Ten Years Later We're Still Talking About Colin Kaepernick – He Conquered the NFL | Ep 1231

**Jason Whitlock** (0:00)
10 years later, Colin Kaepernick just told the country he won. He sat with NBC News and said, he no longer watches the NFL because the league is actively blackballing him and the men who knelt with him. He watches college football now. That is not a quarterback begging for a clipboard. That is a man who knows the institution already belongs to him.
A three-minute kneel during the national anthem has been stretched into game long signs in every NFL stadium. End racism. Stop hate. For the 2026 season, the seventh straight year of the stencil, the league will paint those slogans in the grass and on the helmets again.
Marks his liturgy as field decoration. Kaep never needed another snap. He needed the building to preach after he left the huddle.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:56)
This is that fire. Grab your...

**Jason Whitlock** (1:00)
He named three cases as the fuse. Mario Woods, December 2015, shot 20 times by the San Francisco police.
The local killing, Kaep said, shifted his perspective. Alton Sterling, July 2016, Baton Rouge, at Coast Range. Philando Castile, July 2016, Minnesota, a traffic stop, live streamed for the world. From those three names, he built a moral franchise the league could not put down. There is the NFL before the NEO and the NFL after the NEO.
Before, football sold competition, violence and Sunday ritual. After, it sold atonement. The anthem became a stage. The end zone became a billboard. The front office became a seminary for a politics that has nothing to do with blocking and tackling. The league did not convert because it found a firmer foundation. It converted because it found a cheaper god, a public righteousness that cost nothing on third down and everything in the soul of the game. Football used to demand that men earn his place. This new gospel demands that the league confess on his behalf. The Rooney Rule was already on the books in 2003, 13 years before Kaepernick kneeled. Kaep did not invent the NFL's identity machinery. He put the league's social justice warring on steroids. He worked the body. George Floyd's death delivered the knockout punch. Kaepernick and Floyd were the Batman and Robin transforming the NFL.
One prepared the culture, the other finished the conversion. Look at the building now. Eleven teams field male cheerleaders. Gender became another uniform. Identity became another helmet sticker. The league, color codes, and gender codes is refereeing and coaching pipelines. Diversity scorecards sit in front office as if they were defensive schemes. The NFL did not stumble into this. It was discipled into it. Kaep watches college football and accuses the NFL of blackballing him. He can afford the sneer. He is one of America's greatest Trojan horses. He never recaptured the quarterback job. He captured the institution. The NFL thought it was containing a protest. It was being converted by one. What began as a sideline gesture now owns the grass, the hiring and the moral vocabulary of Sunday. The loudest league in the country is still kneeling. The quietest quarterback already cashed the cultural check. Ten years later, we are still talking about Colin Kaepernick. That is not a failed activist. That is a cultural victory that never required a comeback, a tryout or another down.
He sacrificed a fading quarterback career and got a league to carry his flag. When you let a protest write your liturgy, you do not get the protester back. You get the church he built inside your walls.
That is my firestarter, Steve Kim, Delano Squires and Dre Baldwin join me for the discussion.
Steve Kim, I'm going to let you fire first.
Did Kaepernick win here? Is he the ultimate winner of all of his protesting?

**Steve Kim** (4:42)
I can't believe this.
Were you one of the judges for Whitaker Chavez that called that a draw?
Really? I hope you never become a professional boxing judge. I think he completely lost and capitulated. To me, I believe Kaepernick is kind of like that crazy crack addict, homeless guy that you saw on the street that maybe years ago, you tried to help or paid attention to. And then as time goes on, you're thinking there's no helping this guy. And now as you pass him, instead of giving him a couple of dollars, you just try not to make any eye contact and hope that he doesn't like slash you up and you walk fast as possible away from him and he's out of your life. I mean, this is what he does. Every year, he tries to get his Andy Warhol, his remaining 15 minutes, but he is a bit of a nuisance, right? But I think it's to a point that the general populace of America, they're not even irritated by him anymore. I think they are mildly bemused or if not amused by this whole grift that he's trying to keep going. Then guess what? We move on with our lives.