One Week After NFL Tryout Stunt, 'Nothing Has Materialized' for Kaepernick
Not one single NFL team has reached out to quarterback Colin Kapernick in the week since his much-publicized workout in Georgia, according to a new report.
The report by Adam Schefter of ESPN cites “league sources” as saying “no teams have reached out to work him out, visit with him or sign him.”
Kaepernick held the workout Nov. 16 to show his fitness to return to the NFL. However, it became fodder for more controversy. The workout was originally scheduled at an Atlanta Falcons practice facility, then moved to a high school an hour away from the initial site only half an hour before it was to begin, according to Sports Illustrated.
The change was cited as a reason that instead of 25 teams expected to send representatives to the workout, far fewer showed up. The Detroit Lions, Kansas City Chiefs, New York Jets, Philadelphia Eagles, San Francisco 49ers, Tennessee Titans and Washington Redskins sent representatives, according to CBS.
To remedy that, Kaepernick’s team sent a video of the workout to the teams that did not attend, ESPN reported.
But, as Schefter wrote, “nothing has materialized, and nothing is expected to at this time.” He later added that “the chances are bleak that a team will step forward and sign him.”
Earlier in the week, Mark Geragos, Kaepernick’s attorney, had hinted that something might be stirring for Kaepernick, who last played in the 2016 season, according to the New York Post.
Speaking on The Adam Carolla Podcast, Geragos said two teams had shown interest.
“One who is legitimately in need of a quarterback who had a very poor showing on Sunday and has got an owner that I don’t think gives a sh-t,” he said.
Kaepernick has claimed that he is being frozen out by the NFL for his national anthem protests.
In a commentary piece in The New York Times, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates supported the former quarterback and indicted everyone from President Donald Trump to the NFL owners for the fact that no one will sign the 32-year-old Kaepernick.
Coates on Kaepernick. Major. https://t.co/W60HZElfk2
— Ava DuVernay (@ava) November 23, 2019
“The NFL is revered in this country as a paragon of patriotism and chivalry, a sacred trust controlled by some of the wealthiest men and women in America. For the past three years, this sacred trust has executed, with brutal efficiency, the cancellation of Colin Kaepernick. This is curious given the NFL.’s moral libertinism; the league has, at various points, been a home for domestic abusers, child abusers and open racists,” Coates wrote.
Coates then criticized Trump, who was an outspoken critic of NFL players’ refusal to stand for the national anthem.
Coates compared Trump’s criticism to the president’s attacks on Hillary Clinton and Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.
“Perhaps it is shocking for some to see the president of the United States endorse the cancellation of a pro football player, like he endorsed the cancellation of Hillary Clinton (‘Lock her up’), and of Ilhan Omar (‘Send her back’). But it is precisely this kind of capricious and biased use of institutional power that has birthed the cancel culture practiced by campus protesters and online. But whereas the wrongdoing of elite institutions was once hidden from public view, in the era of Donald Trump it is all there to be seen,” he wrote.
Coates wrote that the controversy of Kaepernick’s workout “helped obscure this central fact — a multibillion-dollar monopoly is, at this very hour, denying a worker the right to ply his trade and lying about doing so.”
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