Slate had one of the hottest takes in the history of sports Thursday morning.
Author Josh Levin ascended to the ranks of the world’s hugest idiots when he argued executives are racists for not signing Colin Kaepernick. His article came in response to a Sports Illustrated article featuring four NFL executives weighing in on why Kaepernick isn’t signed.
Levin really didn’t take it well when one executive said Kaepernick would be best served as a backup to Russell Wilson or Cam Newton.
He responded in part:
Seattle and Carolina are quarterbacked by Russell Wilson and Cam Newton, both of whom are black. So Kaepernick is not being blackballed. It’s just that the only place for him in the NFL is as a backup quarterback on a team with a black starter.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, the idea that Kaepernick isn’t a natural fit for the NFL is based on the outmoded belief that black quarterbacks are necessarily “mobile quarterbacks” and that they need specially engineered offenses to showcase what they do best.
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Thanks to Breer’s story, it’s now clear that some proportion of NFL decision-makers think Kaepernick and the league’s other prominent unsigned black quarterback are exactly the same. There’s only one word that describes that line of thinking, and it’s not meritocracy.
I know a lot about football, and anybody who has watched game tape of the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback in the past two years knows full well he’s not any good.
That anybody could be upset at the suggestion he’s best fit to backup mobile quarterbacks is crazy. Is anybody going to really try and argue Kaepernick is better backing up Tom Brady than he would be if he backed up Russell Wilson? How did we get to this point where facts don’t matter anymore and we decide with our feelings?