Colin Kaepernick Begs to Be an NFL Slave Again

CLAY: This came out over the weekend. Colin Kaepernick begged, essentially, for a job in the NFL. And I understand people out there are like, “I don’t like Colin Kaepernick. I don’t know why you continue to make him a story. He’s just cashing in off all the name recognition.” It’s true, but I do think, Buck, we have an obligation to call out rampant hypocrisy and fraud, particularly when it’s being propagated by the media as a whole.

So in October Colin Kaepernick… He’s got like eight different documentaries now that he’s doing, even though they can’t ever do an interview. Colin Kaepernick had a documentary up on Netflix. He got paid the millions of dollars for it. The NFL Draft is gonna be at the end of this month. Buck, you know the NFL Draft. Everybody — white, black, Asian, Hispanic, whatever your background is — it’s basically a big job interview.

You go and prove how strong you are, how fast you are. And if you impress NFL teams, they will sign you to multimillion-dollar contract. Well, Colin Kaepernick in his Netflix special said that the NFL Draft and the NFL in general is just modern-day slavery. I can’t believe this actually aired anywhere, much less Netflix paying millions of dollars for it. But we have a cut from that October documentary. I want to play that for you, and I want to listen to this.

KAEPERNICK: What they don’t want you to understand is what’s being established is a power dynamic. Before they put you on the field, teams poke, prod and examine you searching for any defect that might affect your performance. No boundary respected. No dignity left intact.

BUCK: “No dignity left intact”?

CLAY: What the do…? You saw this video, right? They turn NFL players — who are walking around being measured, height, weight, all this stuff, they turn them — into slaves on an auction block. And that is what the visual is as Colin Kaepernick is talking there.

BUCK: It seems there is nothing that is too insane, as long as it’s left-wing for Netflix to put on and to promote and to pay a lot of money for. Let me also note that the establishing a relationship where there are certain expectations. Yeah, I mean, everybody who has ever been employed by any company or any business, you send them a resume, you sit down, they ask you questions. They are judging you.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: In the case of professional sports, you are being judged for a physical endeavor that will make you a multimillionaire celebrity. So it’s a pretty remarkable thing for Colin Kaepernick to get away with this. But, you know, this guy, he has been able to do it. Up until now, it’s been nothing but upside for him financially and professionally.

CLAY: So if you want to argue that the NFL is modern-day slavery, there are certainly a lot of attacks that can be made against that argument. The fact that you’re a multimillionaire, as Buck just pointed out. The fact that it’s voluntary. The fact that everyone — white, black, Asian, Hispanic, whatever your background is — is all treated the exact same. The fact that if you decide you don’t want to do it anymore, you can hold out; you can decide to retire. I don’t remember, Buck, a lot of slaves back in the day be like, “Hey, I’m gonna hold out for more money.” You couldn’t because you were a slave! (laughing) All of this is crazy.

BUCK: If I could run a 4.4 40 and bench press 400 pounds — I’m getting there, but if I could do these things — and was an amazing wide receiver or whatever, yeah, I would let them poke, prod, question, measure, all the things in the hopes of getting a $10 million-a-year contract to be a celebrated national superstar? Yeah, I would do that. So that’s why —

CLAY: I bet there’s a lot of people listening to us right now that regardless what they do for a living, they might be willing — they might be willing — to audition for a job that guarantees them millions of dollars, celebrity, and basically everything that you could want from a consumerist perspective, right? And, oh, by the way, it is voluntary. If you decide you don’t like it, you could walk away. So that’s a bad argument, right? It’s a really bad argument. It can be ridiculed.

But what’s amazing about Colin Kaepernick is, he didn’t even stick to that argument for six months. He was at the University of Michigan over the weekend, and he begged for a chance to come back and play in the NFL. In October, Buck, on Netflix he’s saying, “It’s slavery! This is the equivalent of a slave auction, I can’t believe that anybody would ever play in the NFL. This is a disgrace, it’s derogatory, it is unacceptable.” Six months later he decides, this. Listen to this clip from an interview where he’s begging for a job.

BUCK: Can I…?

CLAY: He wants to be a slave again, Buck. This is crazy.

BUCK: I have a couple questions here. What is…? Clay, do you think that it’s more that he’s honestly so dumb that he believes his bullcrap and doesn’t even understand the contradictions here, or is it that he’s so shameless that he doesn’t care that one day he’s comparing it to a slave auction; the next day he’s saying, “Oh, put me in that circumstance” that he very explicitly compared to a slave auction?

He is desperate to be in the situation that he says is similar to a slave auction. And then also — and this is where I really have to come to you on this — is he even good anymore at this? Like, would he even be a starting daybreak like all of this stuff aside, everyone that I know who watches football — I have family members who are normal Americans, watch football — they say this guy would not be a starting QB.

CLAY: It’s a great question. So I’ll come backwards for that. I’ll answer your first question. I think what happened is Colin Kaepernick became a vessel for people who hate America and hate sports. And I think they used him, because, remember, he rarely does interviews. It’s not like, in my opinion, Kaepernick is sitting down sketching out what his Netflix special documentary is gonna be.

I think they just write it. These left-wing loons, they write it, they put it in front of him, and they say, “Hey, we need you to read this off the teleprompter,” and he allowed himself to be used by them as a vehicle to attack America, to attack American sports. And I do believe there’s some element of people that hate football, because it’s hypermasculine, Buck. It is a hypermasculine sport, and it represents, on some level, “toxic masculinity.”

It’s big, strong dudes beading the crap out of each other, and there is a certain segment of the population that doesn’t like that, right? And, by the way, a lot of them are Democrats. (chuckling) Let’s just be honest, okay? Second part of this: I wish that he would get a job personally because he would be a backup. He would not be a starting quarterback right now, to answer your question about how good he was.

When he began his protest several years ago, he had been beaten out by Blaine Gabbert who is a thoroughly mediocre NFL quarterback as the starter for the San Francisco 49ers. So the reason why he was initially, I believe, beginning his protest is ’cause he was upset over getting benched. That’s my theory. Always has been. He wouldn’t have done this if he were the starting quarterback.

BUCK: So sour grapes from the very beginning.

CLAY: I think there were sour grapes from the very beginning, and I don’t… Remember, when he did this first — and this deserves way more attention. But the day that he started his protest, he met with the media, and he was wearing a Castro shirt, Buck. He said in interviews — with our own Armando Salguero, who works now at OutKick — when he went down to play in Miami, he said that America needed to more like Cuba. This is not a smart guy in terms of understanding the larger geopolitical landscape. He thought that Cuba had less racism and more freedom than we do in the United States.

BUCK: From an outside-of-sports perspective, I can say that it did seem like Kaepernick was almost trying to become a modern version of the Che Guevara symbol.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: As in you put a Che Guevara shirt on and it just tells everybody, “I’m a leftist, I think of myself as some kind of a radical. I’m angry, I’m bitter, and I don’t really know anything,” and I think Kaepernick for a lot of people filled a similar role with, “I’m pro-Kaepernick, which I think America is racist and bad and we don’t talk enough about our racism and I’m angry at the system.”

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: But as we know the left actually loves to control the system and then, you know, destroy freedom and free speech, et cetera. Yeah, Kaepernick felt like, to me, he was becoming the modern Che Guevara T-shirt except now it’s a Kaepernick T-shirt.

CLAY: They want him to be a martyr. So if he comes back to the NFL, in my opinion, Buck, and he is standing on the sideline holding a clipboard, not even a starter in the NFL, it destroys his martyrdom, because then he’s back in the NFL. Already I think his martyrdom in many ways is destroyed by him begging for an opportunity to come back and play in the NFL.

I actually wish that he would get a job. This is my personal opinion. I think he gets destroyed as a symbol of awfulness, of the awfulness of America if he comes back and is a backup in the NFL because then he can’t claim, “Oh, I could have incredible,” but they ended my career,” because that’s what he tries to argue now. And so to me, this is just a further point on the media, and you guys…

Everybody out there listening knows that I’ve said this for a while. But, Buck, can you believe the sports media? I’m like the only guy who says, “Wait a minute. Six months ago, he was saying that the NFL was slavery, and now he’s begging to come back.” Nobody’s writing these opinion columns. Nobody’s pointing it out. Outside of me and OutKick, the company that I still run, there’s nobody even pointing this stuff out.

BUCK: He clearly doesn’t think the NFL is running modern slave auctions. He clearly doesn’t actually believe that.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: So he’s lying to his intended audience with that. There’s no way around it, and it’s a reminder of the quote — I think it’s Mencken — that a demagogue is a person who says things that he knows to be untrue to a room full of people that he believes to be idiots. I think that there’s a lot of clear dishonesty from the way Kaepernick frames all of these issues whether it’s police — oh, yeah, he’s not anti-cop. Didn’t he have pigs on his socks?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Pig cops on his socks?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: I think that’s anti-cop.

CLAY: He said cops are modern-day slave traders and catchers. It’s crazy, right?

BUCK: Yeah, it’s astonishing that he is able to get away with what he is in the press. But look, at some level, he saw the opportunity here and he took it.

CLAY: He exploited it. He exploited it, and he is a fraud, and he deserves to be called out as a fraud. And I think the best way to call out his fraudulence, honestly, is to give him a job — and to your point, Buck, have it become clear that he’s not one of the 32 best quarterbacks in the NFL, that he wasn’t at the time he started his protest, because look whether you love or hate sports…

This is the analogy you quoted the other day — I think it’s true in all facets of life — so long as your talent exceeds your problems, they’ll employ you. And, by the way, you if you sell cars for a living, if you are a plumber, if you’re really great at what you do, you can get away with things that people who aren’t as good at what they do will not get away with.

But as soon as those talents are exceeded by your problems in a capitalistic society, they’ll move on to somebody else. That’s what happened with Colin Kaepernick. His talents were not competed by the problems that he brought to bear, and I’d like to see him come back just ’cause I think that will become self-evident.