Key Takeaways
- Colin Kaepernick says the NFL is still “actively blackballing” him, citing teams’ refusal to offer even a workout despite his Super Bowl run and private interest from coaches and general managers.
- The former 49ers quarterback, who has not played since 2016, says he still trains but refuses to watch NFL games because of the league’s treatment of him and other protesting players.
- Ahead of his Sept. 15 memoir, The Perilous Fight, Kaepernick also called the NFL’s racial-justice response “so performative,” while the league cited more than $575 million in social-justice contributions since 2017.
Ten years after his national anthem protest, Colin Kaepernick says his absence from the NFL isn't simply a case of a football career that ran its course. He believes the league is still deliberately keeping him out.
In a wide-ranging interview with NBC News ahead of his upcoming memoir, The Perilous Fight, the 38-year-old former San Francisco 49ers quarterback said he hasn't even watched an NFL game since his departure from the league. Kaepernick, who continues to train most mornings despite not playing since 2016, said his relationship with the NFL remains fractured.
“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. “I watch college football.”
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has repeatedly denied that Kaepernick was blackballed. But Kaepernick told NBC News that his belief wasn't formed around one particular rejection. Instead, he pointed to the totality of what happened after he became a free agent in 2017.
“Coming on the back of going to a Super Bowl, going to an NFC Championship, setting records, and not a single team would bring me in, even for a workout?” Kaepernick said.
He also claimed coaches and general managers privately expressed interest in signing him, only to tell him, “Yeah, we want to bring you in, but it’s getting shut down above us.”
Kaepernick eventually filed a grievance against the NFL in October 2017, accusing team owners of colluding to keep him unsigned because of his protests against racism and police brutality. The two sides reached a confidential settlement in 2019.
Later that year, an NFL-organized workout intended to put Kaepernick in front of all 32 teams collapsed amid a dispute over a waiver. Kaepernick instead staged his own workout.
The quarterback's latest comments arrive as he prepares to revisit the entire period publicly. His memoir, The Perilous Fight, arrives Sept. 15, just over 10 years after he and teammate Eric Reid first knelt together during the anthem. Kaepernick says Reid—not Army veteran Nate Boyer, as has frequently been reported—initially proposed kneeling instead of sitting during the anthem.
Kaepernick also remains critical of the NFL's response to the racial justice movement that exploded following George Floyd's murder in 2020. Although Goodell acknowledged that the league had been wrong not to listen to players protesting racial injustice earlier, Kaepernick called that response “so performative.”
“I don’t think the NFL has materially changed. None of their actions show that,” Kaepernick told NBC News.
The NFL countered in a statement that the issues Kaepernick and other players raised “remain important to the league,” pointing to more than $575 million contributed through its social justice efforts since 2017.
