Colin Kaepernick has been a topic of conversation recently with the revelation that Los Angeles Chargers head coach Jim Harbaugh offered Kaepernick a coaching job on his staff.
Dan Le Batard made it known on Thursday that the offer is not enough to make up for the damage that the NFL has already done to Kaepernick.
“At this stage, what can you do? The answer — outside of putting him in a uniform and allowing him to play the position — what you’ve done is simply unforgivable,” Le Batard said, on Thursday’s Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz. “It doesn’t matter whether your commissioner apologizes for it. It doesn’t matter if you give him a coaching job. You ended the prime of this man’s career at the most valuable position. It can’t be forgiven unless he’s allowed a chance back to get at that position. There are no moves that are gonna impress me here that aren’t gonna feel like PR.”
“What you’ve done is simply unforgivable. It doesn’t matter if your commissioner apologizes for it. It doesn’t matter if you give him a coaching job. You ended the prime of this man’s career… It can’t be forgiven.”
Dan Le Batard reacts to Jim Harbaugh offering Colin… pic.twitter.com/mhEGI37lEK
— Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz (@LeBatardShow) August 15, 2024
A more practical issue then came up in the conversation between LeBatard and co-host Amin Elhassan.
Kaepernick is 36. He hasn’t played in the NFL since the final game of the 2016 regular season. The closest he came to returning to the league might have been in 2022 in a workout with the Las Vegas Raiders. Hall of Fame defensive tackle Warren Sapp later said that the workout did not go well.
So, even if Kaepernick was given a chance to compete for a job at quarterback, how likely would he be to win it?
Le Batard’s comments were similar to what Mike Florio and Stephen A. Smith recently said. With that, Le Batard acknowledged that the NFL’s wrong against Kaepernick can’t be realistically righted.
“At this point, it can’t be expected,” he said. “What they’ve done is not correctable. There’s nothing that I can think of, other than inventing a time machine, that the NFL could possibly do so that in my mind I can forget and forgive what they’ve already done to him.”
In a grievance filed against the NFL in October 2017, Kaepernick alleged that the league and its owners colluded against him to keep him out of the NFL in response to the national anthem protests that he began the previous season. A settlement was reached in February 2019.
Harbaugh was head coach of the San Francisco 49ers when Kaepernick was drafted in 2011. In 2012, Kaepernick started (and won) his first NFL game, replacing an injured Alex Smith. While the 49ers were 7-2-1 at that point, Harbaugh made the quarterback change after that game. Kaepernick led the team to a Super Bowl appearance. Harbaugh left the 49ers following the 2014 season, going to Michigan, where he stayed from 2015 through 2023.
Months before the workout with the Raiders, Kaepernick threw the ball around at Michigan’s spring game in 2022.
[Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz on X, Photo Credit (partial): LeBatard Show on YouTube]
