49ers Would Have Cut Colin Kaepernick If He Didn’t Opt Out

John Lynch confirmed today the 49ers would have released Colin Kaepernick if he didn’t opt out of his contract, the first-year GM said (via Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk). The 49ers would have had to carry a $14.9MM cap charge if Kaepernick had stayed on the team.

A meeting occurred between Kaepernick and the Lynch/Kyle Shanahan power structure where Shanahan said he wanted to run his same offense that thrived with the Falcons. The dual-threat quarterback wasn’t a classic fit for that scheme. The team soon brought in Brian Hoyer, with whom Shanahan worked with the 2014 Browns, and didn’t see Kaepernick making sense as his backup.

“We both sat down and under that current construct of his deal, it was a big [cap] number,” Lynch said. “Kyle had a vision for what he wanted to do, and one thing I think Kyle was very clear and I think Colin appreciated, is that Kyle has an idea of how he’d play with Colin Kaepernick. But he preferred to run the exact offense that he ran in Atlanta last year that was record-breaking in this league. And if you change it for the quarterback, you change it for everybody on that offense.

“Once we pursued [Hoyer], we didn’t see Kaep as a backup that would really fit in that scheme and we communicated that to him. So I think we’ve been very up front with it. But I think that is a fair characterization. Yes, he was not going to be here under the construct of his contract. We gave him the option, ‘You can opt out, we can release you, whatever.’ And he chose to opt out, but that was just a formality.”

Kaepernick remains without a team but has visited the Seahawks, with some league insiders believing he will end up being Russell Wilson‘s backup. Lynch also squashed the notion that the 29-year-old doesn’t want to return to football, one that came from 49ers sources earlier this month.

“I feel like that’s part of my job is controlling what comes out of this building, and to the extent that there was a perception that we were contributing to that Colin didn’t want to play football, we wanted to put an end to that,” Lynch said, via Florio. “… We had a great discussion that stuck out with me that this is a guy who is really interested in getting back in this league and playing at the highest level. And I’ve talked to him since, and that very much is the case.”