Nearly a decade after his last NFL game, former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick still has his sights set on a comeback.
His girlfriend, Nessa Diab, told TMZ Sports that Kaepernick is training “all day, every day” in hopes of convincing a team to give him another shot. The former quarterback hasn’t played in the NFL since 2017 and has long maintained he was blacklisted for taking a knee during the national anthem in protest of racial injustice.
“Nothing has changed! Nothing!” Diab said of Kaepernick’s dreams of returning to the NFL, adding that “it’s all up to the teams if they’ll let him play.”
Kaepernick, 37, hasn’t worked out with an NFL team since the Las Vegas Raiders in 2022, but the team chose not to sign him. In 2020, he was invited to a Seattle Seahawks workout, though it didn’t lead to a contract.
He even took matters into his own hands by organizing a workout at a high school in Atlanta, drawing scouts from seven NFL teams to watch him throw. The closest Kaepernick has come to an NFL return was last year when he was reportedly offered a coaching position with the Los Angeles Chargers under his former head coach, Jim Harbaugh, but he ultimately turned it down.
Before becoming a nationwide spectacle over his national anthem protest, Kaepernick was a standout NFL quarterback who led the San Francisco 49ers to the 2014 Super Bowl, where they narrowly lost to the Baltimore Ravens. In 2023, he told Sports Illustrated that people “may have forgotten what I was capable of doing on the field.” He expressed his hopes of getting signed to a team for his athletic ability and “not the political bias that you have.”
Kaepernick’s most recent link to the NFL came when Harbaugh claimed he had discussed a possible coaching role with him ahead of the 2024 season. However, Kaepernick denied that the conversation ever took place during an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
“I found out the same way everyone else did — on social media,” Kaepernick said, citing his lack of interest in coaching. “I was like, ‘Oh, I got a coaching offer.’ No, no coaching offer.”
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