I'm not gonna deny that the NFL forced him out due to his protesting. When his career originally ended, he might not have been a top ten quarterback; but, one could argue that he was a top thirty-two.
It's also undeniable that, at least in the spectacle that is football, the NFL is showboating for Kaepernick's side. I'm just not hearing many people complain anymore when a player is caught stretching during the Anthem. I find it a little annoying that the great American pass time is spending so much time and energy on politics; but, I'm not gonna stop watching. I also wouldn't stop being a Bills fan if we signed Kaepernick as a backup.
In reality, the NFL's PR team would probably love to see Kaepernick back in the NFL. With so many teams needing a quarterback with a weak draft class and not much in the way of free agents, it might be possible for a team to give him a shot.
Still, there are a few reasons why I don't think it'll happen. For one, he hasn't just been out of the league, but out of the sport for five years. That's significant. Michael Vick wasn't the same player after his two year prison sentence. To that point, even if the NFL maintains that Kaepernick did something wrong, they've forgiven players for legitimately heinous crimes. If Kaepernick doesn't get a job, I don't think it'll be because the NFL is holding a grudge.
I think that Kaepernick's behaviour over the last several years has given us a strong indication that he doesn't want to come back so much as he wants to keep his career in activism fresh.
He keeps talking about how much he wants to play. Well, what happened when the AAF made him an offer? He would have easily had a starting job in the league. NFL scouts would have seen him play. John Wolford got a job as a backup QB for the Rams after the league folded and Kaepernick is better than Wolford. That would have been a good path back to the NFL. He turned it down because the AAF wouldn't pay him 200 times more than every player in the league. Hell, he wanted more money than a lot of starting quarterbacks in the NFL. I understand that $100 thousand dollars in a year is nothing to him now; but, if he really wanted to play, that was a good option.
He had a similar talk with the XFL.
At this point, my assumption would be that a couple of teams may invite him for workouts just because there are so many teams in desperate need. The workouts will probably come with an honest evaluation of the situation that Kaepernick is trying for somewhere between a practice squad spot and given an opportunity to compete for a starting role.
I don't think that Kaepernick would take any such offers.
Even if a team offered him something like Mitchell Trubisky deal -- $2.5 million for one year -- to give him some reps during the preseason and give him some chances to play during garbage time or in the event of an injury, he wouldn't take it even though Trubisky is looking like the hottest commodity as a free agent quarterback now.
The reality is that Kaepernick can continue to bolster his position as an activist the more he convinces people that he's being kept out despite being better than some of the guys in the league. If I were a GM, I would only give him a workout if I were the Colts, the Seahawks, or the Texans and I'm desperate to fill that position. Any teams with a instability at the position probably won't want to risk actuations of racism if they set up a controversy between Kaepernick and a white quarterback.
Really, I think that the elephant in the room is that both sides know how this is going to play out. Kaepernick is going to go in expecting to be a starter and be signed to a $20 million a year deal (that's the amount of money he wanted from the AAF). We also know that no NFL team is going to do that. Trubisky is currently a safer bet as a starter and he's probably only going to be making slightly North of $10 million a year at most. I don't think that Kaepernick thinks that he would get that contract. He just understands that he's making a ton of money off of endorsements and that's a job that's less hazardous than football. Also, if he plays and he stinks, that'll hurt the public perception of him.
Kaepernick was wronged a half decade ago. Fortunately for him, that has made him a very rich man in a less dangerous field.