The next steps of Colin Kaepernick's collusion case against the NFL

Colin Kaepernick’s collusion case against the National Football League can advance further. The matter of when it will be settled remains unsettled, and as such this remains an argument about principle, and principal.
 
Mediator Stephen Burbank ruled Tuesday (and announced today) that Kaepernick’s complaint against the 32 owners that they conspired to keep him out of football can go forward to trial. It means more interviews of league and team officials by Kaepernick’s lawyer Mark Geragos, and ultimately a hearing to determine how much money, if any, Kaepernick will be entitled to if he wins.
 
Which is as it should be, really. Everyone’s already gone this far and may as well see it through, even though the owners won’t see it that way. Then again, they’re the ones who made this a thing with their usual brutish clumsiness.
 
The first is an interesting legal point. The second, of course, isn’t.
 
But as a practical matter, Kaepernick is playing only for lost wages, optics and the principle of opposing wrong. There is no football job waiting for him; by the time this is settled, he will have been out of the league two years, and likely will have lost the bug to keep chasing a football career.
 
Fortunately, playing football isn’t what this is about. Meeting in concert toward a desired end (in this keep, keeping Kaepernick from ever playing again) in violation of union rules is, though. That’s what we law professors and scholars call “illegal,” and what we in public relations call “an awful look.”
 
The NFL seemingly hasn’t minded looking bad on this from the start, between signing an army of quarterbacks clearly inferior to him to unconvincingly explaining why to blaming their three years of lowered ratings on the movement he began two years ago as a one-man statement.
 
But now the standard isn’t about optics, but evidence. Geragos has to find a smoking inconsistency in a mountain of depositions that will convince a judge, and then he and Kaepernick will have to brace themselves for an appeal, although the standard at the appellate level is not typically good for defendants.
 
There is no guarantee that Kaepernick will win, of course, or that the league will prevail either. This is still a circumstantial case on the surface, though Geragos is entitled now to hunt for more of the goods. The story that lives forever, just got some more forever tacked on to it.