Colin Kaepernick hasn't actually met with or spoken to an NFL team since late May when he worked out for Seattle, yet the press has run stories on at least three teams (Baltimore, Miami, and Jacksonville) being interested in him, since.
The most passionate of the trio was Baltimore, who's owner came out of the woodwork to suggest that he was open to signing the former 49ers quarterback as a replacement for Joe Flacco, given (A) that fans would be ok with it and (B) given consideration for how Kaepernick "would change people's views." For the several weeks that the story dragged, Kaepernick remained silent and really has remained mum on football matters. Yet, somehow the jury was out on why the Ravens weren't going to pick Kaepernick up.
Ravens great Ray Lewis played no small role in adding baggage to the non-story when in a video he posted to social media, he advised Kaep to keep his politics out of football if he wants to be signed by an NFL team. And that's when Nessa Diab, who watched her boyfriend paying little mind to the media, as he went about continuing with his activist work, flipped Baltimore the bird, in the form of a Django Unchained meme that depicted Bisciotti and Lewis as a slave master and slave tandem.
Diab's post no-doubt caused a stir, but with the post-Charlottesville sprouting of several other National Anthem protests throughout the NFL, and Ezekiel Elliot's domestic abuse scandal overtaking the news cycle, the wind was taken out of the Kaepernick story. During Tuesday's [September 5] episode of Speak For Yourself on FS1, Colin Cowherd imparted his observation that the Kaepernick craze was killed when following the fanfare that came of a Spike Lee plug, the protest scheduled to take place outside of NFL headquarters in Manhattan produced an unimpressive turnout. But Cowherd would prove short-sighted, as his statement came around the same time the kneeling football rebel's name was trending back up in the headlines, courtesy of remarks Ray Lewis made on Showtime's Inside The NFL, to the effect of Nessa being responsible for him not landing the Ravens gig that Kaepernick has yet to confirm he was ever in pursuit of.
By Wednesday morning, Kaepernick's name was again hot off of the presses, with fans tuning in to FS1's Undisputed in anticipation of remarks Shannon Sharpe might have for Jason Whitlock, after he followed up his Kaepernick bashing segment on Speak For Yourself, with a photo of a Kaepernick impersonator that was clearly meant to mock his black militancy.
While Sharpe refrained from delivering a statement on the photo, which he tweeted his disgust about, the anti-Kaepernick mantle was picked up by ESPN's First Take, during which host Stephen A. Smith let his agreement with Lewis, about Nessa's responsibility for Kaepernick's predicament, be known.
"Here's the deal: If I was Steve Bisciotti I wouldn't have signed [sic] Colin Kaepernick either," Smith said, before going off on how turned off he would have been as a White NFL owner who was willing to give the outcasted baller a shot, before coming across such an inflammatory post. "I'm not signing that brotha. Go kick rocks. You can get the hell out of here. I don't give a damn about all that," he said, resting the blame on Kaepernick for his unwillingness to come out and denounce the comparison his girlfriend made.
Source: YouTube
