The NFL just can’t quit Colin Kaepernick.
Seven years in, the league keeps painting his politics on the field.
And what they’re planning for the 2026 season will leave a lot of football fans wondering why they’re still watching.
The League That Refuses to Read the Room
For the seventh consecutive year, the NFL will stencil anti-racism messages into end zones at stadiums across the country and place political decals on player helmets, according to Front Office Sports.
The campaign also includes performances of what the league calls the “Black National Anthem” at major events. There is one national anthem. It has been played before American sporting events for generations. The NFL decided, starting in 2020, that wasn’t enough.
Jay-Z and his entertainment company Roc Nation have a renewed contract with the league for performances and programming tied to the initiative. That partnership has been in place since 2019, when the league brought Roc Nation on as its entertainment strategist, and it keeps getting extended.
The on-field slogans trace back directly to Kaepernick’s decision to sit, and later kneel, during the national anthem beginning in 2016. The former San Francisco 49ers quarterback said at the time, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” That was the statement that set this whole machine in motion.
The NFL spent years trying to pretend Kaepernick’s protest was a complicated cultural moment requiring a nuanced league response. What it actually was: a backup quarterback who wasn’t good enough to hold his job promoting an anti-American, anti-police message, and a league that panicked and decided to institutionalize that message into its brand forever.
What Seven Years of This Has Actually Looked Like
The end zone slogans began appearing in 2020, following nationwide unrest. The league painted phrases like “End Racism,” “Stop Hate,” “Choose Love,” and “It Takes All of Us” across its fields and has kept them there ever since, season after season, regardless of what’s happening in the country or what fans actually want to see when they turn on a football game.
Kaepernick himself reached a confidential settlement with the NFL in 2019 after filing a grievance accusing team owners of colluding to keep him out of the league. He hasn’t played professional football since 2016. The teams that passed on him did so because he wasn’t good enough to play, not because of his politics.
But the league’s political apparatus, built partly in his image, rolls on. The “Inspire Change” initiative has been the vehicle for all of it, and Jay-Z’s Roc Nation has been the entertainment and cultural arm attached to it. The NFL committed $250 million to the initiative over ten years. That money goes somewhere, and it isn’t going toward making the game better.
Now Kaepernick is releasing a memoir called “The Perilous Fight” through publisher Legacy Lit on September 15, 2026, timed to coincide with the start of the new NFL season and the ten-year anniversary of his first anthem protest. The book is described in part as a manifesto. The timing is not a coincidence.
So fans tuning in this fall get the full package: the slogans in the end zones, the helmet decals, the “Black National Anthem” at big events, a Jay-Z production deal, and a Kaepernick book tour running alongside it all.
The Woke Playbook the NFL Won’t Put Down
The league’s leftist, woke culture has been alienating fans for years. The NFL keeps doing it anyway, apparently convinced that painting political messages on the field is a neutral act that no reasonable person could object to.
But calling for fans to “End Racism” in a football end zone isn’t neutral. It’s the league telling its audience that they need to be lectured at while trying to watch a game. It’s identity politics as stadium decor, and millions of Americans who love football have noticed.
The idea that there is a “Black National Anthem” separate from the national anthem is itself a woke left attempt to divide Americans along racial lines. There is one flag. There is one anthem. The NFL’s decision to treat “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as a parallel national institution is a political choice dressed up as inclusion, and it insults every fan who stands for the actual anthem.
Anthem protests are un-American and disrespectful to the flag, to the country, and to the men and women who serve in uniform. Kaepernick’s original protest was not a principled stand against specific injustices. He said the country oppresses people of color. That’s an indictment of the nation itself, not a targeted critique of a policy. The NFL chose to build a seven-year political program on top of that foundation.
And the league keeps renewing it. Not because fans demanded it. Not because viewership is up. Football viewership dropped 2.2 percent during the 2024-25 season, with the league averaging 17.5 million viewers per game compared to 17.9 million the prior year, according to National Review. The league is losing audience while doubling down on the politics that drove people away.
That’s not a coincidence either. That’s what happens when a sports league decides its job is to push an agenda rather than deliver a product people enjoy.
Kaepernick’s memoir arrives right as the season kicks off, which means sports media will spend weeks treating a man who last played professional football in 2016 as a major cultural figure. The league’s continued embrace of his political legacy gives that book tour oxygen it wouldn’t otherwise have.
The NFL could have let this fade. Other leagues have quietly dialed back their political programming as fan reaction made the cost clear. The NFL chose the opposite direction. Seven years in, with the end zones painted and the Jay-Z contract renewed, the league has made its priorities plain.
Fans who want football without the lecture know where to find the remote.
Sources: Front Office Sports; Breitbart, “NFL to Continue Kaepernick-Inspired On-Field ‘Anti-Racism’ Slogans for 7th Straight Year,” August 28, 2026; National Review, “NFL Expands Social Justice End Zone Messages for Sixth Straight Season”; MSN/The Spun, “Colin Kaepernick Facing Backlash For 2026 NFL Season Announcement.”
