Colin Kaepernick, 38, Says He’s Still Waiting for an NFL Team to Call

Read my lips, Colin Kaepernick: The NFL is not a sports movie.

This isn’t some film where a washed-up could-have-been gets a second chance to play for the Austin Armadillos in some made-up pro league and lights it up at age 38. Yes, he’s been working the farm for the last 10 years, ever since one mistake got him tossed out of the league, or maybe he just gave up because his dad was disappointed in him.

But suddenly, Ryan Reynolds starts working out at 5 a.m. in the back 40 acres squatting with bales of hay, he makes the practice squad, and then the Armadillos’ prima donna starter and the unready backup both go down with injuries, and suddenly Deadpool is tossing perfect sluggos to Michael B. Jordan.

“Well, I’ll be darned as a Texas mule,” says the coach, played by Nick Nolte. He’s a tired, grizzled old sort who was going to quit the game and thought it had passed him by, but… well, you’ve seen this movie. Probably dozens of times, starting at age 5 with one of “The Mighty Ducks” movies and culminating with one of those sick days where you think to yourself, “Well, I mean, I’m already paying for the streaming service. What’s the harm of watching ‘Necessary Roughness’ with Scott Bakula again?”

The NFL is none of those movies. The quarterback position is one of the most exigent in any sport at even the college level — and in the NFL, there are 32 starters and a rotating cast of backups who probably don’t belong there but are needed in the case of injury or a quarterback playing like… well, Colin Kaepernick did back in the 2016 NFL season.

Colin Kaepernick would like us to know that it’s the 2026 season and, you know, he’s still here waiting for that call.

From Men’s Health, Wednesday:

For some people, a 4:30 a.m. wakeup is an event. For Colin Kaepernick, the NFL quarterback-turned civil rights advocate, it’s a Tuesday.

Even though Kaepernick is almost a decade removed from his last snap of organized football, he’s still in game shape. He made that clear when he appeared on MH’s Strong Talk podcast, saying he’s “absolutely” ready to play. “We’ll hit the ground running,” he said. “We do all of our training to make sure that we are prepared for that.”

And yes, Kaepernick still wants back in the league. While he no longer watches the NFL, he regularly checks box scores and stat lines, searching for teams that could use a QB. That means early morning workouts five days a week, hitting plyometrics, sprints, skill work and heavyweight lifts. That level of discipline is deeply ingrained in him—he says it started when he was just eight years old.

Right. Except he wasn’t good enough to make it when he was in that kind of shape in an NFL locker room.

For those of you who are young enough — or simply just don’t care enough — to remember how Kaepernick got himself out of the league, you have to remember how he got himself into it. A second-round draft pick out of the University of Nevada in 2011 by the San Francisco 49ers, an injury to starter Alex Smith elevated him to the starting role the next year. He was unpolished but quick and athletic, and by the 2013 season he had the 49ers going to Super Bowl XLVII.

At that point, two things began to happen.

First, Kaepernick’s play began to plateau. Athleticism only gets you so far, you see, and diminishes as you get older. Teams begin to notice other areas where you struggle, and in those, Kaepernick didn’t improve. If his first option wasn’t open, he’d often just leave the pocket without pressure rather than going through progressions to find other open receivers. While not an interception magnet, he also wasn’t terribly accurate, lacking touch and completing below 60 percent of his passes for his career.

His yards per attempt dipped every season of his career except his final one, where it rose marginally from 6.6 to 6.8. Perhaps most importantly, his number of wins as a starter fell each year from the 2013 Super Bowl campaign, from 12 to eight to two to one.

Second, Kaepernick began a sideline, figuratively, as an activist on the sideline, literally. He would sit out and later start kneeling during the national anthem during the 2016 season. He became a distraction with socks showing policemen as pigs and other fun stuff like that. His entire brand became based around getting his inchoate, scattershot political causes heard by whoever would listen.

After one win in 11 starts in 2016, San Francisco turned to Kyle Shanahan as a new head coach. Shanahan, as football fans will tell you, is a guy who believes in having a system quarterback — someone who’s competent, stays in the pocket, can process defenses, goes through his progressions, and throws the ball accurately to an open receiver. No more than that is required, but certainly no less. And in all those departments, Kaepernick was a lot less.

After this, what actually happened remained unclear. Kaepernick claims he was blackballed from the NFL. NFL front offices, meanwhile, made it clear that he was asking a lot of money for effectively being a backup-caliber quarterback who hadn’t gotten better in his areas of concern and was losing the one asset he had — raw athleticism — with each passing year.

He was reportedly in talks to be the Baltimore Ravens’ backup when his girlfriend posted a meme picturing the Ravens’ white owner, Steve Bisciotti, as the slave owner from “Django Unchained” and Ravens legend Ray Lewis as the “house slave” Stephen from the movie. Unsurprisingly, Lewis said this is why he wasn’t signed. Yeah, that’ll happen.

Then came the unrest of 2020 and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell begged and pleaded with any team, literally any team, to sign the guy. He didn’t get signed. If you couldn’t get signed in the Summer of Floyd™, and that was six years ago, guess what, Colin? You weren’t an NFL caliber quarterback. And you aren’t now.

But, for what feels like the millionth time, let’s hear a serious journalistic outlet ask Kaepernick why he should be playing in the league even though he shouldn’t be. To be fair, this time he’s actually promoting a memoir nobody will read, “The Perilous Fight.”

(How hard the people at his publisher must have fought to add “…to Stay Marginally Relevant” to the title, if just for a joke cover to pass around the office.)

Colin?

Kneeler and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, 38, says he is still ready to play in the NFL & is just waiting for a team to call him up.

“I have to do everything that is in my control to make sure that I’m prepared”

The last game Kaepernick played in was on Jan 1, 2017. pic.twitter.com/zQlqDXsGJQ

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 17, 2026

“Oh, yes. I still train five days a week. I’m up at 4:30 in the morning doing my training before I go about the rest of my day. And maybe this goes a little bit back to me being a masochist and the dedication there. But I have to do everything that is in my control to make sure that I’m prepared. And I mean that — whether that’s training, whether that’s making sure I’m making the right calls — I want to make sure that what I have control over, I’m showing up the best way possible,” he says.

As if the question had to be asked, the question is asked: “So are you in game shape right now?”

“Oh, we are ready to go,” Kaepernick said. “Exact same as, like, 2016, before that. Oh yeah — we will step on that field, hit the ground running.”

Who’s “we” — you and Josh Allen? Because between the two of you, I see exactly .75 starting quarterbacks right now. Because that’s what you are: A hindrance to Josh Allen, or Lamar Jackson, or anyone else at the top of their game right now.

He was equally delusional talking to Time about the same question, when asked why he was confident he could be an NFL quarterback right now.

“Because I train for it,” he said. “I rely on my training and preparation for any moment. I’ve grown confident in my ability to continue to stay ready because I’ve shown that the training works, and I’ve shown that I’ve been able to go out and perform.”

Just to be clear, Colin, the point of departure for you having any chance in the league was ruining the Ravens contract over a meme depicting the owner as a slave owner and the team’s greatest-ever player as a slave. You sure showed them!

And here you are, 10 years down the road, begging for one more chance you would have had if you could have just not blown it for yourself.

To be fair, by 2017, the anthem-kneeling virus had spread throughout the league and nobody cared about patient zero. Like the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Kaepernick gets brought up every now and then as the tipping point as to when wokeism infected sports among conservatives, but our level of caring is more of a shrug these days. Oh, you’re still doing the whole activist training to make a comeback thing? Good for you, I suppose.

The point of departure was getting on a bench during the 2017 season, learning how to read defenses and stay in the pocket, improving your touch, working on a second act. It probably could have come if you had worked at it.

But no. You chose to treat life as if it were a formula movie about the washed-up athlete — except, instead of retiring to the farm, you became one of the highest-paid activists in recent memory, Mr. Kaepernick. Even Jesse Jackson, he of the Wall Street shakedown, had to respect your talents in that department. Respect the grift, if not the grind.

Now, in 2026, this is just pathetic.

Forget about there being more than 32 quarterbacks in the NFL more qualified to start than you. There are 32 quarterbacks in college football more qualified to start in the NFL than you are, at this point. Wake up at 4:30 a.m. all you like. Go to bed at 4:30 a.m. and wake up at 4:30 p.m. It doesn’t make a difference anymore.

The movie script will end with your memoir in the remainders bin, and you’ll be doing the same thing you’ve been doing for the past decade: Telling everyone a lie about your athletic competence even you can’t still believe.

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