I'm a fairly serious football fan. I enjoy fantasy football and whatnot, but I also played football through college, so I would argue that I have an understanding at least as deep as 90-something percent of people watching on TV. I also have a respect for the effort necessary for a person to make it into the NFL, even at the very bottom of a roster.
I will get into the protest itself in a later entry, but for this one, I want to stick simply to his ability to play football. He is probably one of the 20-30 best quarterbacks in the NFL. He is absolutely one of the best 64. If you took Ron Rivera's family hostage and told him that the outcome of one game would determine whether they live or die, and then asked him to choose between Derek Anderson (his current #2 QB) and Colin Kaepernick as his starter, he would absolutely take Colin Kaepernick. Same for Pete Carroll up in Seattle, and probably just about every other team in the NFL.
The "hate" towards Kaepernick reminds me an awful lot of the venom directed towards Anna Kournikova a decade ago. Most of us are outsiders to the tennis world, but there was a "lazy" point of view that Kournikova was just a pretty face, and bad at tennis. The fact is, she was in the top echelon of tennis players, made the semi-finals of a handful of major tournaments, and actually won a couple doubles tournaments. If she had been a golfer, she wouldn't have been comparable Tiger Woods or Jack Nicklaus, but she also wasn't Charles Barkley. She would have been on the Serio Garcia tier- a person who didn't have an incredible amount of success, but a person who absolutely belonged on the tour and had an outside shot of winning.
Based on his football ability Kaepernick absolutely belongs in the NFL.