It took more than five years for quarterback Colin Kaepernick to finally get a tryout with an NFL team. Now that the Raiders have opened the door -- and given that the football world did not stop spinning -- will others give Kaepernick a chance to show what he can do?
One team to watch could be the Vikings. Just minutes before the news broke of Kaepernick’s workout with the Raiders, I was asking Vikings G.M. Kwesi Adofo-Mensah about Kaepernick, given that Adofo-Mensah arrived in the NFL in 2013 with the 49ers, when Kaepernick was the starter.
“I remember we played Green Bay on the road at Green Bay my first year there,” Adofo-Mensah said. “I forget how cold it was, but it’s unbelievably cold. It’s pregame warmups. He comes out for the huddle, and he flips off the jacket, short sleeves. And I remember turning to whoever I was with and I was like, ‘We’re winning this game.’ You talk about leadership and following somebody through something, that’s where that stamped to me who he was and I know that team -- they had a lot of great players on the team that he was around. . . . . If he does want to play, I do hope that it is able to happen for him. I know that that’s not always that easy in this world.”
So would the Vikings, who have Kellen Mond and Sean Mannion behind Kirk Cousins, consider Kaepernick?
“When we do player evaluations, I would say it’s exhaustive,” Adofo-Mensah said. “We consider everything. There is, and again I don’t want to name specific players, but we do an exhaustive approach to it. If you’re not considering all the options out there, especially at a position like that, then you’re probably doing it wrong. We have ongoing conversations all the time. Again, I don’t want to be specific about whether it was him or anybody else, but that’s our job in personnel to be open-minded and creative about solutions and we’ll continue to do so.”
The fact that Kaepernick hasn’t played in five years surely impacts his ability to perform at a high level now. The reality that his five-year absence arises in whole or in part from the NFL’s teams wrongfully colluding against him doesn’t matter at this point.
But it needs to start somewhere. Yesterday, it started with the Raiders. Where will it go from here?
