During Friday’s PFT Live draft, Washington came up as one of the teams that should consider signing Colin Kaepernick. You’ll have to watch the video to hear the reasoning.
Washington, though, has never discussed the former 49ers quarterback.
Doug Williams, the first black quarterback to win a Super Bowl who now serves as Washington’s vice president for player development, explained it’s because of the city the team represents.
“I think what happened here, we’re in a heavily, heavily military area,” Williams said on The Dan Patrick Show on Friday, via NBCSportsWashington.com. “And I think the guy that sits on Pennsylvania Avenue — 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — made such a big stink of it, the fans in this area . . . might’ve been a tough situation for both the team and [Kaepernick].”
Williams, of course, was talking about President Donald Trump. In 2017, while talking about players who take a knee for the national anthem, the president called for NFL owners to “get that son of a b—- off the field.”
“You don’t want to bring people into a situation where nobody is going to be happy,” Williams said. “I think that’s probably what happened, why he didn’t come up during that time.”
Kaepernick has not played since 2016, parting ways with the 49ers in the 2017 offseason. The NFL has backballed him for being the first player to protest social injustice and police brutality during the national anthem.
Kaepernick has not gotten anything more than a visit to the Seahawks in 2017.
But the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, and the protests that have followed, have given NFL players a bigger voice. And many are using that voice to call for Kaepernick to get a second chance.
Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said Thursday a team interested in Kaepernick had called him.
Patrick asked Williams about the Chiefs as a potential landing spot for Kaepernick since Andy Reid gave Michael Vick a job when the quarterback got out of prison.
“[Reid] told me — he was as real as real can get — he had two sons, and they had gotten in a little trouble,” Williams said. “He said, ‘Hey, my son got in trouble.’ He said, ‘Everybody deserves a second chance.’ And you know what? That was good enough for me. And I think if anybody could stomach that and handle Kaepernick and mentor him and understand where he’s coming from, it would be Andy Reid.”