“No teams wanted to sign a player — even one as talented as Kaepernick — whom they saw as controversial, and, therefore, bad for business.”
Lockhart, who is a CNN political analyst now, gave a behind-the-scenes look at what led to Kaepernick being blackballed by the NFL:
“[F]or many owners it always came back to the same thing,” Lockhart wrote. “Signing Kaepernick, they thought, was bad for business. An executive from one team that considered signing Kaepernick told me the team projected losing 20% of their season ticket holders if they did. That was a business risk no team was willing to take, whether the owner was a Trump supporter or a bleeding-heart liberal (yes, those do exist). As bad of an image problem it presented for the league and the game, no owner was willing to put the business at risk over this issue.”
Given the broader societal circumstances and the fact that the issues for which Kaepernick protested have reached an obvious tipping point, the potential damage to a team’s bottom line should be far less now than it would have been in 2017.
But still no one is rushing to sign him.
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