Colin Kaepernick, the gift the NFL keeps rejecting for lesser QBs

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I was wrong about Colin Kaepernick. Not about his place in American culture and his value to the generation tasked with cleaning up our ungodly messes — he is very important there, and that is not in dispute except by people who want to live in the 1930s. Or the 1830s.
 
But I thought our fixation on him as a quarterback would have worn off after the NFL had gone to such lengths to banish him from its thoughts two years ago — or that they would have signed him by now just to give their lawyers a break.
 
Instead, quarterbacks are going down injured at the usual horrendous rate and being replaced by quarterbacks we long ago thought were fully rejected as inadequate.
 
Like Josh Johnson going to the Washington Football People to back up Mark Sanchez, who replaced Colt McCoy, who broke his leg, to replace Alex Smith, who replaced Kirk Cousins and broke his leg. In his time, Johnson has been a Buccaneer, a 49er, a Sacramento Mountain Lion, a Brown, a Bengal, a 49er again, a Bengal again, a Jet, a Colt, a Bill, a Raven, a Giant, a Texan, a Raider again, and he was even drafted first by the San Diego Fleet of the Alliance of American Football.
 
Yet, Washington coach Jay Gruden responded to a question about Kaepernick (as in “Really, not even now?”) by saying that he was “discussed.”
 
Well, if you think “discussion” means, “Can we bring in ... ?” “No, and don’t bring it up again,” sure, he was discussed.
 
But the NFL, for all its failings in the area of constancy when it comes to everything from player discipline to its own rulebook, remains firm on the notion that Colin Kaepernick is the living embodiment of the death of football. And typically, it has it wrong — stupidly, reactively wrong.
 
That part, I understood. I just didn’t realize that they would be willing to fill Josh Johnson’s Franchise Bingo Card before allowing Kaepernick to play on a second team. And I underestimated our willingness to throw out his name repeatedly just to watch otherwise desperate coaches summarily reject it.
 
In a cynical way, Kaepernick has become the handy one-word descriptor for “Our team has no quarterback,” which is not nearly as noble as “being a one-word descriptor for “social justice” or for “freedom of speech” or “willingness to throw away a career for a principle.” We do love ramming everything into a sports framework — hell, that’s why we have jobs.

[RELATED: Richard Sherman: NFL teams now shunning Kaepernick out in open]
 
But it’s been nearly two full seasons of the league aggressively refusing to consider him, and that seemed a sufficient amount of time to get away from our Kaepernickian fixation. Instead, as the quarterbacks keep going down, it increases, and that’s because (a) the NFL has the attention span of a fruit fly on heroin, and (b) teams have reached well below Kaepernick on the available quarterbacks list just to prove the power of political pandering and ill-considered cowardice.
 
The Washington case, though, essentially reiterates that on this one item, the league and its 32 teams march in lockstep. The argument that Kaepernick’s game has deteriorated has been dismissed by the fact that he hasn’t been given the chance that would prove it, and the idea that his style would be incompatible with a team’s current offense is rendered idiotic by the Ravens’ so-far successful switch from Joe Flacco to Lamar Jackson.
 
Kaepernick’s return was, is and always will be an owners’ decision, and so far the owners have decided 11 times since his original stop in Florida that Josh Johnson is better for the brand. It is the one thing they can articulate with unanimity because they never talk about it, and silence can sound awfully consistent.
 
But Kaepernick isn’t going away as a talking point, if for no other reason than the fact that the owners deciding he is less worthy than Josh Johnson remain silent on it. After all, Johnson still has the Cardinals, Falcons, Bears, Panthers, Cowboys, Broncos, Lions, Packers, Jaguars, Chiefs, Chargers, Rams, Dolphins, Vikings, Patriots, Saints, Eagles, Steelers, Seahawks and Titans left. And since teams are working out the CFL’s best quarterback, Bo Levi Mitchell, we should probably include Canada, too.
 
Or does that export Kaepernickiana to a nation not yet ready for it? I mean, how many countries do we want to hate us?

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