Colin Kaepernick implies that he'd like to be the Seahawks starting QB

A short-ranging interview with I Am Athlete that didn't hit the six-minute mark

I Am Athlete continues to be a strange podcast. Brandon Marshall, a former player turned YouTuber, has done a remarkable job of building the channel and I Am Athlete has attracted nearly 800,000 subscribers in a relatively short amount of time. By comparison, Taylor Lewan and Will Compton’s Bussin’ with the Boys podcast has yet to hit 175k subscribers after posting more than 500 videos; The Pivot podcast, an “offshoot” of I Am Athlete (a nice way of saying that Ryan Clark, Fred Taylor, and Channing Crowder created their own show after feeling that Marshall was too much of a control freak) already has amassed 250,000 subscribers in its first three months.

But I wonder how I Am Athlete’s fans will feel about the show after teasing an interview with Colin Kaepernick and then only delivering a segment that lasted 5 minutes and 45 seconds from the time that Marshall asks him “Do you want to play football?” to Kaepernick’s final message that he’d be willing to be a backup for the right situation.

It’s not surprising that the NFL’s most enigmatic player of the last decade would only allow a podcast 5:45 of his time and a short, defined list of acceptable questions. It’s only surprising that a podcast would agree to give up their platform for six minutes and then call it an interview; we can get 2+ hour interviews with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jack Dorsey in the podcasting format, and even Donald Trump was on THE NELK BOYS PODCAST for over 40 minutes. But despite a friendship between Marshall and Kaepernick, it remains a mystery why this interview failed to hit the 10-minute mark.

Or the six-minute mark.

I’ve done hundreds of interviews with players, entertainers, and notable figures at this point, and one thing that you learn is that agents, managers, and the subjects themselves will often offer the least amount of time that they possibly can. “Hey, (PLAYER) would like to promote this beef jerky brand on Thursday, he has 10 minutes, would you like to interview him?” At first, you say yes, because interviews seem important. But eventually I think every interviewer comes to the point where they start flat out rejecting anything less than 30 minutes; you have to draw a line in the sand somewhere. Marshall is not there yet.

In this narrow-ranging interview, Kaepernick mentions that the only team that has ever given him a workout was Pete Carroll and the Seattle Seahawks in 2017. Kaepernick says that at the time, Pete told him that he was a starter and that the Seahawks already had a starting quarterback. But Kaepernick continues to say that Seattle “doesn’t have a starter right now”—which would be an interesting way to begin his relationship with Geno Smith and Drew Lock, to be honest.

Kaepernick said that he would be willing to go to a team that needs a backup, but that he believes he’d then earn the right to start eventually. That’s the type of competitive spirit you would expect from any legitimate NFL player—however, Kaepernick has yet to even show a willingness to play in an alternative pro league, to take a spot on a practice squad, and his first task would simply be to workout for a team before we’re talking about how he’s going to “win the starting job” for that franchise.

The Seahawks, like any team, I’m sure would rather have Kaepernick spend many months, if not an entire year, holding a clipboard. He hasn’t been involved in the sport of football on the field since 2016. What are we even talking about here until Kaepernick can prove capable of running the scout team, let alone competing against Lock and Smith to be the starter in Seattle?

But many of you have been asking about Kaepernick and wondering why he doesn’t get that opportunity in 2022 that he may not have gotten with the Seahawks in 2017. Today we got almost six minutes of answers. I hope that helps ease some anxiety about Kaepernick’s NFL future.