You would think that exiled NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick would have a place in the revived XFL football league.
However, the average XFL contract is a relatively paltry $55,000, far below the salary Kaepernick was accustomed to when he made $40 million over his six seasons in the NFL. And since the two sides could not come to a happy medium financially, the XFL passed on Kaepernick’s services.
“We spoke with his representative,” XFL Commissioner Oliver Luck said of Kap, according to TMZ. “And the salary requirements that were broached in that conversation were exorbitant and certainly out of our range.”
Luck claims that talks between the XFL and Kaepernick camps went down about a year before it debuted on Saturday, Feb. 8, 2020. According to Luck, the talks never got very far.
“We have some pretty significant salary restrictions, you know,” Luck said. “We’re a start-up league, so we want to make sure that we can be fiscally responsible and fiscally prudent.”
Kaepernick claims he wants to play professional football again, as evidenced by his tryout, however disastrous the results, in the fall of 2019 in Atlanta. He and the NFL could not reach an agreement with the language contained in the legal paperwork in order to get him back in the league. And now it looks as if his camp could not agree on the terms offered by the XFL either.
Kap remains an unemployed free agent, having played his last game at the end of the 2016-17 season.
“And the, you know, salary requirements that some folks, you know, shared with us were in our case exorbitant, so we, you know, couldn’t go down that path,” Luck told TMZ.
