The Quarterback Who Wasn’t There
As the NFL season draws to a close, the shameful exclusion of Colin Kaepernick must not be allowed to fade from view.
Back in August of last year, just a couple of weeks before the start of the NFL season, Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shahid Khan was asked, like so many others, both before and after, if he’d be open to the signing of free agent quarterback Colin Kaepernick. But unlike many others who’d been asked the question, who’d hesitated, or equivocated, or indicated that they’d have to take the temperature of their fan base, Khan offered a rather definitive answer.
“Absolutely,” Khan said to radio host Mike Dempsey, who posed the question. If the “football people” wanted to bring Kaepernick on board, then Khan, a Pakistani-American Muslim, and the NFL’s only non-white owner, was not going to stand in the way. Of course, as you probably know by now, Jacksonville’s football people were not interested in the former 49ers quarterback, choosing instead to head into the season with what they had.
If you’re wondering why I’m bringing this up today, well, chances are that’s because you didn’t watch Jacksonville’s 10–3 victory over the Buffalo Bills, in a game that might charitably be described as an absolute slog. While the Jaguars came away with the victory, mostly behind the strength of one of the best defenses in football, Blake Bortles, the quarterback that Khan, Tom Coughlin, and Doug Marrone have backed all season, was less than effective. His final line of passing line of 12 for 23 through the air for 87 yards and a touchdown doesn’t truly tell the story of just how mediocre a game it was, given the errant screen passes and badly misjudged short throws. So yes, as you watched Bortles struggle mightily to secure a victory, at home, despite a typically dominant effort from the Jacksonville defense, it was hard not to remember Khan’s words from five months ago, and wonder what this Jaguars team might be capable of with a change under center.
Now, let’s be clear, so that this doesn’t get in any way twisted. I have no idea how the Jacksonville Jaguars season unfolds with Colin Kaepernick at quarterback. Nobody, not even his biggest supporters, would argue that he played at a game-changing, MVP caliber level during his last couple seasons in San Francisco. It’s entirely possible that, had he been signed in Jacksonville, Kaepernick may have been able to give the team an upgrade at the position. It’s also possible that he would not have been able to equal the performance of Bortles, who, to his credit, was able to elevate his game to at least “good enough” for most of the season. Maybe the Kaepernick Jaguars are a dominant team that wins 14 games. Maybe they never get in gear and miss the playoffs entirely. Maybe Kaepernick, at some point, loses the spot due to injury, or poor performance, and it becomes Bortles’ team once again, still limping their way to the divisional round. Maybe time is a flat circle.
I don’t know what Colin Kaepernick could have achieved in Jacksonville. Neither do you, and neither does anyone else. Anyone who claims they can say with certainty how something as chaotic as professional football might unfold is a charlatan, and should be regarded as such. So no, the point isn’t that Colin Kaepernick would definitely have helped Jacksonville, or Denver, or Houston, or anyone else who struggled with quarterback issues for at least part of the season.
The point is that all we’ve got are hypotheticals. And that’s a damn shame.
As we move past the regular season, and into the playoffs, you can already feel Colin Kaepernick slowly dissolving into history. Not as an activist, or an important cultural figure, of course. Kaepernick’s simple act of protest has transcended sports, and the conversation he helped facilitate is showing no signs of slowing down. But as a player? As an actual athlete, and a damn impressive one, running and throwing and commanding an offense at a level that only a few dozen people in the world are capable of? Well, Colin Kaepernick’s career has most likely come to a close. If no team had a place for him in 2017, it’s hard to imagine that he’ll be able to find a home next season, after an entire year on the outside looking in. Most legal analysts give his collusion case against the league little chance of success, and in all probability, the grievance makes it even less likely that a new club will come calling in the offseason. The days of Colin Kaepernick, NFL Quarterback, are almost certainly through.
And what an absolute travesty that is!
I know, I know, this isn’t exactly a new revelation. Plenty of people have spent plenty of time lamenting the fact that Kaepernick’s protest made him an NFL pariah, and I’m not so arrogant as to think that I’m going to somehow break new ground. But it is important that we keep talking about it, on occasion, because the status quo has no greater friend than the passage of time. Every day that goes by, every game that is played, Colin Kaepernick’s career as an NFL quarterback fades just a little further into the background. And that’s more than fine for a whole lot of powerful people. They never had an answer for the issues that Kaepernick brought to the forefront, and the sooner they can all stop being asked the question, the happier they’ll be.
Thankfully, as chronicled recently by Natalie Weiner at Bleacher Report, there are a number of players determined to carry the protest forward, regardless of what it might mean for their own future employment prospects. Kaepernick’s message was always bigger than any one individual, and it’s been encouraging to see that keeping him out of the league has not kept the conversation about police brutality, criminal justice reform, and systematic racial injustice from continuing.
And I can’t help but feel that we all have a responsibility, as football fans, to not let Kaepernick’s absence escape us, to refuse to allow his career to simply fade from view. As we watch the playoffs unfold, let’s take a moment, every now and then, to remember that a man who led his team to the Super Bowl just five years ago, who is still 30 years old, who is healthy and athletic and talented and ready to go, will probably never play in the NFL again, because he had the temerity to say that racism is a scourge, and that our country should strive to be better.
There’s a phrase, one that will more than likely be familiar to any thoughtful fan reading this, that’s been weaponized as a way to defend the sport as it receives an awful lot of negative attention. “Pay no attention to the critics,” say a certain class of dopey pundits, “They’re just part of the War on Football.”
It’s a ridiculous construction, of course. Having qualms about head injuries, concussions, CTE, and the long term cost of the game, doesn’t make you some crusader, with a deep vendetta against the sport. It makes you a human being, with empathy, who wants to make the game safer, and have an honest conversation about the toll it appears to be taking, and whether it’s worth it. The irony is that many of the people most likely to be decried as “social justice warriors bent on destroying the game” are in fact some of its biggest fans. I know because I’m one of them.
For all of the things about football that make me deeply uncomfortable, from the endless injuries, to the questions about long term mental health, to the often forced patriotism, to the commercialized nature of every single aspect of the NFL experience, I still love the sport, despite itself, for those moments where Drew Brees threads the football into the tightest of windows, Le’Veon Bell magically shifts straight from 2nd to 5th gear, or Odell Beckham performs feats of concentration and body control the likes of which I’ll never see elsewhere.
You know what a “War on Football” really looks like? I might argue that at a time when ratings are down, stars are hurt, the narrative is dreary, and the sport is in need of all the talent it can find, keeping a supremely qualified quarterback out of the league for the pettiest of reasons might qualify. If the owners, the coaches, the front offices, the keepers of the league, if they really loved football, they’d do everything they can to ensure that one of the best in the world got a chance to continue playing it. On Sunday, I watched one hell of a stinker of a football game, and while I have no idea if Colin Kaepernick would have been better, I can say with certainty that he deserved an opportunity to be.
The reality is, if you truly care about something, you want it to be better. It’s how a lot of fans feel about football. It’s how Colin Kaepernick feels about his country. Maybe one day, we’ll realize that’s something not to condemn, but to strive for.
