On the 14th episode of our NFL podcast, The Counter, we turned our attention to predicting what will happen next for Colin Kaepernick.
The movement he started by first sitting, then kneeling, during the playing of the national anthem four years ago has gained traction in the wake of the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell went so far as to admit the league was wrong for silencing protesting players. Unfathomably, he did so without even saying Colin Kaepernick’s name.
No matter: Kaepernick soon moved to the center of the discussion anyway, with Rev. Al Sharpton calling for his return to the league while giving a eulogy for Floyd.
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It’s a nice sentiment, and obviously Kaepernick should get the chance to return to the game he has maintained, all along, that he loves. But we can’t pretend that allowing a 32-year-old to return after three whole years away even begins to make up for the league’s blackballing of a man who simply wanted to raise awareness of the racism and injustice he saw in this country.
Kaepernick missed out on prime athletic years — and more so on the experience that would have allowed him to transition into being effective later in his career. He was robbed of three years worth of reps in practice and possibly games that would have allowed him to more quickly decode defenses. He had three years of careful coaching, the kind that molds a raw QB into a proficient one, stolen from him.
We’ll never know what Colin Kaepernick could have been; if he returns, he’ll be only a shadow of the player that would have developed if he’d received the same chances that every other quarterback of his talent level routinely gets. So let’s not make his return some sort of symbol for whether the NFL is taking Black Lives seriously; the damage is already done.
We also used this episode to dig in on the wild Bills-Oilers wild card game from 1993 that saw Buffalo erase a 32-point deficit before winning in overtime. Steven covered that in-depth in a story earlier this week and traced how the Run N Shoot’s “ineffectiveness” in the playoffs probably delayed the NFL’s transition away from a conservative approach that valued establishing the run first and foremost.
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So, yeah, you can blame Frank Reich (and the officials who missed calls on Don Beebe and Darryl Tally) for those years of unimaginative football around the turn of the century.
You can pick up The Counter at any of your preferred podcast spots — a few are linked here — or by using the player at the bottom of this post.
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