Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti made it abundantly clear that his organization is considering non-football factors in connection with the possible addition of quarterback
Colin Kaepernick. It’s the closest any NFL executive has come to admitting that Kaepernick’s status is influenced by concerns regarding public and fan reaction to signing him.
The issue arose at a fan forum on Sunday, when someone asked Bisciotti whether he’s concerned that adding Kaepernick would hurt the team’s “brand.”
“We’ve
very sensitive to it and we’re monitoring it, and we’re still, as [General Manager] Ozzie [Newsome] said, scrimmaging it,” Bisciotti said, via the team’s official website. “So pray for us.”
Bisciotti also addressed the inherent presumption within the question that signing someone who protested during the national anthem throughout 2016 would harm the team’s image.
“Quantify hurting the brand,” Bisciotti said. “I know that we’re going to upset some people, and I know that we’re going to make people happy that we stood up for somebody that has the right to do what he did. Non-violent protesting is something that we have all embraced. I don’t like the way he did it. Personally, I kind of liked it a lot when he went from sitting to kneeling. I don’t know, I’m Catholic, we spend a lot of time kneeling.”
Of course, with Kaepernick committed to standing for the anthem in 2017, the question isn’t whether having a guy who kneels for the anthem will harm the team’s brand. It’s whether having a guy who previously kneeled for the anthem will harm the team’s brand. In a league where dog fighters and drunk drivers and domestic abusers and alleged killers get second chances all the time, the guy who did nothing wrong can’t get a second chance that he shouldn’t need.