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By Rickey Hampton, Editor and Founder of TheAfricanAmericanAthlete.com
The Super Bowl is over, but the NFL season never really ends. Every NFL team is hard at work putting together next year’s roster, in hopes they will emerge at the next season’s champions.
Each year in this age of free agency rosters turnover about 30 percent. Teams will add and subtract veteran players, in addition to bringing in new players to the NFL via the draft.
But for me, the No. 1 question I have for the 2018 season will be if Colin Kaepernick finds his way onto a team.
Kaepernick’s story is well documented by now. His choice to kneel during the playing of the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ in the 2016 season started an uproar and culture war that exists to this day.
It is no doubt that his decision to bring attention to issues of justice and equality cost him his job.
Despite the fact Kaepernick is an established quarterback with accomplishments more than most, he was not signed by any of the NFL’s 32 teams last season. For that to happen was a disgrace.
Larry Lee, a veteran of the National Football League, and former V-P of the Detroit Lions, put Kaepernick’s situation into perfect context last season.
“There are 96 jobs (playing quarterback) in the NFL,” Lee said. “Clearly, he is more than qualified to be among that 96. If he isn’t we will all know why.”
Clearly, it’s been a case of NFL teams simply not wanting to sign Kaepernick because of his stance. And as the clock turns from a tumultuous 2017 to 2018, all we can do is wait to see if Kaepernick will get a fair shot or continue to be the victim of a form of the very injustice and inequity that he is protesting, and the NFL perpetrators would deny existing.
