High-ranking military official warns NFL team about signing Kaepernick - report
Free agent quarterback Colin Kaepernick did not play a single snap in the NFL in 2017 after opting out of his contract in 2016.
According to Kaepernick, he is being blackballed by owners and the NFL after he sparked waves of national anthem protests by being the first player to kneel during the anthem. To fight against his perceived injustice, Kaepernick currently has an ongoing collusion grievance against the league and its owners.
The two teams who seemingly came closest to signing Kaepernick were the Seattle Seahawks and Baltimore Ravens.
The Seahawks passing on Kaepernick was explained as a cap-space strapped team being unable to splurge on a backup quarterback.
Culturally, the Seahawks were a fit with Kaepernick because coach Pete Carroll has always given his players free reign to speak and act out on political and societal issues. It didn’t bode well for Kaepernick that the Seahawks passed on him.
However, when Ravens starting quarterback Joe Flacco went down with an injury, another opportunity presented itself.
Ultimately, Kaepernick’s camp shot him in the foot when his girlfriend, radio DJ Nessa Diab, posted a photo on social media equating Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti and Ravens icon Ray Lewis with slave-owning Leonardo DiCaprio and house slave Samuel L. Jackson from the 2012 Quentin Tarantino film “Django Unchained.”
🎯 @raylewis pic.twitter.com/N9k7nDgmDh
— NESSA (@nessnitty) August 3, 2017
While that obviously soured any potential interest the Ravens may have had in adding Kaepernick as a replacement quarterback on their roster, apparently there were other outside factors the Ravens were considering.
Namely, a “high-ranking” military official told Ravens coach John Harbaugh to consider consider the ramifications of signing Kaepernick, according to a TMZ Sports report.
Reportedly, Harbaugh reached out to several of the most trusted confidants in his inner circle as the Ravens were debating whether or not to sign Kaepernick. One of those confidants was a military official who warned the coach about signing Kaepernick.
To be clear, the official didn’t tell Harbaugh outright not to sign Kaepernick.
Instead, the official asked Harbaugh if Kaepernick’s kneeling lined up with the Ravens’ core team values.
The official also suggested that Kaepernick be presented with firm guidelines about his expected behavior. That was clearly a not-so-subtle reference to Kaepernick kneeling for the national anthem.
And if Kaepernick were to violate those guidelines? It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to deduce that Harbaugh would cut him.
Of note, this report could easily become another shred of the “evidence” that Kaepernick is scraping together for his collusion grievance.
Kaepernick has his work cut out for him to get his grievance to go anywhere. A team passing on his services is the NFL free market at work and readily evident. But proving owners secretly colluding to keep Kaepernick unemployed will require a lot more substantiation than the occasional report.
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