Kaepernick called his current road trip “the best approach that we have at this point,” a proactively engineered campaign while there are favorable conditions in the league for his potential return.
Kaepernick called his current road trip ‘the best approach that we have at this point’. LOS ANGELES — In the five years since he last played in an NFL game, Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who ignited an international debate on athletes’ right to protest, has only sporadically surfaced in public.
“In the past, we tried to approach things very quietly behind the scenes — just stayed ready, kept working and had my agent have conversations,” Kaepernick told The New York Times in a brief interview. “But there’s been a persistent question of, ‘Is he ready? Can he still play?’” He said publicly documenting his workouts, being ready to throw on the fly — to anyone, anywhere — is his way of answering those questions.
Now 34, Kaepernick is making his most pronounced argument to teams that have not been able to confidently assess the more simple concerns about his playing ability. By posting video footage of his workouts on social media, Kaepernick has made for himself the highest-profile audition reel for teams since an October 2019 showcase ended with a chaotic dispute with the NFL.
Wearing a black, sleeveless Nike shirt and shorts Friday, Kaepernick threw for nearly two hours with about 20 other people at UCLA. The velocity on his passes looked strong, albeit not against live competition, as he rolled out and zipped darts to receivers along the sidelines. Kaepernick has gone unsigned after opting out of his contract that offseason, when he became a lightning rod for a cultural divide over whether his spotlighting social inequities disrespected the military. In 2019, Kaepernick and a former teammate, Eric Reid, settled a lawsuit with the NFL that argued the 32 team owners had colluded to keep him out of the league.