Colin Kaepernick Is Ready to Return to the NFL, Claims He’s Better Than a ‘Good Amount’ of Current QBs

Nearly a decade after playing his last pro football game, Colin Kaepernick is still ready to return to the field.

“We got the cleats by the door,” the former quarterback, 38, told Us Weekly in an interview published on Monday, September 14. “We’ll be out the door.”

He also “wholeheartedly” agreed that some teams could use his talents, and was asked how many of the 32 current QBs he could best.

“It’s tough to say because I haven’t been watching the games, but I will check the stat lines to see where quarterbacks are at,” Kaepernick responded. “Based upon that, I think there’s a good amount.”

His entire NFL career, which began in 2011, was played with the San Francisco 49ers. At the start of the 2016 season, Kaepernick took a knee during the National Anthem to protest police brutality and racial inequality. Kneeling, which he said was meant to signify respect for members of the military while continuing his original protest, was done with the blessing of former Army Green Beret Nate Boyer, per The New York Times. While his teammates and several other NFL players also began kneeling in protest, the move sparked major backlash.

When the 49ers told him they planned to release him after that season, Kaepernick opted out of his contract, but found no other team willing to hire him. He then sued the NFL, accusing the owners of colluding to keep him from playing. The parties reached a confidential settlement in 2019, per the Times.

Kaepernick isn’t necessarily done with the league.

“I think closure would be being back on the field and given the opportunity to continue my career unimpeded by their efforts,” he told Us. “I mean, outside of that, I don’t think there’s ever really closure there when your career is taken away. But what I will also say is, my mentality around it is, ‘I can’t control their actions, but I can control mine.’ I can control waking up and training every day. I can control the impact and approach that I have with the work that I’m doing outside of the NFL and from 2016 moving forward.”

The activist, whose memoir The Perilous Fight, is due out on September 15, said he would continue to fight injustice.

“So while there may not be closure in that way, I also look at it from a perspective of, ‘I’m still going to keep moving forward and keep building and keep looking at ways that I can help advance society as we’re going,'” he concluded. “And I think for me, having that focus allows me to continue to move forward in ways that I think may be more difficult if I didn’t have that focus.”