The San Francisco 49ers released a photo gallery on Friday commemorating the franchise’s 68-year history of games against the Green Bay Packers in the lead up to their matchup on Monday Night Football. The gallery included photos of nearly every notable player to put on a San Francisco jersey from Hall of Famers like Joe Montana and Terrell Owens, to guys like Jeff Garcia. Not included in that list was current NFL outcast Colin Kaepernick.
The current free agent quarterback was nowhere to be seen among the initial 48 photos that the team released on its website. Kaepernick had some pretty notable games against the Packers during his time with the 49ers. In the NFC Divisional round in 2013, he set an NFL quarterback record when he rushed for 181 yards in a 45-31 win over Green Bay. In 2014, he led a game-winning drive against the Packers in the NFC Wild Card game and famously went sleeveless despite temperatures dropping to minus 14.
Of course, there was another pretty famous game that involved Kaepernick and Green Bay, but it’s not like the 49ers would go out of their way to celebrate that.
This would be the latest major omission that Kaepernick’s name has been a part of from this year alone. Early releases of Madden 19 had his name censored in a song lyric that made a direct reference to the quarterback.
The Niners have since apologized for leaving Kaepernick out of the gallery, updated the gallery to include him, and released this statement.
“Unfortunately there were a handful of obvious misses in this gallery posted by our website team and we appreciate them being brought to our attention. The 49ers organization has tremendous respect and gratitude for the contributions Colin made to our team over the years.”
General manager John Lynch even went out of his way to express his embarrassment about the situation in an interview with San Francisco station KNBR.
“Obviously, from our part, a glaring omission. From ownership on down, we’ve got so much respect for his contributions to this franchise, and against the Packers. Anyone who is a fan of football, particularly, let alone 49er fans, knows that he has a great part of history against the Packers.”
It is worth noting that the 49ers did support their former quarterback’s choice to kneel during the national anthem. But even with the lip service to his prime years with the team, and the past support of his cause, it’s a real head-scratcher as to how a photo captioned “Alex Smith completes a pass in Dec. 2006" got thrown into a gallery celebrating a matchup between two teams with decades of Hall of Fame rosters, while one of Kaepernick setting NFL records somehow wasn’t worth including.