NFL owners conspired to keep former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick out of the league. We know it. The world knows it. Now all Kaepernick has to do is prove that NFL owners did, in fact, work to keep him unemployed.
Actually proving that this happened is completely different from just believing it. Nevertheless, on Tuesday, NFL lawyers got the opportunity to depose Kaepernick, the first witness for the quarterback’s complaint that after he began kneeling to protest the killings of unarmed black men, women and children by police, other teams deemed him toxic and conspired to keep him out of the league.
Yahoo! Sports notes that while no one knows exactly where the line of questioning will fall, it is believed that the NFL will focus on Kaepernick’s position after opting out of his contract with the 49ers in March of 2017.
Here’s the way that Yahoo! Sports explains the presumed focus of Kaepernick’s deposition:
• Whether Kaepernick expected to be signed as a starter once he opted out of his contract with the San Francisco 49ers.
• What salary demands he or his representation had in mind early in free agency.
• Whether Kaepernick’s capacity to play diminished due to past injuries.
• How Kaepernick related to coaches or teammates while playing for the 49ers.
• Whether Kaepernick expressed a willingness to continue his professional football career anywhere outside of the NFL.
• Perhaps most pressing (and obvious), whether Kaepernick has ever discovered or been presented with tangible proof that NFL teams or executives sought to eliminate him from playing in the league again.
It’s unclear if the deposition will note how many turned Kaepernick’s protest against the killings of unarmed blacks during the national anthem into a protest against America. Many Anglo-Saxon Christian Americans threatened to protest against the NFL if all players didn’t stand during the anthem. Hell, Vice President Mike Pence even staged a walkout during an NFL game to draw controversy to the subject.
Yahoo! Sports believes that the league’s lawyers’ plan for discrediting Kaepernick’s collusion claim is to lead him along a path suggesting that he tainted his value as a quarterback and a teammate by calling out police brutality against people of color and by wearing his infamous pigs-in-police-hats socks during 2016 training camp.
The news site notes that the deposition could take hours and doesn’t signify that an end is drawing near, as there are still several league executives, owners and team personnel remaining on the deposition list. Yahoo! Sports notes that this could run into 2019 before a decision is finally reached.
Or team owners could stop being fuckboys and hire Kaepernick, who is easily better than more than half of the league’s backups and several starters.