Liberals hold rallies across the nation demanding that . . . someone sign Colin Kaepernick?

I doubt they've lost interest in impeaching Trump, but I guess it says something about the American left that they can make other demands driven by pure ideology without any regard for the merit of the idea itself. The left - at least those who know what football is - has become convinced thaat Colin Kaepernick is being "blackballed" by all 32 NFL teams because he refused to stand for the national anthem last year. This has become such an article of faith that they are now getting ready to hold rallies in 15 different cities demanding that someone sign the unemployed quarterback:

Saying Colin Kaepernick has been “ostracized” over his political views, a New York City-based group is voicing its support for the free agent quarterback by organizing rallies around the country Wednesday.

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Kaepernick is still looking for a team after opting out of his contract with the San Francisco 49ers in March. Some believe that teams won’t sign him because he refused to stand for the national anthem last season while he protested racial oppression and police brutality in the United States. The group 100 Suits for 100 Men, which works with parolees who are trying to re-enter the workforce, is planning a show of solidarity at the NFL’s Manhattan headquarters at 5 p.m. Wednesday, ESPN reported. At least 15 rallies in all are planned around the country, including in Brooklyn, Harlem, Chicago, Miami and Washington, D.C. Kevin Livingston, president of 100 Suits for 100 Men, told ESPN he wanted to help Kaepernick after the former 49ers quarterback donated 50 suits to help parolees on job interviews. “He stood up for us,” Livingston said. “It’s only right that he took our issues in our communities and brought it to a national level and sacrificed salary and being ostracized by the NFL. It was only right that we stand up for him.

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Kaepernick's purchase of the suits for the parolees is a perfectly laudable thing, but it's completely irrelevant to the question of whether any NFL team would be wise to sign Kaepernick. And while it may be true that Kaepernick's activism has something to do with his unsigned status, the impact doesn't work in the way his defenders want to think it does. First of all, Colin Kaepernick is not that good a quarterback. Eric Macramalla summed it up nicely in this piece for Forbes:

Kaepernick has been an ineffective quarterback. Over the last two seasons, he is 3-16 as a starter with an underwhelming completion rate of 59.1 percent, which ranks in the bottom five of the league. His QBR this past season was 55.2, which is number 23 in the NFL among quarterbacks. The year before, it stood at 47, 29th in the league. Kaepernick is terrific athlete, who can beat you with his legs. With teams taking the run away, Kaepernick had to beat teams with his arm, something he couldn’t do. When tested, he was wildly inaccurate. “We wanted to do everything we could to make him throw the ball. I mean, he’s an athlete. You can’t take that from him," Cornerback Stephon Gilmore said. "But when it comes to passing the ball, he can’t really throw. We took advantage of that. We wanted to make him beat us with his arm, and he couldn’t do that."

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Colin Kaepernick's protest was not noble. He slandered police officers across this country and he deserves to be held to account for that

The 49ers didn't even have Kaepernick starting at the beginning of the season, going to him only when starter Blaine Gabbert failed and the team needed to make a change just for the sake of a change. It didn't work, which is why the 49ers are going in a totally different direction at quarterback in the coming year. Kaepernick was very impressive in his first couple seasons in the NFL, but the defenses figured out his weaknesses and he wasn't able to adjust. This gets to the connection with his activism: If a player is going to be surrounded by a media circus, which Kaepernick would, teams have to assess whether the player is worth the distraction. It's enough of a pain to have reporters around all the time asking about something that's only peripherally related to football, but when the player who's attracting the attention isn't that good in the first place, why bother dealing with it? Any team can sign a backup quarterback who's as good or better than Kaepernick, and won't bring the media circus with him. And let's not lose sight of this: Kaepernick's protest was not as admirable as the media would have you think it was. In fact, it wasn't admirable at all. It was presented to the public as sticking up for minorities who were helpless against police brutality. But in fact, what Kaepernick did was perpetuate the fiction that white cops are rampaging across the country brutalizing and killing black people just because of their race. I'm willing to believe Kaepernick was a gullible dupe who believed the mainstream media's narrative on this, but the fact remains that he was perpetuating a lie. And if he didn't have an anti-police attitude, then he wouldn't have shown up for practice wearing cops-are-pigs socks like he did. Colin Kaepernick's protest was not noble. He slandered police officers across this country and he deserves to be held to account for that. But that's not the reason he hasn't been signed. He hasn't been signed because he's not very good. He doesn't deserve to be an NFL quarterback. He doesn't deserve to be a media hero either.

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