Former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick hasn’t played in the NFL since the 2016 season, when he began protesting police violence against Black Americans by sitting or kneeling during the pregame national anthem.
Has he found himself out of another job? Recent Facebook posts claim as much, saying he “was fired from his new high school coaching job after just one season.”
“The kids couldn’t stand him,” reads a quote in the May posts. “He’s arrogant and conceited.”
But this claim originated on self-described satire sites.
These posts were flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
America’s Last Line of Defense, a network of fake-news websites, posted the story as early as 2023 with the headline, “Colin Kaepernick loses his first coaching job after only six games.”
The story says that “the principal of Joseph Barron Senior High School in Des Moines” fired Kaepernick because “he just had a way … of pissing people off” and “was trying to get players to kneel for the National Anthem after just three weeks.”
Joseph Barron isn’t among the high schools of Des Moines Public Schools, and we couldn’t find a school by that name in Iowa’s capital city.
We also found no evidence that Kaepernick ever accepted a high school coaching job.
We rate posts that say this claim is authentic Pants on Fire!