It's Obvious the NFL Intended to Sabotage Colin Kaepernick's Workout All Along

Colin Kaepernick's Saturday workout with the NFL drew plenty of suspicion when it was initially announced. It just felt hastily put together and, for lack of a better way to put it, too good to be true.

Things ended up falling apart in various respects Saturday and almost not taking place at all, with the league and Kap's camp pointing fingers at one another. And it now seems obvious that the NFL fully intended in bad faith to sabotage the workout from the very start.

It's a self-evident truth that Kaepernick's relationship with the league has been strained ever since he kneeled during the National Anthem for the first time, and that animus very much continues to apply today.

From the get-go, Kaepernick and his circle were furious with the league over the timing of the event. The fact that it was hosted on a Saturday rather than a Tuesday prevented elite talent evaluators from attending in the first place.

The tension was compounded by the fact that Kaepernick and the league had not spoken in formal terms since February. Open lines of communication were absolutely needed to make this whole thing work. They just weren't there.

Separately, there were problems with both media access and the players Kap would be working with on the practice field. Not only did the league not want media to attend, but they refused to tell him whom the QB would be working with, which clearly seems like an attempt to trip him up and prevent him from showcasing the best version of himself.

The NFL then tried to throw him further off of his game by trying to keep his own crew from filming the workout, meaning that any recording of the action would have to be conducted by the league and the league alone.

No outside media and no private recording meant that the NFL could have pared down the film in order to tell whatever story they thought would best fit their desired narrative.

The NFL even made Kaepernick sign a waiver that held that wouldn't sue if he didn't get signed by a team! In essence, they were asking him to put all of his trust in this hastily-organized workout that had been set up by the very league that's been blackballing him for three years.

Inside of two hours from the scheduled start of the workout, the NFL had yet to make any changes that would benefit Kaepernick, supposedly the whole point of the exercise. Ultimately, the quarterback felt forced to hold his own workout at a separate location, which then led to just six of the original 24 teams attending.

The original workout was doomed from the start. The NFL never intended to give the man a fair shake at making it back into the league. It's a testament to his will that he even managed to hold a workout at all.