The NFL season is almost upon us, and Colin Kaepernick is still out of work. Guess whose fault this is? According to the media, it’s your fault and mine for being unflinching, unyielding bigots.

Kaepernick’s employment status, or lack there of, swirled through the news yet again when quarterbacks Joe Flacco of the Baltimore Ravens and Ryan Tannehill of the Miami Dolphins went down with injuries during training camp. As soon as news of those injuries became public, sports journalists created mini on-air vigils, trying to lobby and pressure teams to sign Kaepernick. When that didn’t happen, they made it clear that the awful boogeyman behind this travesty is America’s attitudes on race and NFL owners for being old white men.

The leftists at ESPN have become particularly deranged by Kaepernick’s unemployment. After Kaepernick didn’t get the gig in Baltimore when Flacco hurt himself lifting weights, ESPN’s Jemele Hill embarrassed anyone left with ethics in the Disney Corporation by comparing today’s modern-day police officers to slave patrols in defense of Kaepernick. This bit of stupidity happened after a Tweet by Kaepernick where he in fact compared police officers to slave patrols. Jemele Hill was quick to agree, saying his comment was “Inflammatory, but historically accurate.”

Next up was Hill’s cohort Dan LeBatard who, after the Dolphins signed Jay Cutler and not Kaepernick after Tannehill’s season-ending injury, opined one of the reasons Kaepernick was still unemployed was the color of his skin, and then intimated that the election of Donald Trump in November was an act of racism.

It would be easy to dismiss this as just ESPN being ESPN, but it seems the majority of sports journalists (a term to be used lightly) when giving a personal opinion on Kaepernick agree on one thing. America’s institutional racism is to blame for Kapernick’s still being on the sidelines.

What all of them miss, of course, is that the person responsible for Colin Kaepernick’s predicament is Colin Kaepernick. Let’s imagine for a moment that Kaepernick were white. What do you think would be the response if a white NFL quarterback did the following?

• Refused to stand for the National Anthem for an entire season.
• On multiple occasions intimated or stated that police were pigs and bigoted.
• Preached the gospel of how wonderful Fidel Castro was, a man who murdered and imprisoned those who disagreed with him, suppressed freedom at every turn and sent the Cuban economy and standard of living back 50 years.
• Had been absolutely awful as a quarterback over the last two seasons.

With this set of circumstances, a Caucasian, Hispanic, or Asian quarterback would also be in the same predicament as Kaepernick, unemployed. The question isn’t why hasn’t Kaepernick been signed by a team yet, the question is why would anyone even consider him?

We hear and see a lot of news stories that the NFL is blackballing Kaepernick. Looking at Kaepernick’s own disgraceful actions, it is more than plausible that each NFL team on its own came to the same conclusion independently — they don’t want him for good reasons. But if history proves me wrong and there was a colluded effort by NFL owners not to allow him to play, so what?

After all, isn’t the left big on banning people that they feel have done something socially untenable? Good luck in owning a bakery where you don’t make same sex wedding cakes out of personal religious considerations. The left will send a mob to your little store in a heartbeat, but somehow the left doesn’t like it when their modus operandi is applied to their own.

How out of touch are sports journalists on how your typical football fans feel about Kaepernick? At the Ravens’ first preseason game a planned protest took place outside the stadium where protesters took a knee (literally). This protest only drummed up about 15 people. So much fuss in the media over someone worth so little thought.

But if the NFL believes it is in for smoother sailing without Kaepernick this season, it may have some stormy seas ahead. Marshawn Lynch, after a self-imposed exile, is back in the NFL with the Oakland Raiders. If you missed it, he sat through the National Anthem at the Raiders’ first preseason game. And other players on other teams are beginning to do the same. Stay tuned. Maybe ESPN will hire Kaepernick to roam NFL sidelines during pregames to report on who’ll be sitting out the playing of the anthem or who leads the league in taking a Kaepernick knee. Anything to keep Kaepernick gainfully employed, after all.