New Seahawks RB Carlos Hyde: NFL can show it cares about race ‘by signing Kaep back’
Carlos Hyde knows how the NFL can show it is genuine when stating, as commissioner Roger Goodell did this past weekend, “black lives matter.”
Get his former 49ers teammate Colin Kaepernick back in the league.
“I think the NFL could start by signing Kaep back,” Hyde said Monday while on an online Zoom call as the newest Seahawks running back.
“I think if they sign Kaep back, that would really show that they are trying to move in a different direction.
“Kaep was making a statement four years ago about what’s going on in today’s world. And the NFL didn’t bother to listen to him then.
“So I think they should start by doing that.”
Goodell admitted Friday, in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd under the knee of a police officer in Minneapolis, that the NFL was “wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest.”
Many players see that as an encouraging sign toward the league improving relations with its protesting players, 70 percent of whom are black.
Others feel Goodell’s and the league’s words are hollow without action toward change—such as getting Kaepernick a job back in the NFL.
Kaepernick and Hyde were in the same backfield in San Francisco from 2014-16. The former Super Bowl quarterback began sitting then taking a knee during the national anthem at games in the summer of 2016 to protest racial inequality and police brutality in our country.
That was the last season Kaepernick played in the NFL. He’s been out of the league since, effectively blackballed while white team owners have signed journeyman quarterbacks—most infamously Mike Glennon (career record: 6-16).
The Seahawks came closer than anyone to signing Kaepernick, in the spring of 2017 months after he and the 49ers decided to part ways and end his contract amid the national controversy about his protesting. Seattle was the only team to have Kaepernick in for a free-agent visit.
But ultimately the Seahawks became like every other team. They left Kaepernick unemployed.
At the time coach Pete Carroll made the curious comment Kaepernick was a starting quarterback in the NFL and the Seahawks already had one, Russell Wilson.
That was true before they asked Kaepernick to visit in 2017.
There’s been speculation Kaepernick wants a starting job or starting money to return to the league.
The fact remains four teams—Chicago, Arizona, the Raiders and Jacksonville (the Jaguars for 2020) have signed Glennon for a total of $26.5 million cash to him in the years Kaepernick has been kept out of the league.
Last week, Carroll was on his “Flying Coach” podcast with Steve Kerr, coach of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors. On it, Carroll said of Kaepernick: “I think that there was a moment in time that a young man captured. He took a stand on something, figuratively took a knee, but he stood up for something he believed in.
“And what an extraordinary moment it was that he was willing to take.”
But Carroll and the Seahawks weren’t willing to bring Kaepernick and his stand onto their team.
That begs a question: did the Seahawks miss an opportunity to further Kaepernick’s—and thus blacks’ and the country’s—cause by not signing him in 2017, and again when they considered it before the 2018 season?
Should he be a Seahawk now?
“That’s really a Pete question,” Wilson said last week.
“But I think, ultimately, he could definitely be on our roster, for sure. He can do a lot of great things, you know. He’s a really talented player, that’s for sure.”
