“I just play football,” Crabtree said Sunday (via the San Francisco Chronicle’s Ann Killion). “I ain’t no Martin Luther King.”
It isn’t certain how much of Crabtree’s stance has to do with his personal feelings about Kaepernick. He took care to throw shade at his former QB when he left San Francisco after six seasons, saying at the time, “I needed a quarterback that can deliver the ball, and that was hungry like I was.” Crabtree signed with Oakland as a free agent before the 2015 season.
“I’ve let it be known I don’t have anything to do with him,” Crabtree told Killion. “I’m a Raider.”
Two of Crabtree’s teammates, Malcolm Smith and Bruce Irvin, felt differently. They raised their fists during “The Star-Spangled Banner” on Sunday before the game against Tennessee, catching Coach Jack Del Rio by surprise.
“I would’ve hoped that it would’ve been brought up ahead of time so we could all be involved,” he said. “As I’ve said earlier, I respect everyone’s opinion to express themselves. That’s what we have as Americans. I would just like to see us as a team do things together and united.”
Smith admitted that he had spoken with his coach after the game.
“You put your coach in that position and he doesn’t know, so I apologized to him,” Smith said. “He let me know ‘we support you’ and I appreciate that. He wished I would have given him a warning, but, at the same time, it just came over me in the moment.”
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