Nothing about Colin Kaepernick, the football player, changed on that warm Southern California night a decade ago.

Not his speed. Not his arm strength. Not the improvisational skills that made him one of the NFL’s most electrifying, if at times erratic, quarterbacks.

And to be honest, nothing changed about Colin Kaepernick, the 28-year-old man, that night either.

If anything, the moment the 49ers star took a knee during the national anthem before a preseason game Sept. 1, 2016, to bring attention to a series of social issues he cares deeply about — from racial injustice to minority oppression to police brutality — only revealed to the world at large who Kaepernick always believed himself to be.

“It wasn’t a sudden act,” he wrote in a statement this spring announcing his memoir, ”The Perilous Fight,” a title borrowed from a passage of the very song to which his name will forever be linked.

No, it wasn’t.

That night wasn’t even the first time the player who always seemed to have one eye on the field and the other on the world at large chose to do something other than stand during the anthem. In the two previous 49ers exhibitions that August, he sat on the bench, largely unnoticed, as the anthem played.

Only after connecting with former NFL player and retired Green Beret Nate Boyer in a hotel lobby did Kaepernick move from the bench to a knee, something Boyer suggested would be more respectful to those in the military.

He didn’t announce he was going to do it. He didn’t share it on social media. He didn’t promote it in any way. He just did it, quietly placing his right knee on the ground, his left arm across his left knee and staring silently ahead as Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Steven Powell sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

When Kaepernick huddled with noted sociologist and then-49ers adviser Harry Edwards in the aftermath, they both knew Kaepernick’s decision carried considerable risk.

“I said, ‘You know, this is going to become a major issue,’ ” Edwards told The Associated Press. “You are a Black male and seen as a greater threat because of the centrality of male activities and male sports. And so there’s no way that there’s not going to be a price to pay for this.”

The price ended up being Kaepernick’s football career.

The conversation Kaepernick intended to start was instead hijacked. The method of Kaepernick’s protest became the focus, with critics calling it offensive, particularly to those in the armed forces.

Then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump lashed out and later, as president, labeled any player who knelt a “son of a bitch.” Fans burned Kaepernick’s jersey in anger.

While supporters pointed out that Kaepernick’s right to kneel is one of the freedoms protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution, the very thing those in uniform are commanded to defend, it didn’t seem to matter.

No matter how hard Kaepernick kept trying to steer the talk toward racial injustice, it swerved in seemingly every other direction instead.

Four months after kneeling for the first time, Kaepernick threw his 1,692nd and final pass in the NFL, a 9-yard touchdown to tight end Garrett Celek late in the fourth quarter of a loss to Seattle that capped a 2-14 season.

The 49ers hit reboot during the offseason, firing head coach Chip Kelly and replacing him with Kyle Shanahan. Kaepernick met with Shanahan and new General Manager John Lynch, then opted to void the remaining year on his contract and become a free agent.

The player whose rise in 2012 sparked San Francisco to an NFC title, who once led former NFL quarterback-turned-analyst Ron Jaworski to wonder aloud if Kaepernick could become one of the best ever at the position, never pulled on a uniform again.

Kaepernick and former teammate Eric Reid — who knelt alongside him in 2016 — filed a lawsuit against the NFL alleging that owners colluded to blacklist them out of the game. A settlement was reached in 2019, and while Kaepernick kept one toe in the game — as late as 2022, he worked out for the Las Vegas Raiders — both he and the league seem to have moved on.

An absence that still leaves some wondering why

The NFL is, in just about every way, a meritocracy. Pedigree doesn’t matter, only production. The league’s history is filled with players granted second chances despite various misdeeds, some of whom returned to the field after spending time in prison.

Over the past month, the Seattle Seahawks sprinted to land cornerback Terrion Arnold even as he faces eight felony charges stemming from an incident in Florida.

Kaepernick, by contrast, remains unsigned to this day even as countless quarterbacks with lesser resumes have drifted in and out of the league.

His exile doesn’t quite make sense to longtime Pittsburgh Steelers defensive lineman Cam Heyward, a seven-time Pro Bowler. Heyward described Kaepernick as a “hell of a talent” who created “headaches” for opponents on the field and who once passed for 302 yards, ran for 62 more and accounted for a pair of touchdowns in the Super Bowl, a game Heyward is still waiting to play in as he enters his 16th season.

While stressing he didn’t have all the specifics on why Kaepernick never played again, Heyward said the quiet part out loud when asked if he felt Kaepernick’s stand was the driving force behind why he didn’t play beyond 2016.

“I don’t think any player deserves that,” Heyward told the AP. “I think we all strive to be football players, but then we also strive to give back. And you never would think it would lead to that. It feels like he paid the price with his career. I just don’t think that’s right.”

Kaepernick doubles down on his activism

Numerous people who either played or coached alongside Kaepernick in 2016 declined to speak to the AP about their experiences of that season and its fallout.

“I think that this reluctance to even talk about it now is indicative of to what degree the NFL substantively addressed it,” said Frederick Gooding Jr., a professor of African American studies at Texas Christian University and the author of a book examining the intersection of race, media and sports. “If anything, people should be more open to talk about this, warts and all.”

That hasn’t happened on the scale Kaepernick envisioned.

It wasn’t until 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minnesota, that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell acknowledged the league misstepped by not listening to players like Kaepernick who were fighting for social equality. By then, Kaepernick was already three-plus years removed from the sport.

“The NFL still is able to acknowledge that maybe they should have listened better, but they’re not losing anything,” Gooding said.

While demonstrating during the anthem spread across the league in the immediate aftermath — with as many as 200 players taking a knee at times during the 2017 season — the temperature, at least inside NFL stadiums, has been turned down even as it remains ratcheted up in so many other areas of society.

Edwards, whose roots in promoting social justice date back to his time counseling San Jose State’s Tommie Smith and John Carlos to raise their fists in a Black power salute on the medal stand at the 1968 Olympics, once publicly lobbied for Kaepernick to return to the game.

Now, he sees the work Kaepernick and his wife, Nessa, have done through the years — from the “Know Your Rights” camps they host to promote “education, self-empowerment, mass-mobilization” for people of color, to the independent autopsies their foundation pays for (most recently following the death of Black teenager Nolan Wells in Mississippi) — and believes the game would have just gotten in the way.

“Nothing he would ever accomplish in football, even if there was a team that would bring him on board, would match his importance as a sports political figure in the first two decades of the 20th century,” Edwards said.

ACLU President Deborah Archer told the AP that Kaepernick’s journey “set an example” for others to follow.

“He showed what they can do, the power that they have to start conversation,” she said after the organization presented Kaepernick with an activism award at a ceremony in Washington, D.C., in July. “For so long athletes, actors were told: That’s your lane, stay in your lane. He showed that there is no lane. We are all a part of this democracy, that we all have a right to speak, we all have an obligation to speak.”

AP sports writers Alanis Thames, Kristie Rieken, Doug Ferguson, Mark Long, Terry Tang and Dan Gelston contributed to this report.