Alex Smith speaks on former NFL teammate Colin Kaepernick. ‘The country wasn’t ready’
It’s something that isn’t fathomable to some in the sports industry: Why has it been over 1,460 days since former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick last took the field in a National Football League game?
Especially to Washington quarterback Alex Smith, a former teammate of Kaepernick.
“It still doesn’t make sense,” Smith said on The Ringer’s podcast “10 Questions With Kyle Brandt.” “The run that he went on the last year we were together when we went to the Super Bowl ... [it] was so crazy to watch. Truly one of the historic runs in football to see what he was doing. He still holds records from that time period. Really special. It’s crazy that fast forward to only a couple of years after that he’s out of the league. You couldn’t even grasp it. You couldn’t understand it.”
Kaepernick’s star was on the rise after getting his first 49ers start in the middle of the 2012 season, leading the team to a 5-2 record in his seven regular-season starts and then a spot in Super Bowl XLVII.
Fast forward to Aug. 26, 2016, when a reporter captured a photo of Kaepernick sitting on the bench during a preseason game against the Green Bay Packers as his teammates stood for the national anthem, McClatchy News reported.
“I am not going to stand up and show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Kaepernick said at the time. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
In September 2016, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine for a story on patriotism.
And on Jan. 1, 2017, Kaepernick took the field for the last time in the NFL.
“I think it’s so tragic looking at it. I think he was ahead of his time, certainly, trying to call out social injustice, especially around police reform,” Smith said of Kaepernick. “The country wasn’t ready. Nobody was ready for it, and he’s sitting there trying to tell everybody through a completely peaceful manner about some of the things going on in this country that had been going on for a long time.
“To see the backlash that happened, yeah, it hurts. The country wasn’t ready for it and he suffered the repercussions with his job and then how brave he was. He lost his livelihood.”
In October 2017, Kaepernick filed a grievance against the NFL and accused owners of keeping him out of the league via collusion, ABC News reported. But it did nothing in terms of putting him back on the field.
This story was originally published February 19, 2021 at 1:09 PM with the headline "Alex Smith speaks on former NFL teammate Colin Kaepernick. ‘The country wasn’t ready’."