Ok, I’ll admit, this is a slightly contrived post just to have the excuse to include this image in the blog. However, there’s been a fair bit of speculation about whether Colin Kaepernick will ever play again in the NFL after starting the trend in the NFL of taking a knee during the national anthem in protest against racism in the US. The suspicion is that he is being overlooked in favour weaker quarterbacks by club owners as retaliation for his protest, but does the evidence bear this out? Well, various informal statistical analyses, comparing Kaepernick’s most recent performances against those of other quarterbacks, definitely support this point of view.
Meanwhile, here’s another statistic: Nike sales spiked by around 31% in the days after the Kaepernick ad campaign was released. It would be nice to think that Nike would have ran the Kaepernick campaign even without doing their own market analysis based on surveys and focus groups to collate evidence that it would be viable financially as well as morally. Guess we’ll never know though.
