‘ACTIVELY BLACKBALLING’: Kaepernick Reignites NFL Controversy With New Accusation

Colin Kaepernick is once again in the headlines, and once again the subject is not football but grievance. A decade removed from his last NFL snap, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback told NBC News this week that the league is still “actively blackballing” him and that he no longer bothers to watch NFL games at all.

Kaepernick, who has not taken an NFL snap since the end of the 2016 season, said he now prefers college football. He made the comments ahead of the release of his upcoming memoir, “The Perilous Fight,” due out later this month.

For those who have followed his career, the complaint is not new. Kaepernick has spent the better part of ten years insisting that his exit from professional football had nothing to do with his diminishing performance on the field and everything to do with a league determined to punish him for kneeling during the national anthem.

“I’m not gonna support an organization that one, is actively blackballing me, but two, has targeted my brothers who have been protesting as part of this as well,” Kaepernick said in the interview. He added that he now watches college football instead.

It is worth remembering how this all started. In 2016, Kaepernick began sitting, then kneeling, during the national anthem before preseason games, saying he could not stand for a flag representing a country he believed oppressed Black Americans. The gesture ignited a firestorm that has never fully died down.

Whatever one thinks of the original protest, the plain fact remains that Kaepernick was, at the time, a quarterback in visible decline. He had been benched during the 2015 season. His completion percentage and passer rating had fallen sharply from his Super Bowl run four years earlier. Teams do not owe roster spots to players regardless of talent level, and plenty of quarterbacks with far stronger recent tape than Kaepernick’s have failed to catch on with new teams.

Kaepernick and his former teammate Eric Reid, who knelt beside him, later sued the league for collusion, alleging that owners had worked together to keep them out of football. The NFL settled with both players in 2019, reportedly paying a substantial sum, though the settlement included no admission of wrongdoing by the league or any of its thirty-two teams.

That settlement has since become the central exhibit in Kaepernick’s ongoing narrative. Supporters point to it as proof of a conspiracy. Skeptics note that companies settle disputed claims all the time simply to make expensive litigation and bad publicity go away and that a settlement is legally distinct from a finding of guilt.

In his new interview, Kaepernick went further, describing a 2017 meeting with the Seattle Seahawks in which he claims officials pressed him repeatedly about his political views rather than his football ability. He suggested the questioning would have triggered “immediate litigation” in almost any other American workplace.

He also took aim at the NFL’s broader social justice initiatives, calling the league’s public posture “performative.” That is a notable charge given that the NFL says it has funneled more than 575 million dollars into social justice causes since 2017, largely as part of the Inspire Change program launched in the wake of the anthem controversy.

In other words, Kaepernick is criticizing the very apparatus the controversy he started helped create. The league bent over backward to accommodate the activist wing of its locker rooms, plastered end zones with slogans, funded outside organizations, and still finds itself accused of insincerity by the man whose protest triggered all of it.

It is a familiar pattern. No amount of institutional capitulation ever seems to satisfy the original grievance, because the grievance was never really about a specific policy fix. It was about a worldview, and no check written by a private sports league was ever going to resolve that.

Kaepernick is now 38 years old. He says he still trains most mornings, holding out hope that some team will offer him a workout, despite not having thrown a competitive pass in a decade. NFL front offices, whatever their politics, are not in the business of sentimental hires. Quarterbacks his age who have been out of football that long simply do not get calls, protests, or no protests.

It is also worth noting that Kaepernick has hardly suffered for his stand. He has parlayed his fame into a Netflix docuseries, a Nike endorsement campaign, book deals, and continued relevance in progressive media circles a full decade after he last played a meaningful snap. Being “blackballed,” in his case, has come with a level of cultural cachet and financial reward that most retired backup quarterbacks never see.

None of this is to dismiss the fact that Kaepernick clearly feels wronged. But there is a difference between a personal grievance and a proven conspiracy, and after ten years, a lawsuit settlement, a Netflix deal, and a forthcoming memoir, the public is entitled to weigh the evidence for itself rather than simply accept the claim at face value.

The timing of the renewed complaints, arriving just ahead of a book launch, will not be lost on observers. Grievance sells, and Kaepernick has built a substantial post-football career on keeping his story in the news.

Reaction on social media broke along predictable lines, with conservative commentators noting that Kaepernick was raised by adoptive white parents in a comfortable household, a detail often invoked to question the framing of his activism as rooted in personal experience of the very injustices he describes.

The NFL, for its part, has not issued a fresh response to this week’s comments, and a league spokesman did not immediately provide additional comment beyond pointing again to its social justice spending record.