The Colin Kaepernick Settlement Figure Matters, But We May Never Know The Truth

The NFL and Colin Kaepernick settled out of court. The exact details of the agreement are supposed to be confidential. That hasn’t stopped the speculation.

On Friday, Mike Freeman reported that a number of his sources were speculating that the payout was in the $60-80 million range.

Today, Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio is hearing that the figure is smaller.

"Fourth, multiple people connected to the league have, without disclosing the number, downplayed the settlement as an amount that will cover the league’s anticipated legal expenses for the duration of the arbitration, with perhaps a bit more. (The anticipated legal expenses weren’t disclosed; chances are those amounts would have been in the seven figures, not in the eight figures.) Fifth, another source with knowledge of the situation tells PFT that speculation that the settlement amount landed in the range of $60 million to $80 million is incorrect."

Dan Patrick revealed that a source told him that the settlement could be as low as the $5 million range.

“This is what I was told,” Patrick said. “What were the chances of Colin Kaepernick winning this collusion case against the NFL? I was told ‘less than zero percent.’ That’s how much of a chance he had. Less than zero percent of winning this because there was no evidence.”

Opinions on Kaepernick have been baked in to the cake for some time now. This settlement will do little to change people’s preconceived ideas about who is the bad guy and who is the good guy.

And while detractors are dinging the prospective quarterback for taking any money at all, they’ll also be using cherry-picked low estimations as fuel for their arguments that there was never any collusion to be found anyway.

To that end, the money does matter here. The larger the figure, the more worried the NFL was about letting this train move down the track. This whole thing looks a lot different if we’re talking about $50 million or $5 million here.

It’s perhaps fitting that we’re not apt to get firm confirmation and this will come down to a choose-your-own conclusion exercise.