Stephen Burbank, the real opinion that matters on Colin Kaepernick and the NFL

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John Elway explaining Colin Kaepernick is basically where outrage goes to die. It's just another move before checkmate, is all.
 
By now, people know how Elway dismissed the notion of Kaepernick as a Bronco by saying, “He had his chance. We made him an offer.” People know it was a lowball offer that Kaepernick, in the early stages of monitoring the market while still technically under contract to the San Francisco 49ers, quite reasonably declined. Elway knows that. He knows that you know that.
 
And he couldn’t be less interested in whether you think he might be engaging in a form of hypocrisy or disingenuousness – which, by the way, he pretty clearly is. Think what you like, he said. I’m not going to tell you all the owners are colluding to keep him out of the game, and if you don’t like the answer he gives you, he couldn’t care less.
 
It’s life in 21st century America, when we no longer shrink from the lies we tell, and when caught we simply shout them louder without any regard for reaction.
 
But even asking the Kaepernick question is an exercise in disingenuousness at this point. Nobody believes any team will ever consider him because the 32 owners are already in too deep on the "he's not good enough" cover story. We’re just waiting on the judgment by arbitrator Stephen Burbank on Kaepeernick's collusion claim.
 
That’s it. There’s your end game. Not John Elway’s contemptuous swat or any of the back stories from the other teams. Kaepernick is seeking to be paid by people who may have agreed in concert not to pay or play him, and the question is a legal one now rather than a football one.
 
It’s been a legal question for some time, in fact, because the owners made their stand to kneel before the current president and kneel on Kaepernick. They did math. They counted numbers. They considered money and ratings points and bought the whole “the anthem is killing us” narrative because they wanted to. Kaepernick gave the owners grief for doing something his own team and teammates did not at any point object to, and he is being made to pay for that.
 
It’s that simple, save Burbank’s judgment. Colin Kaepernick is not going to be a football player ever again, which is a risk he probably never thought would be an option when this all began but knows very well now. He hasn’t played in a year, isn’t going to play in this one or ever again. This is now an argument about damages.
 
Thus, asking John Elway about Colin Kaepernick was, in a certain way, a wasted exercise if the goal was to find out if there was any interest in Kaepernick as a Bronco. It was instructive, though, to see how dismissively Elway rid himself of the notion, and how willing he was to bend the fact to fit the answer. It was a short but very clear master class in crisis management – “You asked for an answer, you got an answer. It has little to do with the thrust of your question or the circumstances at the time, but that’s not the deal. I gave you words and you wrote them down, now go away.”
 
Life is so much easier when you don’t have to worry about the disapproval of others. That is, unless and until Stephen Burbank decides to make his own disapproval legally binding.

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