During halftime of Michigan’s spring game, there was a familiar face to Wolverines head coach Jim Harbaugh — Colin Kaepernick, who played for Harbaugh in San Francisco from 2011 through 2014, and nearly led the 49ers to a win in Super Bowl XLVII over the Baltimore Ravens at the end of the 2012 season, and nearly led the 49ers back to the Super Bowl in a narrow loss to the eventual champion Seattle Seahawks in the 2013 NFC Championship game.
Of course, Kaepernick has been out of professional football since the end of the 2016 season, most likely because he knelt during the national anthem that season to protest police brutality. Kaepernick accepted a settlement from the NFL in 2019 after filing a collusion grievance against the league for keeping him out of professional football for all the wrong reasons. There was a farcical workout for NFL teams that same year that led to nothing, and Kaepernick has seen at least the appearance of interest from a couple of teams (most notably the Seahawks), but to date, no team has been willing to buck the blacklist. Kaepernick recently worked out with Seattle star receiver Tyler Lockett, and there are NFL players all along who have believed that he deserves an honest opportunity, but despite a constant shortage of high-level quarterbacks at the NFL level, we’re still in the same place.
So, Harbaugh brought his former quarterback to the Michigan campus, where Kaepernick got his bearings, spoke to the team, and participated in a workout that Harbaugh — a former NFL quarterback and one of the most demanding quarterback tutors of his era — ran from the field.
As has been the case whenever Kaepernick has thrown against air over the last few years, he looked accurate and confident on everything from simple outs and hitches to go and seam routes. We already knew that he had the arm to make any throw in that narrow workout vacuum. Now, it’s up to some NFL team to give him a real chance — or not.
Here, courtesy of the Big Ten Network, is the entire throwing session.
