Former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick priced himself out of a job with the XFL, according to Commissioner Oliver Luck.
The eight-team league held its first slate of games over the weekend, but without Kaepernick, who last year indicated he wanted to return to the NFL.
The XFL operates under a different player management model than the NFL, centrally hiring all of the teams’ players prior to the first draft.
In an interview with NPR about the upstart league, Luck was asked about the quarterback who began the trend of national anthem protests.
“Great football player,” he said. “I — you know, I’m not going to talk about any particular player outside of the group of guys that we have because we think — again, we’ve got the best 500 or so players under contract who aren’t in the National Football League or in other professional leagues,” he said.
Kaepernick was considered, Luck said.
“We gave it some thought,” he said. “We have some pretty significant salary restrictions, you know. We’re a startup league, so we want to make sure that we can be fiscally responsible and fiscally prudent. And the salary requirements that some folks shared with us were in our case exorbitant, so we couldn’t go down that path.”
When asked again if it all boiled down to money, Luck was emphatic.
“I’m saying that we spoke with his representative, and the salary requirements that were broached in that conversation were exorbitant and certainly out of our range,” he said.
Kaepernick’s last NFL contract was a six-year, $126 million extension, according to CBS Sports — averaging $21 million per year.
Last year, Sporting News, citing sources it did not name, reported that Kaepernick had sought nearly that much — $20 million per year — to play in the XFL. According to The Associated Press, he had demanded the same amount to play in the other upstart spring league, the Alliance of American Football, which folded last April in the middle of its first season.
The average XFL player is expected to make $55,000 this season, according to Fox News.
Story cited here.