Colin Kaepernick stopped being a quarterback the moment he decided to speak his mind by sitting out the national anthem Friday night.
That is, he stopped being a quarterback for public consumption. He did not stop being a citizen, or a person with opinions and beliefs. He sat through the national anthem before Friday’s Packer-49ers football game, and even though it was merely an exhibition game, it was still a provocative place to take a protest, which is why Colin Kaepernick-as-quarterback is now a thing of the past culturally and socially.
This was a choice he made based on his own political beliefs and statements he has made about the corruptions to American society that have been ramped up during this particularly ugly political cycle.