The same league that let Michael Vick play again after he went to prison for dogfighting, and allowed Deshaun Watson to sign a contract for $230 million following accusations of sexual misconduct by more than 20 women (Watson has maintained his innocence), was keeping Kaepernick out.
“There’s not a definitive moment that I would point to,” Kaepernick says about when he realized what was happening.
Instead, it was more of a culmination.
“Coming on the back of going to a Super Bowl, going to an NFC Championship, setting records, and not a single team would bring me in, even for a workout?” Kaepernick says.
In August 2017, the Miami Dolphins — whose owner Stephen Ross previously launched a nonprofit to fight systemic racism — signed quarterback Jay Cutler after an injury to starter Ryan Tannehill, even though Cutler hadalready retired. NFL team executives, meanwhile, used the media to try to throw water on the idea that Kaepernick was blackballed.
Some coaches and GMs did reach out, Kaepernick says, and explicitly told him, “Yeah, we want to bring you in, but it’s getting shut down above us.”
One of those coaches, Kaepernick writes in his book, was John Harbaugh, the then-head coach of the Baltimore Ravens. Kaepernick spoke extensively with Harbaugh during the summer of 2017. Harbaugh’s brother Jim was Kaepernick’s coach during the 49ers’ run to the Super Bowl.
Kaepernick writes that Harbaugh was “pushing” to sign him, but was “shut down from above.”
In October 2017, Kaepernick filed a grievance against the NFL under the terms of the league’s and players’ collective bargaining agreement, alleging that owners were colluding against signing him due to his protest.
“Everybody believes that he was blackballed,” says one former player who was in the league during 2016. “Players knew that this would happen. That was a firm belief around the league.”
Goodell pushed back on the notion of organized collusion to keep Kaepernick out of the NFL.
“Those are decisions that each individual owner has to make and their clubs, coaches, GMs,” Goodell told NBC in 2020. “And I’ve talked to a lot of our clubs about it and I’ve encouraged them. I’d love to see him play again.”
In November 2019 — months after the NFL settled Kaepernick’s lawsuit — the league tried to arrange a midseason workout for him in front of all 32 teams. The details of this day are now infamous, as Kaepernick ultimately called off the NFL’s workout the morning of due to an extensive waiver he refused to sign — a waiver Kaepernick believed would sign away his employment rights and potential future claims — and instead managed to organize a workout of his own.
The dissolution of the workout drew another round of skepticism, with many claiming Kaepernick was pulling a media stunt or was not serious about wanting to play again.
While Kaepernick was out of the league, the NFL went about trying to turn the temperature down on his protest, battling the aftermath of an especially divisive election and a ratings slide some attributed to the player demonstrations.
The league partnered in 2017 with the Players Coalition, a group founded to address systemic racism, and has since committed more than half a billion dollars to various social justice causes. Kaepernick wasn’t part of the group. (Reid said in 2017 that Kaepernick was kicked out of communications with the group by co-founder Malcolm Jenkins, which Jenkins denied.)
The NFL did whatever it could to stop the kneeling, the former player says, believing the league wanted to weed out players who kneeled: “What happened was the league and the Players Coalition came to a deal, and then the league did what they were going to do … They wanted their games to go back to normal.”
Kaepernick’s protest likely cost him tens of millions of dollars, even accounting for whatever he got from the NFL in the settlement.
But as his career was sacked, as television pundits continued to make personal attacks, and as 986 people were killed by police in 2017, Kaepernick stayed largely quiet.
He says that was by design.
“No individual should be speaking for everyone across the country. I don’t think that’s a responsible way to approach things,” Kaepernick says. “It’s also being able to enable other people to step into leadership positions, because that’s what movements actually are. It’s not one person just driving things.”
Months after his workout snafu, events unrelated to Kaepernick raised the volume on his protest once more.
On May 25, 2020, 46-year-old George Floyd was killed by police officer Derek Chauvin in Minnesota.
Video revealed Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes, killing him. Chauvin was convicted on multiple murder charges in 2021.
Nearly four years after Kaepernick kneeled in response to police brutality, worldwide protests emerged in the wake of Floyd’s killing. Kaepernick says seeing the protests around the world made him hopeful in the moment, especially as people in some cases risked their own well-being to be heard in the middle of the pandemic.
Getty Images file
“There was a significant portion of the population that previously was disconnected from these realities,” Kaepernick says. “It was like, oh, actually I have to sit with this now and I have to grapple with this. And am I OK with this? And what is my role within this? Am I complicit?”
Corporations also scrambled to meet the moment, including the NFL. In June 2020, several NFL players coordinated social media posts asking for the league to condemn racism and “admit wrong in silencing our players from peacefully protesting.”
The next day, Goodell responded in a video message.
“We, the National Football League, condemn racism and the systematic oppression of Black people,” Goodell said in the video, echoing the words players demanded from him. “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. We, the National Football League, believe Black lives matter.”
Kaepernick wasn’t impressed.
“His response through that video was only because of pressure from players, not because it was altruistic,” Kaepernick says.
The idea that the league should have listened to protesting players “is so laughable in my mind, and so disingenuous,” Kaepernick says. “We had been trying to address the issue that the NFL created with blackballing me for years. To come out and say we should have listened on the back of that — while I’m still actively trying to play in the NFL — it’s so performative.”
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