Alex Smith on Colin Kaepernick Not in NFL: ‘It Still Doesn’t Make Sense’

Alex Smith knows Colin Kaepernick very well and doesn’t understand why he’s still not with an NFL team. The Washington Football Team quarterback appeared on the podcast 10 Questions with Kyle Brandt and talked about Kaepernick being a free agent, which has been the case for him since the end of the 2016 season.

“It still doesn’t make sense,” Smith said, as reported by CBS Sports. “The run that he went on the last year we were together when we went to the Super Bowl…[it] was so crazy to watch. Truly one of the historic runs in football to see what he was doing. He still holds records from that time period. Really special. It’s crazy that fast forward to only a couple of years after that he’s out of the league. You couldn’t even grasp it. You couldn’t understand it.”

Smith is referring to when he and Kaepernick were on the San Francisco 49ers in 2012. Both players started games for the team that season, but Kaepernick was able to take control the second half of the year and lead the 49ers to a Super Bowl appearance where they lost to the Baltimore Ravens. After the 2012 season, Smith was traded to the Kansas City Chiefs and Kapernick starter for the next four years.

In 2016, Kaepernick began to protest during the national anthem. He first started by sitting during the anthem but then took a knee after talking to his former teammate and veteran Nate Boyer. The protest led to major debate nationwide, and when Kaepernick opted out of his contract in 2017, he has been a free agent since. Kaepernick filed a lawsuit against the NFL, claiming that owners colluded against him and his former teammate Eric Reid to not signing them onto rosters. The case was settled in February 2019.

“I think it’s so tragic looking at it. I think he was ahead of his time, certainly, trying to call out social injustice, especially around police reform,” Smith said of Kaepernick. “The country wasn’t ready. Nobody was ready for it, and he’s sitting there trying to tell everybody through a completely peaceful manner about some of the things going on in this country that had been going on for a long time.”