LeSean McCoy comments on Colin Kaepernick: Was he right?

LeSean McCoy comments on Colin Kaepernick situation. Is he right or is Kaepernick being blackballed?

LeSean McCoy recently made headlines commenting on the Colin Kaepernick situation. McCoy’s quote hit on most of my feelings on the matter although many disagree with his take. My thoughts are that while some teams could be blackballing him, I have no reason to believe it’s a league wide conspiracy against Kaepernick.

For the most part, teams are only going to sign Kaepernick to be their starter. Most teams will not tolerate having a backup quarterback who makes more headlines than their starter no matter how unfair that is to Kaepernick. On top of that, he plays a different style of football than most quarterbacks requiring his own team to change their offense when he is in the lineup. He will also turn 30 this year so he’s not exactly a spring chicken.

Rather than just assume he is or isn’t being blackballed, I decided to take a look at each quarterback situation in the league in an attempt to see which teams could use Kaepernick’s services in order to help determine if that franchise could be blackballing him. Before I do that though, here is McCoy’s full quote.

Buffalo Bills

According to the Buffalo News, McCoy said, “It’s a lot more than just he’s not on the team because he doesn’t want to stand for the national anthem. That may have something to do with it, but I think also it has a lot to do with his play. I’m sure a lot of teams wouldn’t want him as their starting quarterback. That chaos that comes along with it, it’s a lot. As a team, trying to win and not have a distraction on the team, I just take that as a player – there’s certain players that could be on the team with big distractions, and there’s other players that it’s not good enough or not worth it. I think his situation is not good enough to have him on the team with all the attention that comes along with it.”

McCoy’s comments were not necessarily controversial, but not everyone agrees with him either. In an attempt to see if he is right, let’s take a look at all the quarterback situations in the league to see who could use Kaepernick. In order to make it easier, I will break teams into a few major buckets. Teams with starters who are better than Kaepernick, teams who have young quarterbacks that they are trying to groom so it doesn’t make sense to bring in Kaepernick and eight other teams that didn’t fit into one bucket.

On the following slides I refer to whether some owners lean Republican or Democrat in certain situations. This is not to insinuate that all Republicans are against Kaepernick’s method of protest and all Democrats support it. However, I do think it indicates whether one is more likely to support one side or the other and that’s why I included the information where I thought it was relevant.