Philadelphia — It was always a long shot that the Eagles would make the NFL playoffs and then be competitive in the postseason with QB Carson Wentz as their standard-bearer. It was too much to put on one already damaged star. Wentz did great through the season, but he was always one bad tackle away from disaster.
The problem Sunday in the wild-card playoff with the Seahawks was that the Eagles didn’t have anyone of Went’s caliber to replace him with when just 8 minutes into the first quarter he was hit hard and suffered a possible concussion.
It’s nothing against Josh McCown that he didn’t make the grade as back up quarterback. He did his best. But imagine if, instead of running in terror because of political gutlessness, Eagles management had hired Colin Kaepernick, the former ace quarterback from the San Francisco Giants, blackballed by the NFL for protesting the anthem at games over the issue of police violence against minorities, when Kaep made known that he wanted to play, was ready to be a backup QB for the Eagles and didn’t care much about the money.
The Eagles could have had a Superbowl-experienced QB to plug in for the injured Wentz, and Wentz might have even had a shot at playing in a later playoff game when his head cleared.
Of course, the Eagles management would then have had to contend with getting ticketed all the time in their limos by vengeful white Philly cops from the Fraternal Order of Police.
NOTE: On the morning when this letter ran on Wednesday in the Inquirer, my inbox was full of sadly predictable emails from self-styled white “super-patriots” attacking me for backing Kaepernick, whom they universally claimed had “disrespected veterans and the flag” by sitting on the bench or taking a knee during pre-game singing of the National Anthem. Never mind that Kaepernick always made clear that he was objecting not to the American flag or anthem per se, but to the the anthem’s being played while police across America were killing and brutalizing black and other minority citizens virtually unchecked.
To those who will no doubt continue to attack me for supporting Kaep, and for pointing out the gutlessness (and stupidity) of Eagles management, who no doubt worried about losing white ticket-buyers, forgetting that they would have won far more support from Philly’s minority football fans had they shown the courage and smarts to hire him, I offer the following:
An open letter from American military veterans in support of Colin Kaepernick