The fluctuating costs of activist quarterback Colin Kaepernick to the San Francisco 49ers and the NFL were never inexpensive.
Those costs started with the seven-year, $126 million contract he signed in 2014, an average of $18 million per season.
And those costs are ending with the current drop in NFL ratings.
On top of his $126 million contract, Kaepernick was guaranteed $61 million if he were to suffer a career-ending injury.
His contract additionally mandated that Kaepernick purchase a disability insurance policy that would have paid the 49ers $20 million had the quarterback incurred career-ending damage.
The contracted salary for Kaepernick in 2014 was $645,000.
His bonus for signing the contract was $12.3 million.
Furthermore, the deal was structured so that after 2014, the team was free to terminate Kaepernick and owe him nothing more.
Additionally, Kaepernick's paycheck under his performance-based contract “went down $2 million each year if he was not named first- or second-team All-Pro, or if the 49ers didn't play in the Super Bowl the previous season with 80 percent of the snaps taken by Kaepernick. None of those things happened,” according to Cork Gaines, editor of Business Insider's sports page.
Kaepernick's pay for the 2015 season dropped from $12.4 million to $10.4 million.
And Kaepernick's deal with the 49ers ended prematurely.
The still-jobless quarterback's seven-year, $126 million contract turned into $39 million in total compensation over three years.
That's $8 million less than Judge Judith Sheindlin's $47 million annual paycheck from her daytime TV show, “Judge Judy.”
Kaepernick seemingly placed his future earnings in jeopardy with his kneeling during the playing of the national anthem, wearing of Fidel Castro shirts and amateurish plunges into the world of geopolitical affairs.
Kaepernick opined in sermonizing fashion on the purportedly xenophobic dynamics of crime and punishment in America, the pluses and minuses of capitalism and communism, the pipe dreams of collectivist heavens on Earth by way of hellish autocracies, and the problematic possibilities of achieving individual self-sufficiency and liberty via compulsory communalism.
He supplemented his shoddy historical, political and economic analyses with his off-putting and tedious theatrics during the playing of the national anthem.
During a conference call last year with South Florida sports reporters, Kaepernick was grilled by a Miami Herald reporter about his Castro shirts.
“One thing that Fidel Castro did do is they have the highest literacy rate because they invest more in their education system than they do in their prison system, which we do not do here, even though we're fully capable,” Kaepernick responded.
In fact, within two years of shooting his way into dictatorial power, Castro blindfolded, muzzled, robbed, surveilled, handcuffed, exiled, imprisoned and executed Cubans.
Ralph R. Reiland is associate professor of economics emeritus at Robert Morris University and a local restaurateur (rrreiland@aol.com).
