I love to hear regular people talk about how pro athletes should be fired for doing dumb things. The common phase I hear when an athlete screws up is, “if I did that in my job, I would get fired immediately, so player X should be dismissed also.”
This logic does not fly with me even though I do hate to see pro athletes get away with some egregious behaviors. The fact is, pro athletes are not like the average working guy who makes widgets or pushes papers for widget makers. Pro athletes have a skill set that is uncommon and not easily replaced. Those widget workers can be fired and a replacement found in about 23 seconds on average. Players like Colin Kaepernick, who had a brush with the law recently, cannot be replaced so quickly.
NFL QBs are very hard to find. There are 32 NFL teams and the number of high level quarterbacks is about 12, with another 8 very good ones. Do the math and it is not hard to see why pro athletes, especially NFL QBs, get away with all kinds of misbehavior. For the average Joe that complains about the unfairness of all this, just go out and make yourself as valuable in your market place as a QB is in his market place. Do that and you will soon be able to get away with almost anything, while keeping your gig.
Colin Kaepernick’s recent incident involving a woman being taken to the hospital from his apartment, is a murky situation. No charges have been filed but it is a bad look for the quarterback of the 49ers. The face of an NFL franchise cannot have something like this be all over the news. Guilty of a crime or not, Kaepernick has to stay away from anything that could lead to police involvement, weed use (allegedly), and hospitalized females getting a rape test done. San Francisco has put their contract talks with their offensive leader on pause due to all this noise around the young player. That may be a move to show Kaepernick how serious the organization is about situations like this. But it could also just be a ploy to get a better deal out of the quarterback, who reportedly will seek about 20 million a year in a new deal. If anyone thinks that the Niners are really going to break off talks completely and let Kaepernick get away and go to another team that would be very far-fetched. This case would have to get very ugly before that happened. There is no way an NFL team could let a player as good as Kaepernick get away as a free agent, unless he was convicted of a very serious crime.
Replacing an NFL quarterback is like finding a great race horse. You cannot just go out to a pasture and pick a good looking animal, then throw a saddle on it. It is a slow process to get a great QB or a very lucky process in some cases like a Tom Brady situation. The 49ers will indeed extend Kaepernick’s contract and it will be a good deal for the guy. He does need to watch himself in the future however. Pro quarterbacks can get away with quite a bit but there is a line that does not need to be approached. Mix in a bad season on the field and some off the field bone head mistakes and a team will cast a player out. It is all about value in the market place.
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