The year is 2026, and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick is still comparing the NFL to slavery.
Though Kaepernick’s football playing days have been over for almost a decade, the controversial football player continues to train for a very improbable comeback. Just recently, he said that he was “game ready” and that he only keeps up with the NFL to monitor potential quarterback gigs.
It’s now been over nine years since he played competitively in the NFL after many believed he was blackballed from the league because of his kneeling protests. Of course, he didn’t take a knee until 2016, but his decline as a football player started well before that.
After an impressive 2013 season, the Niners finished 8-8 and missed the playoffs. Then Kaepernick was benched for Blaine Gabbert the following year (2015) after a 2-6 start to the season. The coach got fired.
Finally, in 2016, the kneeling began, but Kaepernick played for new coach Chip Kelly well into December before once again being benched in the 4th quarter of a game where he was 1-5 with 4 yards and 5 sacks. The Niners finished 2-14 that season.
Years later, he would famously (for how absurd it is) liken playing in the NFL to modern day slavery… so it’s a bit of a mystery as to why he would want to play in the league again.
That was five years ago when he made that comparison… right?
Nope. Colin Kaepernick is still making that argument today. The 38-year-old recently sat down with Ryan Clark on The Pivot Podcast, and the former NFL player once again drew comparisons between the National Football League and slavery. Specifically, Kaepernick takes issue with the pre-draft combine process:
“When you get to the point where it’s like, ‘Yeah, strip down to your drawers.’ It’s like, ‘Well, why do I need to do this?’ But also, I guess this is the way I have to do it and everybody is doing it. This is part of the process…
Why do we have to do that? You have a high level sense of, you know, it feels like a meat market. At that point in time, I didn’t have the historical perspective to be able to tie those together in such a parallel.”
Kaepernick went on to support his perspective by saying that the only real reason that the combine exists is to allow for the powerful people of the NFL to condition players to be obedient:
“While the compensation might be different, and that dynamic is different, that doesn’t mean the process isn’t the same. And the intention behind the process isn’t the same.
And for me, looking at it in retrospect, this becomes a way to condition players to be obedient as part of this process. Do what you are supposed to do, show up how you are supposed to show up. If you do it well, we’ll pay you well.”
“Do what you’re supposed to do and they’ll pay you really well” sounds an awful lot like… I don’t know…. pretty much any job anywhere.
Yeah… hope no one is holding their breath about a comeback.
The closest he got to a comeback – and saying that is still a stretch – is back when Aaron Rodgers went down with an injury in his first season with the New York Jets. Kaepernick wrote a letter to the Jets, saying bringing him in for a workout would be a “nothing to lose” scenario, and then pointed towards some high-level references that would be willing to back him up and talk to the Jets if they had any questions.
That list included Jim Harbaugh (former Michigan Head Coach & current Los Angeles Chargers Head Coach), Chip Kelly (former UCLA Head Coach & current Northwestern OC), John Harbaugh (former Baltimore Ravens Head Coach & current New York Giants Head Coach), and Mark Davis (Las Vegas Raiders Owner).
If you were wondering, that open letter never resulted in anything. His last NFL workout actually came with the Raiders in May of 2022. Kaepernick’s other big chance to return to the NFL came in 2024, when the Chargers offered the then 37-year-old Kaepernick a spot on… the coaching staff (he declined).
As the clock continues to tick, and the former QB continues to give interviews like the one above, his already slim odds of returning to the NFL dwindle even further.
