Kansas City Chiefs among few teams to watch Colin Kaepernick workout

When all was said and done, only a handful of teams ended up actually watching Colin Kaepernick work out. The Kansas City Chiefs were one of them.

On Saturday, the National Football League set up the opportunity for Colin Kaepernick to work out for any and all teams who might be interested in seeing him. The Kansas City Chiefs were originally reported as not going to see him and then that report was corrected, saying the Chiefs would send someone.

In the end, after the actual workout was completed, the Chiefs were only one of a handful of teams to actually attend the event.

Kaepernick and his representatives decided to throw a curveball an hour before the workout was scheduled and move it away from the planned location at a training facility for the Atlanta Falcons to a high school an hour away. Kaepernick’s reps claimed that they moved the location to “ensure transparency.” The full statement:

It turns out, at least from one report, that the NFL was going to keep media from attending the workouts and that the league would be in full control of all video from the workout. Check out the following:

From there, the number of teams in attendance shrank accordingly. Apparently a couple dozen teams were willing to be in Atlanta for a spell. From there, only 25 percent of them were actually willing to drive the extra distance to see Kaepernick march through a series of throwing drills.

Jason La Canfora has the word that the Kansas City Chiefs were just one of seven teams, according to him, that attended the workout. The others include the Philadelphia Eagles, the San Francisco 49ers, the Tennessee Titans, the Washington Redskins, the New York Jets, and the Detroit Lions. Reporter Matt Derrick later identified the scout in attendance from the Chiefs as scouting assistant Ricky Seale.

It’s impossible at this point to ascertain what level of interest the Chiefs might have in Kaepernick. On the one hand, they sent someone to Atlanta and then had that same person continue to invest even when further hurdles were thrown in his way, especially when 17 other teams decided to throw in the towel at that point.

At the same time, Seale isn’t exactly high up the food chain in the organizational flowchart—although bringing in a heavy hitter to watch Kaepernick was never going to happen for any team on a Saturday when personnel are already so busy watching important college games and the like. (Hence another reason for Kaepernick to be frustrated.) Due diligence is just that and if you’ve already sent someone to Atlanta, why not just send him further up the road?

It will be interesting to see the turns taken from here by the player and the teams involved. Will Kaepernick find a real NFL home? If so, could it really be in Kansas City? If that sounds ridiculous, why send someone? There is more smoke here than expected by most of us, to be sure.