Colin Kaepernick is certainly principled — and strong in his convictions — but that doesn't mean he'll ever see the football field again.

Fans will remember Eric Reid as one of the few players who knelt alongside Colin Kaepernick when he first “took a knee” to protest the treatment of black men, especially in the NFL, thus kicking off the Black Lives Matter movement.

Reid recently signed a contract with the Carolina Panthers, but he has a pending collusion case against the NFL for the previous off-season.

He claims that he wasn't signed in the last off-season because he decided to kneel alongside the former 49ers quarterback. He also claims that, when that didn't work, the team tried to keep him out of the league by administering several “random” drug tests in the hopes that he would test dirty, and then he would be kicked off the team. (It didn't work, of course, and Reid said that this only proves that he and Kaep were being actively targeted.)

“If anything, it proves my point from last year. I didn’t sign until the (fourth) week and did for almost the league minimum. And this year I signed a more substantial contract. And nothing has changed. I’m still the same player.”

Reid said that the league conspired to keep him from getting re-signed to a different team, and they're currently conspiring to keep Colin Kaepernick off the field, and permanently so.

He said that his “hope tank is on empty” based on what he knows about the way the league works.