One of the past decade’s most polarizing figures in American sports will publish a book, nearly 10 years to the day after the moment that dramatically changed, and prematurely ended, his NFL career.
Colin Kaepernick has announced plans to publish The Perilous Fight on September 15, 2026, two weeks after the 10-year anniversary of the moment he was first spotted sitting during the national anthem before a preseason game.
He’d been sitting during the anthem throughout the 2016 preseason. For the September 1 game, he was in uniform for the first time, making the gesture conspicuous and noticeable.
What followed was a protracted debate among those who understood his motivations and respected his First Amendment right to protest by not standing (he later decided to kneel, not sit) and those who viewed the gesture as disrespectful to the country and borderline treasonous. It sparked a wave of other players realizing that they also had the right to not stand, thanks to a flaw in the rules that required players to be on the sideline for the anthem but did not require them to stand.
It was a mess for the league. While many huffed and puffed about boycotting the NFL, some followed through, albeit temporarily.
And when Kaepernick was released by the 49ers after the 2016 season — two years after signing a market-level contract — he never landed with another team.
It gets a little muddy at that point. Did some teams give him a deliberate cold shoulder? Yes. Did Kaepernick do himself any favors by not making it clear from the get-go that he’d accept a backup role and, if need be, a minimum salary? No.
Still, his collusion claim was eventually settled short of a formal hearing, with Kaepernick getting a payment in the range of $5 million to $10 million.
Through it all, he had one visit (in 2017, with the Seahawks) and one tryout (in 2022, with the Raiders). In 2019, an effort by the NFL to arrange a workout for Kaepernick collapsed amid suspicions that the league’s waiver was written to extinguish any lingering legal claims he may have made for his ongoing unemployment.
Eventually, a documentary from Spike Lee was filmed but eventually scrapped. Now, Kaepernick will be able to tell his story, in his own way.
“People saw the moment,” Kaepernick said in the release announcing the project. “But they didn’t see the years that made it possible: the questions about who I was; the injustices I could no longer ignore; the voices of those who came before me that I carried into that stadium. That journey, from a Black kid navigating an identity the world didn’t always make space for, to an athlete who realized the game was bigger than football, shaped everything. When I took a knee, it wasn’t a sudden act. It was the result of years of becoming. And what came after taught me the most important truth: this fight has never belonged to one person. It belongs to all of us. We fight for each other. We build with each other. We must fight for justice and equity with the courage and clarity this moment demands. That is how we build a future worth fighting for.”
The publisher calls the book "[e]qual parts memoir and manifesto.” It nevertheless remains to be seen whether the book eventually will be published. In 2021, former NFL quarterback Robert Griffin III announced plans to publish a book called Surviving Washington. By March 2022, the RGIII project was DOA.
If the Kaepernick book proceeds, it will be interesting to see whether and to what extent he does a book tour. Most publishers expect a significant time commitment for interviews and other appearances. Will Kaepernick do that? He has rarely been interviewed since his final NFL game. Possibly, he negotiated with the publisher clear limits on what he’ll be required to do.
However it goes, the current plan is for the Kaepernick book to land on the day after the completion of Week 1 of the 2026 season. The overriding question is whether, 10 years later, there will be a market for his side of a story that has largely faded from the pro football radar screen.
Offseason programs will start getting underway around the NFL next week.
The ten teams that hired new coaches this offseason will be eligible to start working with their players on Monday, April 6. The Ravens are the only team that has set that as their first day of work while the Cardinals, Falcons, Bills, Browns, Raiders, Dolphins, Giants, Steelers and Titans have set Tuesday as their opening day.
All of those teams will also be able to hold a voluntary minicamp later in the spring. Every team is also scheduled to hold a rookie minicamp and a mandatory minicamp over the course of the next few months.
The first two weeks of work for all teams is limited to meetings, strength and conditioning, and physical rehabilitation only. The three-week second phase allows for on-field work, but no full-speed team drills while the third OTA phase allows for team drills, but there is no live contact allowed at any point in the offseason.
Most of the 22 teams with returning coaches will be opening their offseason programs on April 20 or 21. The Broncos have set May 4 as their first day.
As the Cowboys make a change to their defense, they needed to tweak the personnel to fit the adjusted front. That effort has included a trade that sent defensive tackle Osa Odighizuwa to San Francisco.
It wasn’t easy, for the player or his head coach, Brian Schottenheimer.
“Anytime you go through a scheme change, there’s going to be adjustments where you move on from an incredible person, an incredible leader in Osa,” Schottenheimer said this week at the NFL’s annual meeting in Arizona. “That was one of the hard ones. I’m happy to share with you guys: I wept, we both wept on the phone together. It was hard. That’s the nature of the business, and I’m thrilled that he’s going to a place that is a great fit for him.”
This is one of the realities that get overlooked by media who view trades as all-caps, exclamation point-worthy proclamations. For every goofy “TRADE!” tweet we see, there’s a human being who may not be thrilled about the sudden change in his overall work and life circumstances.
Odighizuwa, who has spent five years with the Cowboys, had no reason to want to leave. Especially with no state income taxes in Texas and a whopping 13.3 percent in California.
But that’s one of the realities of playing in the NFL. Absent a no-trade clause, any player can be traded. Whether he wants to be or not.
Every player is a piece in a football machine that will eventually replace each of them with a new part. And “the best interests of the team” always control those decisions.
The best interests of the player are secondary, at best. For most teams, the best interests of the player don’t even matter.
Especially when the team decides it’s ready to move on from the player.
Linebacker Dre Greenlaw’s move to Denver last year did not work out as planned.
Greenlaw signed a three-year deal with the Broncos, but missed the first six games of the season with a quad injury and then was suspended for the eighth because of an altercation with referee Brad Allen. Greenlaw dealt with a hamstring injury near the end of the year and was released in March after playing 10 total games with the AFC West club.
During an appearance on The Set podcast with former NFL player Terron Armstead, Greenlaw shared why he believes things didn’t work out with the Broncos.
“Going from a 4-3 to a 3-4 was a huge difference, especially not being able to practice in the defense,” Greenlaw said. “It’s just kinda like, for me, the fact that I’m not healthy, I don’t feel that twitch or that gear that I felt like I need to have, but, obviously, I’m out here trying to do everything I can to be on the field. It makes it tough when you pay a guy $11 mil and he’s only on the field 50 percent of the time. It made it tough for me. It made it to the point where it kind of makes you not happy. Now I’ve got to slowly come in and take reps from somebody else — the linebackers were playing really, really good at the time, so now I’ve gotta come in I’m taking reps from this guy. And now it’s like, OK, we’re splitting reps, how are we going to do it? One week it’s this, one week it’s that, and it’s like, I’ve never been in that position before for one and, for two, yeah, I just wasn’t happy. That’s really what it boiled down to at the end of the day.”
Greenlaw said he was thankful for the opportunity to play for Sean Payton in Denver and for the way he was accepted by the organization, but added that “everything works out for a reason” and that he’s excited to be back with the 49ers after signing a one-year deal with his first team in the wake of his release.
There’s one way to keep 49ers fans from taking over SoFi Stadium during a “road” game against the Rams.
Move it to Melbourne.
In a joint interview with Packers coach Matt LaFleur, 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan said he knows “for a fact” that the Rams pushed to have their home game against the 49ers be the game that was sent from La La Land to the Land Down Under.
“I’m pretty sure the Rams lobbied for that game,” LaFleur said when the subject of the Australia game came up.
“I know for a fact they did,” Shanahan said. “That’s what’s so bothersome.”
Shanahan joked (we think) that he wants the 49ers’ “home” game in Mexico to have the Rams as the visiting team.
Still, Shanahan understands why the Rams would want to avoid seeing a home game against the 49ers become a home game for the 49ers. (The Chargers were surely thinking about that last year, when a potential Chiefs takeover of SoFi Stadium was moved to Brazil.)
“That would suck to have to do silent cadence and to have our home game at their stadium,” Shanahan said. “So I get their ambitions, but they were rewarded that. So I’m just hoping we can get our request, too. I’d love them to come to Mexico.”
Having both ends of a home-and-home series played on foreign soil would be unprecedented, to say the least. And it would be an interesting tweak, if it ever happens.
For now, we’ll all settle for the interesting reality that the Rams found a way to tweak the 49ers by successfully persuading the NFL to export what would have been another 49ers home game.
