Colin Kaepernick won’t be getting a job in the NFL this season.
That’s the assessment of Fox Sports 1 analyst Jason Whitlock , the co-host of Speak for Yourself.
Former San Francisco 49ers QB Kaepernick famously took a knee during the national anthem last season as a protest against police brutality and racial injustice and is currently without a job in professional football. Various players who are still in the league have followed suit with a similar protest, however.
The NFL free agent’s possible future either as a starter, or more likely a backup at this stage of his career, has consumed a tremendous amount of oxygen in the sports media industry, and the media in general, and has only intensified now that the NFL regular season has arrived. It’s unclear whether Kaepernick’s controversial social activism and NFL owners’ concerns about the distractions/headaches it might cause or his declining skills — or a combination of both — have kept the signal caller off the gridiron so far.
As regular Inquisitr readers know, Jason Whitlock has been something less than a cheerleader, as it were, for Colin Kaepernick’s football employment prospects, unlike many of his journalistic colleagues. On previous occasions, he has deemed Kap’s activism more or less as divisive, childish, uninformed, and self-serving.
Separately, Whitlock got into some hot water last week when he filmed a satirical segment with a Kaepernick impersonator, which prompted a controversy on social media from those who concluded that the actor was white. Even Whitlock’s FS1 colleague Shannon Sharpe indicated that he was going to lodge a complaint with Fox Sports executives about the skit.
It turns out, however, that the actor in question was Christopher Reid, a.k.a. Kid from “Kid ‘n Play” and the House Party movies, who is black, TMZ reported . Producers apparently decided against airing the segment anyway.
On a recent Speak for Yourself broadcast, Whitlock suggested that Kaepernick will likely remain unemployed, despite the also-rans and never-weres that NFL teams are signing for the backup QB position.
“I would be shocked if any team signs him…I’m starting to think that the league has moved on from Colin Kaepernick, and I don’t blame them….there’s a whole package of things that executives, coaches evaluate, and Colin does check some of the boxes. Athletic…is he one of the top-40 quarterbacks in the league? Probably. But there’s some other boxes he doesn’t check: Clearly being a distraction, being a polarizing figure, doing something that irritates your fan base, bringing a conversation into your locker room that not everybody wants to have. He doesn’t check those boxes, and the NFL has moved on…”
REAL TALK: “The league has moved on, and I don’t blame them.” — @WhitlockJason would be shocked if any NFL team signs Colin Kaepernick pic.twitter.com/YzKqD10F0i
— Speak (@SpeakOnFS1) September 6, 2017
The contrarian Whitlock — the former Kansas City Star and Huffington Post columnist and Ball State University football player — rejoined Fox Sports after two tours of duty with ESPN and now is the co-host of the above-mentioned Speak for Yourself , an offering that airs weekdays on FS1 at 5 p.m. Eastern time, which appears to be the Fox network’s counter-programming to ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption .
Expressing views that seldom fit into either the left or right paradigm, Whitlock is a vocal critic of what he considers the intrusion of progressive ideology into sports culture. With that in mind, Whitlock claimed in an earlier broadcast that the Kaepernick story is not going away.
“Kaepernick is being used to attack the NFL and to paint the NFL as racist, The people who are using him to do that, and he’s now in on it, aren’t going to let this go. People are out to get football and the NFL…black people are too successful in football, and these liberals want to put a stop to that. They’re not going to give up on the Kaepernick story.”
Reacting in part to the controversial Django Unchained tweet purportedly from Kap’s girlfriend that may or may not have cost the NFL player a contract with the Baltimore Ravens, Jason Whitlock observed that “I think it’s about all the people around Kaepernick…I blame Nessa, but I mostly blame Kaepernick for not understanding his situation and who he can surround himself given his situation.”
Particularly given the likelihood of injuries or performance issues at the quarterback position, do you think that Colin Kaepernick will get a job in the NFL this season?
[Featured Image by John Bazemore/AP Images]