Colin Kaepernick gets a surprise offer to play quarterback.

Colin Kaepernick gets a surprise offer to play quarterback

Colin Kaepernick, a former NFL quarterback, has been the subject of a lot of talk lately. This got worse when rapper J. Cole showed the letter Kaepernick wrote to the general manager of the New York Jets, Joe Douglas, in which Kaepernick asked Douglas to put him on the practice squad.

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In the end, though, the Jets didn’t take Kaepernick up on that offer. Instead, they chose to sign Trevor Siemian. But Kaepernick is now being looked at by another professional team. That would be the B.C. Lions of the Canadian Football League. TSN’s Farhan Lalji reported Thursday that the Lions have added Kaepernick to their list of players to negotiate with:

Noting that adding a person to a discussion list doesn’t always mean anything is important. The bargaining list is a strange thing about the CFL. It is a list where each of the nine teams can add up to 45 people. That doesn’t mean that those guys have any deal with the team or will ever play in a CFL game, and most don’t. It just means that if the player wants to play in the CFL, they have to sign with the team that has them neg-listed or convince that team to trade their rights to a different desired location. (Players on that list can also exercise their own 10-day rule, which forces the CFL team to either make them an offer or let their rights go, as we saw with Terrell Owens in 2018.)

And Kaepernick has been on the CFL’s list of people to talk to before, but no deal was made. Even though Kaepernick’s lawyer said he wasn’t interested in the CFL at the time, he was on the Hamilton Tiger-Cats’ list of players to negotiate with from March to September 2017. They then dropped him. Later in September, Kaepernick joined the Montreal Alouettes. They tried to contact his lawyer, but didn’t hear back. In August 2020, Justin Dunk of 3 Down Nation said that the Ticats were again interested in negotiating with Kaepernick. Reporters can sometimes get a few names from negotiation lists, but in the last few years, the CFL has made teams reveal 10 names from their lists every September and December. Kaepernick was not one of the names revealed last December or this month.

But there are times when CFL negotiation lists pay off, and sometimes with bigger names than you might expect. Johnny Manziel tried out for the Tiger-Cats in 2017, signed with them in 2018 (after a special plan from the league commissioner because of Manziel’s history of domestic violence), played briefly as a backup there, forced a trade to the Alouettes, started for them briefly (with some ups and downs), and then was released by the team and banned from the league in February 2 after breaking the terms of his contract.

But other big names have joined the CFL without as much fuss. Trent Richardson, a former NFL first-round pick with Alabama and Indianapolis, and Chad Kelly, a former Ole Miss star who led the Toronto Argonauts to the best record in the league after replacing 2022 CFL passing leader McLeod Bethel-Thompson, who left for the USFL this offseason, are among these players. Some big-name players, like Chad Johnson in 2014, have come in with some drama but still done good work.

We don’t know if Kaepernick would want this or not. In 2017 and 2020, it was clear that he didn’t. And that’s reasonable. The CFL is hard to get used to, and most Americans don’t know much about it, even though it has a deal with CBS Sports Network and streams the rest of its games for free. This is especially true for quarterbacks because the rules are different from American football. There are 12 players on each team, three downs, and the field is longer and bigger. Many great CFL quarterbacks, like Kelly, had to start out as backups.

That might not be what Kaepernick wants to happen. And he’d have to play a smaller role (at least at first) in B.C., where Vernon Adams Jr. has been doing well (after Nathan Rourke left in the offseason for the NFL, where he played well for the Jacksonville Jaguars in the preseason, was released, and then signed back to their practice squad) and has led the Lions to a 10-4 record (tied for first in the West) so far.

But because Kaepernick is so mobile, he has been talked about for a long time as a quarterback who could do well in the CFL. And that league has a long history of taking in skilled players that the NFL didn’t want for one reason or another. And since Kaepernick is now 35 (and will be 36 in November) and NFL teams still don’t seem too interested in him, and since his last NFL game was in 2016, the CFL may be a better option for him now than it was before.