Colin Kaepernick Was Pushed to Ask Out Taylor Swift

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Could Colin Kaepernick and Taylor Swift had ended up with their own happily ever after?

A little over two months after the singer married Travis Kelce in the “wedding of the century,” another famous football star is thinking back on what might have been.

Kaepernick reveals that, back when he was in the NFL, he got some strong encouragement to shoot his shot with Swift.

He didn’t go for it, and Swift ended up with a different hunky football star. And that suits Kaepernick just fine.

Who advised Colin Kaepernick to ask out Taylor Swift?

On Tuesday, September 15, the former football layer’s memoir, Perilous Fight, hit bookstore shelves.

He spoke of how his mother, Tessa Kaepernick, suggested that he ask out Taylor Swift.

“When I was in the NFL, she told me that I should ask out Taylor Swift,” Colin Kaepernick wrote.

He detailed that this was “(long before Travis Kelce made his move).”

(Kaepernick became a “free agent” weeks before spring began in 2017. We all learned who Kelce was in 2023.)

According to Kaepernick, his mother suggested this “because we would be perfect together.”

He apparently did not take his mother’s counsel at this time.

Kaepernick was quick to emphasize that this was no “slight to Taylor.”

However, he said that Swift “was not my type.”

This suggestion could have taken place any time between 2011 and 2016, based upon his NFL years.

He doesn’t sound like he regrets not taking the chance

Since this time, Colin Kaepernick and Taylor Swift have both tied the knot. Just, you know, not with each other.

He and Nessa Diab welcomed a baby in 2022 and have been married for years.

Though he did not intend to shade Swift, Kaepernick did make some remarks about his mother. The fact that she suggest that he ask out the singer showed him that his mother was not “capable of seeing who I really am.”

He recalled that his mother had exhibited a pattern of encouraging him to date white women. This mentality can stem from anything from status symbols to internalized racism and beyond, and is frankly very complex to discuss and process.

Notably, Kaepernick was born to a white teenage mother and was adopted by the Kaepernicks, who are also white. Like we said … it’s super complex.

Nessa and Colin Kaepernick attends the #MetGala

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— SinnamonS (@sinnamonscouture.bsky.social) May 5, 2025 at 8:11 PM

Kaepernick has long history of using his platform (and his impossible-to-ignore good looks) to promote anti-racism in our deeply anti-Black culture.

He became the center of a weird, baseless controversy for “disrespectfully” kneeling about a decade ago.

It caused friction when he was within the NFL. Ultimately, he parted ways with the organization.

Kaepernick has a complex history. His advocacy for racial justice is good. His AI project to teach children how to produce hideous slop instead of learning art themselves is, to be blunt, abhorrent.

Though Swift has made questionable choices, it’s clear that Kaepernick’s issue described in the memoir isn’t with her. Rather, he cites this as an example of how he felt that his own mother did not understand him.