In the eyes of NFL teams, and especially their head coaches, that was Kaepernick’s real issue: making waves when not good enough to do so. If he’d just quietly accepted his demotion to journeyman status (He was beat out for the starting job by Blaine freaking Gabbard, for goodness sake!), he would probably still be getting paid to hold a clipboard somewhere. If it were someone like Russel Wilson (just an example, no insult intended to him personally), probably he gets away with it. Teams tolerate quite a lot of BS when it’s a superstar player causing the BS.