Brian Urlacher: Kaepernick’s kneeling wouldn’t fly in his locker room

Brian Urlacher says Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests never would have made it past the door in his Chicago Bears locker room.

The Pro Football Hall of Fame linebacker addressed the topic during an appearance on OutKick’s “The Craig Carton Show,” where Mr. Carton asked whether politics were ever a factor in the Bears’ locker room during Mr. Urlacher’s playing days. Mr. Kaepernick, then the San Francisco 49ers’ quarterback, first knelt during the anthem in 2016 in protest of police brutality and racial injustice, touching off a controversy that divided NFL locker rooms and fan bases for years.

Mr. Urlacher said he stayed out of politics entirely as a player and argued that any hint of division along those lines would have sunk a team’s chemistry. “You can’t have the racial divide in the locker room,” he said, adding that a unified locker room requires setting aside outside disagreements for a common goal.

He went further, saying Mr. Kaepernick’s kneeling specifically would have been intolerable to him personally and would have marked a breaking point in how he dealt with a teammate. The fallout from the protests also kept Mr. Urlacher away from the sport as a fan: He and his wife stopped watching NFL games altogether for roughly two and a half to three years, he said, only tuning back in once the anthem controversy had faded from the headlines. 

“That would have been something that would have probably been a line in the sand for me when it comes to stuff like that,” he said later in the interview.