John Harbaugh hopes to extend Colin Kaepernick’s NFL career in 2017 for a simple reason. He faced Kaepernick’s title, and the Baltimore Ravens coach thought he could help the San Francisco 49ers quarterback get back to the big game.
“He was a nightmare to defend in that Super Bowl,” Harbaugh recalled.
On February 3, 2013, Kaepernick nearly led Harbaugh’s brother, Jim, to a championship in New Orleans. As Kaepernick drove the 49ers down the field at the Superdome and finally fumbled near the goal line, CBS analyst and former Super Bowl MVP Phil Simms said on the broadcast, “Man, I’m really blown away by these few passes.
John Harbaugh wanted everything that player had left on his hands and feet after the 2016 season. His Ravens quarterback, Joe Flacco, was dealing with a back injury ahead of what would be his final year as a full-time starter in Baltimore.
Ten years after Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem in protest of police brutality and the systematic oppression of people of color, Harbaugh recalled that the quarterback’s stand as the league’s most polarizing player was undeterred.
“Honestly, that wasn’t the reason,” the New York Giants’ first-year coach said The athletics. “Yes, there was discussion that there would be a certain percentage of the fan base that wouldn’t appreciate it, but we decided that couldn’t be the reason for our car.”
What were the factors that drove Baltimore’s interest in Kaepernick in the spring and summer of 2017?
“I have an insider’s knowledge of his talent and also who he is from my brother,” Harbaugh said. We talked about it a lot, and I met Cap a lot, I had a lot of conversations with him.
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And yet this compatibility did not lead to compromise.
According to NBC News, Kaepernick wrote in his upcoming memoir, “The Dangerous Struggle,” that Harbaugh was “pushing” to sign the free agent but was ultimately “shut down.”
At the time, ESPN reported that Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti had resisted the idea of signing Kaepernick, with Ravens general manager Ozzie Newsome saying in a statement that “anyone who makes those claims is wrong.”
That night, Kaepernick’s then-girlfriend and now-wife, Nessa Diab, a popular radio host and podcast personality, tweeted a picture of Samuel L. Jackson’s character, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in “Django Unchained,” as Ravens legend Ray Lewis hugs Bisciotti.
“The only thing that was worse was the image that (Diab) tried to paint us as racist individuals,” Lewis said on Showtime’s “Inside the NFL” program next month, and that’s the sad part of the story. … We’ll close the deal to sign him. All we wanted to hear was Colin Kaepernick speaking.
As the Giants prepare for their season opener against Dallas, Harbaugh wasn’t interested in discussing the specifics of why his former team passed on Kaepernick. But at the time, the coach’s public opinion was not the deciding factor in his “no” vote on Kaepernick, and he remained a staunch advocate as the controversy over the quarterback’s tenure erupted amid criticism from President Donald Trump.
In the year In 2017, Harbaugh said he had some spirited and good-natured arguments with Kaepernick about history and politics. He called the quarterback a “great guy” and “a great guy” when very few NFL officials would dare say those words on the record. Harbaugh called Kaepernick “too good a player” to leave the league and predicted he’ll play somewhere “probably for a long time.”
Kaepernick never took another NFL snap.
In his new book, set to be released next week, the quarterback believes he’s still been blackballed. If nothing else, Kaepernick’s numbers suggest his lack of work wasn’t just about on-field performance.
In the year A fan sits behind Colin Kaepernick’s sign during the Ravens’ 2017 home preseason game against Washington. (Rob Carr/Getty Images)
In his two-plus years as a starter under Jim Harbaugh, Kaepernick went 25-14 in the regular season and 4-2 in the playoffs, with a combined 71 passing and rushing touchdowns (including the postseason). He twice shut out Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers, passing and rushing for 769 yards and five touchdowns in those games. Kaepernick was a read option terminal out of the gun formation.
After Jim Harbaugh and offensive coordinator Greg Roman left San Francisco, Kaepernick went 3-16 as a starter in his final two injury-altered seasons. Despite going 1-10 last year, Kaepernick still managed 16 touchdown passes with four interceptions and a 90.7 passer rating, putting him ahead of his big-name peers. He opted for free agency and left San Francisco with a career interception percentage similar to Tom Brady’s (1.8) and tied for second on the NFL’s all-time list behind Rodgers.
Kaepernick talked to the Seattle Seahawks and Ravens. If he was being ostracized by many coaches and executives who objected to his protest tactics or feared fan backlash, or both, John Harbaugh was not one of them. “I believe we should respect each other’s opinions,” Harbaugh said. “Nobody is made to get the market right, that’s for sure… To me, that’s America. That’s the First Amendment.”
Harbaugh had Roman on his Ravens staff as an offensive assistant and planned to use Kaepernick just like his brother did in San Francisco.
Just like Harbaugh will use Lamar Jackson in 2018 and beyond.
“So you can see why the Caps gravitate toward us with our offense,” Harbaugh said. Greg was writing it (in San Francisco), and the cap fit it beautifully. There was plenty of game action in the off-field, and the medium throws were Cap’s forte.
“It blew my mind,” Harbaugh said while watching Kaepernick rush for a record 181 yards in his first playoff game against Green Bay. “I’m excited for my brother. But we had to study and grind, and I thought we did a good job in the Super Bowl against him. But you can only hold it for so long.”
Kaepernick hasn’t been the same juggernaut that Baltimore thought he was, but he’s at least a credible starter or backup on the market when fewer quarterbacks are landing jobs. The Jets signed Josh McCown, 37, who is eight years older than Kaepernick and arrives in New York with an 18-42 career record.
At the same time, Harbaugh was asked if he believed Kaepernick had actually been blackballed by the league. He called the theory “intellectually lazy” and said the situation would be “more skewed” than that and Kaepernick would be a starter again.
But despite Kaepernick’s age, no team has offered him a contract. Last week, Harbaugh was once again asked if his decision to kneel during the pregame anthem to protest societal injustice cost him his job and millions in future earnings.
I think everybody’s doing what they think is in their best interest…and you just have to look at that and ask what they think about it because everybody’s trying to win and everybody’s going to sign anybody to win.
In retrospect, it wasn’t the fault that so many people were running. His options may be limited in this way. Maybe because people weren’t willing to move offensively in that direction… That wasn’t the whole story, just part of it.
Harbaugh had his own vision of how Jackson would perform as he transitioned from Flacco to an electric dual-threat game on his way to two league MVP awards.
Had Baltimore signed Kaepernick, Harbaugh said, “We might still be drafting Lamar to have two guys like that.”
The Giants coach was visibly upset when talking about Kaepernick and the missed opportunity to meet the quarterback who denied him a Super Bowl ring. Harbaugh says he’s a “Capp fan” and still occasionally exchanges texts with the quarterback, who, a decade after the actual protest, is sure to go down in history as one of the NFL’s most influential men.
He should also go down as a good football player.
“The bottom line is your quarterback has to make plays, and Colin Kaepernick has shown he can do that,” Harbaugh said.