The entire Colin Kaepernick situation was brought to an entirely new level on Monday with Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll indicating that the team is interested in the embattled former San Francisco 49ers signal caller (more on that here).
This comes after two months in which Kaepernick himself was pretty much a forgotten man on the free agent market.
Some conclude that the avoidance of Kaepernick can be directly linked to the NFL blackballing him due to his National Anthem protest last season. Others believe he’s simply not a good quarterback and most definitely not worth the headache as a backup.
Though the most-interesting theory being thrown out there is that Kaepernick doesn’t really want to return to the gridiron. Instead, he seems more focused on his social activism and community work, two things that have defined the quarterback’s offseason thus far.
If you ask Kaepernick’s trainer, Josh Hidalgo, that’s simply not the case.
“Colin has been there since January, training with me five days a week,” Hidalgo told MMQB’s Peter King. “We have been getting ready for football as if he was a starting quarterback for an NFL team. When I read that people don’t know if Colin wants to play football … This guy’s been doing it five hours a day, five days a week, like he has a starting NFL job. And we don’t take days off.”
It’s a narrative that really didn’t make much sense in the first place. Kaepernick has never shown a lack of a commitment to the game. In fact, he’s been among the hardest-working members of the 49ers since joining the team back in 2011.
Some will point to Kaepernick’s work off the field as a way to conclude that he’s not 100 percent focused on the game. If that’s in question, so is too other players that take time out of their busy schedules to make a difference in their community. See Russell Wilson and Tom Brady as two examples there.
If Kaepernick did decide to move on from football and focus solely on community activism, more power to him. But that seems to be far from the case right now.
The 29-year-old quarterback is coming off a 2016 campaign that saw him put up over 2,600 total yards with 18 total touchdowns and four interceptions in 11 starts. It will be interesting to see if anything comes out of Seattle’s interest in him.