John Harbaugh hoped to extend Colin Kaepernick’s NFL career in 2017 for a simple reason. He had faced Kaepernick with a title at stake, and the Baltimore Ravens coach thought the San Francisco 49ers quarterback might help him return to the big game.“In that Super Bowl,” Harbaugh recalled, “he was really a nightmare to defend.”Kaepernick nearly led Harbaugh’s brother, Jim, to the championship in New Orleans on Feb. 3, 2013. That night, he threw for 302 yards and a touchdown and ran for 62 yards and another score. As Kaepernick drove his 49ers down the Superdome field on a potential winning drive that ultimately stalled near the goal line, CBS analyst and former Super Bowl MVP Phil Simms said on the broadcast, “My gosh, I’m really literally mesmerized by some of these passes.”John Harbaugh wanted whatever that player had left in his arm and legs after the 2016 season. His Ravens quarterback, Joe Flacco, was dealing with a back injury before what would be his final year in Baltimore as the full-time starter.Ten years after Kaepernick peacefully protested police brutality and the systemic oppression of people of color by refusing to stand for the national anthem, Harbaugh remembered that he was not deterred by the quarterback’s standing as the league’s most polarizing player.“In all honesty, that wasn’t a factor,” the first-year New York Giants coach told The Athletic. “Yeah, there was conversation that there’s going to be a certain percentage of the fanbase that’s not going to appreciate this, but we decided that wasn’t going to be our driving factor.”What, then, were the factors driving Baltimore’s interest in Kaepernick in the spring and summer of 2017?“His talent, and also the fact I had inside information as to who he was from my brother,” Harbaugh said. “We talked a lot about him, and I’d met Kap many times, had numerous conversations with him because of that. We talked about it at length as an organization, and we liked the fit.”Colin Kaepernick knelt quietly. What does it mean ten years later?Jerry BrewerAnd yet that fit never led to a deal.According to NBC News, Kaepernick writes in his upcoming memoir, “The Perilous Fight,” that Harbaugh was “pushing” to sign the free agent but, in the end, was “shut down from above.”At the time, an ESPN report that Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti was resistant to the idea of signing Kaepernick was denied by Ravens general manager Ozzie Newsome, who said in a statement, “Whoever is making those claims is wrong.”That evening, Kaepernick’s then-girlfriend and current wife, Nessa Diab, a popular radio host and podcast personality, tweeted an image of Ravens legend Ray Lewis hugging Bisciotti over an image of the Samuel L. Jackson character in the movie “Django Unchained” holding up the evil plantation owner played by Leonardo DiCaprio.“The only thing that went bad was that image where (Diab) tried to make us racist individuals,” Lewis said the following month on Showtime’s “Inside the NFL” program, “and that’s the sad part about this story. … We were going to close the deal to sign him. All we wanted to hear was Colin Kaepernick speak.”While preparing the Giants for their season opener against Dallas, Harbaugh was not interested in discussing the details of why his former team passed on Kaepernick. But the coach’s public comments back then made it clear he wasn’t the decision-maker who voted “No” on Kaepernick, and that he had remained a strong advocate as the controversy over the quarterback’s stance raged on, fueled in part by President Donald Trump’s criticism.In 2017, Harbaugh said he had some spirited, good-natured debates with Kaepernick about history and politics. He called the quarterback “a great guy” and “a really good person,” when very few NFL officials would dare say those words on the record. Harbaugh called Kaepernick “too good a player” to be out of the league and predicted he would play somewhere “probably a long time.”Kaepernick never took another NFL snap.With his new book set for release next week, the quarterback still believes he was blackballed. If nothing else, Kaepernick’s numbers strongly suggest his failure to find employment wasn’t merely about on-field performance.A fan sits behind a Colin Kaepernick sign in 2017 during the Ravens’ home preseason game against Washington. (Rob Carr / Getty Images)In his two-plus years as a starter under Jim Harbaugh, Kaepernick was 25-14 in the regular season and 4-2 in the playoffs, delivering a combined 71 passing and rushing touchdowns (including the postseason). Twice, he eliminated Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers from the playoffs, passing and running for 769 yards and five touchdowns in those games. Kaepernick was a read-option terminator out of the pistol formation.After Jim Harbaugh and offensive coordinator Greg Roman left San Francisco, Kaepernick went 3-16 as a starter in his final two injury-altered seasons. Though he was 1-10 in his last year, Kaepernick still managed 16 touchdown passes against four interceptions and a passer rating of 90.7, which placed him ahead of some big-name peers. He opted for free agency and left San Francisco with a career interception percentage (1.8) that matched Tom Brady’s and tied him for second, behind Rodgers, on the NFL’s all-time list.Kaepernick talked to the Seattle Seahawks and the Ravens. If he was being shunned by many coaches and executives who either opposed his form of dissent or feared fan backlash, or both, John Harbaugh wasn’t one of them. “I believe that we should respect each other’s opinions,” Harbaugh said. “Nobody’s got the market cornered on being right, that’s for sure. … To me, that’s America. That’s the First Amendment.”Harbaugh had Roman on his Ravens staff as an offensive assistant and planned to use Kaepernick just like his brother had in San Francisco.Just like Harbaugh would use Lamar Jackson in 2018 and beyond.“So you can see why Kap would have been attracted to us with our offense,” Harbaugh said. “Greg was authoring that (in San Francisco), and Kap just fit it beautifully. There was a lot of play-action off that, and the intermediate throws were Kap’s forte. Throwing the ball 20 or 25 yards downfield, that was his thing.”While watching on TV as Kaepernick ran for a record 181 yards in his first playoff victory over Green Bay, Harbaugh said: “It blew my mind. I was also excited for my brother. But then we had to study and digest it, and I thought we did a good job against it in the Super Bowl. But you can only contain it for so long.”Kaepernick wasn’t the same juggernaut when Baltimore was considering him, but he was at least a credible starter or top-of-the-market backup while lesser quarterbacks were landing jobs. The Jets signed 37-year-old Josh McCown, who was eight years older than Kaepernick and who arrived in New York with an 18-42 career record.Around the same time, Harbaugh was asked whether he believed Kaepernick had indeed been blackballed by the league. He called the concept “intellectually lazy” and the situation “more nuanced” than that and maintained Kaepernick would become a starter again.But even though Kaepernick was in his prime, no team offered him a contract. Last week, Harbaugh was asked again whether he felt the quarterback’s decision to kneel during the pregame anthem to protest societal inequities cost him his career and millions in future earnings.“I think everybody does what they perceive to be in their best interests … and you just have to look at that and ask what their reasoning was on it because everybody is trying to win and everybody will sign pretty much anybody to win,” he said.“If you think back, it wasn’t an offense that many people were running. His options might’ve been limited that way. Maybe because people weren’t willing to move in that direction offensively. … That wasn’t the whole story, just a part of it.”Harbaugh had his own vision of how it would work as he transitioned away from Flacco, the prototypical pocket passer, to the electric dual-threat game Jackson played on his way to two league MVP awards.If Baltimore had signed Kaepernick, Harbaugh said, “we probably would’ve still drafted Lamar for the opportunity to have two guys like that.”The Giants coach sounded wistful when talking about Kaepernick and the lost chance to team up with the quarterback who had nearly denied him a Super Bowl ring. Harbaugh said he remains “a fan of Kap’s” and still occasionally exchanges texts with the quarterback, who, a decade after his rightful protest, is assured of going down in history among the NFL’s most impactful figures.He should go down as a damn good football player, too.“The bottom line is your quarterback has to make plays for you,” Harbaugh said, “and Colin Kaepernick proved he could do that.”