to climb the pocket rather than escape at the first sign of pressure.

He’d find his checkdown rather than hanging on his initial reads.

Kaepernick was starting to get it. The stats wouldn’t show it — because the 49ers had become a much worse team — but he was a better quarterback in 2016 than he had been during his peak years earlier in the decade.

Don’t get me wrong. Kaepernick was still a work in progress and had a long way to go before developing into an above-average pocket passer, but he was, at the very least, on the right track.

Kaepernick’s performance in a clean pocket — the most stable and predictive measure of quarterback play — isn’t going to excite anyone. In 2016, he averaged 0.06 Expected Points Added on non-play-action attempts from a clean pocket, per Sports Info Solutions. That was well below league average, but he did rank above several players who started dozens of games after that 2016 season, including Eli Manning, Blake Bortles, Jared Goff and Case Keenum.

That number doesn’t include his work as a scrambler, which should be factored in when assessing the performance of a quarterback. After all, yards are yards. In 2016, Kaepernick was the best scrambler in the league, averaging 0.78 EPA per scramble with a success rate of 71.4%. Kaepernick was also an asset in the run game, finishing third in success rate among quarterbacks with at least 10 designed runs in 2016, per Sports Info Solutions.

Kaepernick was no Lamar Jackson but he had more than enough quickness to exploit any space a defense gave him.

I’m not breaking any new ground with these statistics. It’s long been clear to anyone who could see through the propaganda put out by the league through their most loyal water-carriers that Kaepernick belonged in the league. This is backed by overwhelming evidence. Check out the work by Bill Barnwell and Football Outsiders if you’re still skeptical.

It’s time to start asking a different question.

Instead of asking if Kaepernick should be in the league, we should be asking what Kaepernick could have been had he been given a chance to develop — an opportunity he surely won’t get now that he’s on the wrong side of 30. Maybe he lands in the right offense and he unlocks that part of his brain that all great quarterbacks tap into as they get older. Maybe the light bulb never flickers on and his career organically fizzles out.

Because the NFL needed a few years to realize that Kaepernick’s suggestion — that police shouldn’t murder unarmed black people — isn’t an affront to the country, we’ll never know how things would have turned out.

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