The NFL continues to not give Colin Kaepernick employment, even after Amnesty International gave him its 2018 Ambassador of Conscience Award. The Seahawks, however, claim that they haven’t ruled out adding him.
“We’re still battling on all fronts, on all guys,” coach Pete Carroll told reporters on Monday, via ESPN.com. “We’re still looking at guys and evaluating. There are still free agents we’re looking at and in that the process just continues. We’ve gone through the information gathering and we have a pretty good feel for where we are. It’s ongoing. We’re not done with that decision at all.”
Two weeks ago, three different reports (from ESPN, Yahoo Sports, and PFT) indicated that a planned workout with Kaepernick was postponed after Kaepernick declined to commit to standing for the national anthem. NFL Media, partially owned by the Seahawks, reported that the Seahawks wanted to gather more information about Kaepernick’s overall plans, including his pending collusion grievance against the league.
Carroll now says that reports regarding the postponement of the workouts were “blown up.”
“I think we’ve been working at this thing for some time now,” Carroll said. “I don’t think that was really as telling as it came across. We’re really aware of him and he’s a fine football player and there may be a place for him. We don’t know that yet.”
If the reports were blown up or skewed or whatever, they weren’t embellished or exaggerated by the three different media companies that published the reports. Thus, the Seahawks if anything should be frustrated by the perception that the report that the team pulled the plug over the anthem issue ultimately traces to Kaepernick -- especially since he never disavowed the reports.
Here’s the truth as it relates to Seattle’s interest, or any other team’s potential interest in Kaepernick at this point. When a former, current, or prospective employee is pursuing litigation of any kind against a company, everything done with respect to the employee has a strategic component aimed at successfully defending against the claim. Seattle’s interest likely has been dangled as an opening for a potential settlement of Kaepernick’s grievance, or possibly as a way to claim that he isn’t really serious about mitigating his damages by aggressively pursuing any and all NFL options available to him.