Colin Kaepernick has not watched an NFL game in years, and he has no plans to change that.
The former San Francisco 49ers quarterback told NBC News he has switched his weekend allegiance to the college game, in an interview released on September 1, 2026 to promote his forthcoming memoir.
“I’m not gonna support an organization that one, is actively blackballing me, but two, has targeted my brothers who have been protesting as part of this as well,” Kaepernick said. “I watch college football.”
The remarks arrive a decade after he first sat, then knelt, during the pre-game national anthem in 2016 to protest police brutality and racial injustice. He has not played since that season’s finale.
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One meeting, one workout, no offer
Kaepernick led the 49ers to Super Bowl XLVII in the 2012 season. In the years since the protest, only a handful of clubs have made any move toward him.
The Seattle Seahawks were the only team to bring him in for a formal meeting during the 2017 offseason. In November 2019 he held a self-organized workout at Charles Drew High School in Riverdale, Georgia, after a league-arranged session collapsed over disagreements on the liability waiver and media access. Eight club representatives followed him to the new site, but no offer followed.
His most recent tryout came with the Las Vegas Raiders in 2022. That, too, ended without a contract.
No change since the 2019 settlement
Kaepernick and former 49ers teammate Eric Reid settled a collusion lawsuit with the NFL in early 2019, alleging owners had frozen them out for their protests. The financial terms were never disclosed.
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Asked whether the league had shifted since then, Kaepernick was dismissive.
“I don’t think the NFL has materially changed. None of their actions show that,” he told NBC News.
He linked his own exclusion to what he had built on the field before the protest cost him a roster spot.
“Coming on the back of going to a Super Bowl, going to an NFC Championship, setting records, and not a single team would bring me in,” Kaepernick said, as quoted by Fox News.
Memoir due September 15
Kaepernick has spent the intervening years on activism, including his Know Your Rights youth camps and funding independent autopsies in cases involving police killings.
His memoir, “The Perilous Fight,” is scheduled for release on September 15, 2026.
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