(delete the space after "along" to fix the link, had to break it up because it was too long to post)
Three years after NFL team owners closed the doors of their franchises to Colin Kaepernick, the leagues former head of communications who was often in the center of the storm has asserted what many have long suspected: A kneeling Kaepernick was bounced from the NFL in 2017 because he was bad for business.
Thats one of the massive takeaways from the column written by CNN political analyst Joe Lockhart, who was the NFLs vice president of communications when Kaepernick ignited a social justice movement that rippled through teams and shook the leagues ownership ranks.
In Lockharts own words from a column from early Saturday morning: No teams wanted to sign a player even one as talented as Kaepernick whom they saw as controversial, and, therefore, bad for business.
That line bears repeating once, twice or a thousand times because it forever puts a spate of intellectually dishonest and long-running canards to bed. So lets stop and shout this for a moment, so everyone in the back can hear it:
Colin Kaepernick was not bounced by NFL team owners because of his skill. He was not bounced because of salary demands. And he was not bounced because he wanted a starting job. No, he was rejected by NFL team owners because he became a financial liability, kneeling for social justice and igniting a telling firestorm with President Donald Trump.
We can finally all be honest about that now. Colin Kaepernick lost his job forever because he became a wildly uncomfortable inflection point between franchise owners and players. He lost his job because he wouldnt turn down the volume on his anger or rhetoric. And he lost his job because a segment of fans were furious about all of it, refused to listen to any of it, and never bothered to understand where it might be coming from.
Now a multitude of cities are burning at night following the death of George Floyd in custody of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. And what were seeing each day is a level of discord, exhaustion and outright defiance that comes from the very marrow of Kaepernicks message. A message that might have been worth preserving in the league or at least tolerating if only for the fact that it was a window into a brand of pressure and dehumanization that has been building for years, if not decades or lifetimes.
That opportunity for the NFL was lost, arguably creating an even bigger platform for Kaepernick in the process. A platform that will only grow in these coming weeks, as Floyds fruitless pleas for his life echo in the publics ear, leading a few people (and maybe many) to look back on the why behind Kaepernicks kneeling. A why that was lied about, grossly distorted or simply used to fuel a political machine that is now falling into catastrophic failure as we near one of the most explosive elections in American history.
An election that will happen during another NFL season without Kaepernick, whose career has been buried to the point of no return.