If you’re the Cincinnati Bengals (or Miami Dolphins), you woke up Monday morning with way more questions than answers after rookie phenom Joe Burrow tore his knee apart on Sunday against the Washington Football Team.
As we reported at The Root, the LSU standout has since been diagnosed with a torn ACL, torn MCL and other structural damage to the knee, and will miss the duration of not only this season but could possibly miss all of next year too. Suffice to say, the future of the Bengals is in serious jeopardy now that the team has a gaping hole at quarterback for the foreseeable future.
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Backup Ryan Finley clearly ain’t the answer either, so if the Bengals want to pull the trigger on a veteran signal-caller with a career 72-30 touchdown-to-interception ratio, playoff experience and a capable passer who can kill opposing defenses with his legs, Colin Kaepernick wants Cincinnati—and any other team—to know that he’s more than qualified and up for the job.
On Monday, the exiled quarterback posted a video to Twitter showing that he’s still putting in work on the field, still very much in shape and is still being denied employment by the NFL for going on 1,363 days and counting.
“1,363 days of being denied employment,” he tweeted. “Still putting in work with @E_Reid35. Still going hard 5 days a week.”
In the immediate aftermath of the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, remember how NFL commissioner Roger Goodell shed white tears about how miserably he failed at addressing the league’s national anthem protests? And how he’s reversed course and now supports players exercising their right to peacefully protest?
“The first thing I’d say is I wish we had listened earlier, Kap, to what you were kneeling about and what you were trying to bring attention to,” Goodell said. “We had invited him in several times to have the conversation, to have the dialogue. I wish we had the benefit of that. We never did.”
What happened to that sentiment? Or reports that teams had a real interest in scooping up Kap prior to the season? Los Angeles Chargers coach Anthony Lynn even went on record to state that he’d be down to bring in Kap for a workout.
“I haven’t spoken with Colin, not sure where he’s at as far in his career, what he wants to do,” Lynn told reporters in June. “But Colin definitely fits the style of quarterback for the system that we’re going to be running. I’m very confident and happy with the three quarterbacks that I have, but you can never have too many people waiting on the runway.”
Apparently, you can, because—SPOILER WARNING—that workout never happened.
If you’re curious as to why that is, it’s probably because whatever “interest” there was in Kap this offseason was complete bullshit and was actually just white guilt, as we reported here at The Root in September:
“At one point along the way, NFL Media reported that teams had contacted “friends and associates” of Kaepernick, and that they would be contacting his agent when they “get to the point where they’re confident enough that they think they can work out a contract.” So either they never got to the point of confidence that they can work out a contract, or it was all just more bullshit.”
I’ve personally given up any hope of seeing Kap on an NFL field ever again. But for his own sake, I hope he not only never gives up on that goal, but is able to prove me wrong sooner than later.
Maybe even as a Cincinnati Bengal.
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