Kaepernick is leprosy to NFL owners, pure and simple

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Colin Kaepernick offered to work out for the Tennessee Titans after Marcus Mariota’s injury. The Titans refused to consider it.

And so ends yet another installment in the continuing saga, “Why This Isn’t About Football And Never Was.”

Kaepernick is leprosy to NFL owners, pure and simple. Worse, he is the abject lesson the players are supposed to learn about those who get out of line. His quarterbacking skills have never mattered in the issue of why he remains not only unemployed but unconsidered.

I mean, how else does a blackball without evidence survive?

The latest story, as reported by Jason LaCanfora of CBS, merely reinforces what people who aren’t nailgunned to football came to realize months ago -- that Kaepernick is perceived by the owners as the reason why they were confronted with the angry overbelly of American society and why they might have lost ratings points and money a year ago.

Thus, when poor innocents like Brandon Weeden are signed instead of Kaepernick, they get savaged as though they were the ones who screwed him. Kaepernick is fully an ex-football player because the 32 owners have done a rare thing here – maintained internal discipline.

There has never been another issue in league history save crushing the union and squeezing the networks in which the owners have been in agreement. They are highly competitive billionaires used only to getting their own way, and some even care about football.

Thus, the current dearth of competent quarterbacks, which would typically cause at least a few of them to cast a wide net for anything that moves and has an arm, would have gotten Kaepernick a look long before this.

But in this singular case, it does not, because he gave the industry a problem it hasn’t figured out how to conquer in the traditional ways (like throwing more football at the problem, a la televising the combine), and they miraculously all agreed that wherever the bar is for competence, he and he alone is and shall always be below it.

In short, the only way Colin Kaepernick ever plays in the National Football League again is if someone in a big mahogany-and-ermine suite breaks ranks in the faces of his or her fellow suites, and that’s simply not the way for smart people to bet.

Ever.

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