Again, yea its a success considering he got a free 80 million but at the same time it didn't help his cause at all. Zilch. There is still 0 evidence proving collusion, he'll still Never play in the NFL again (likely anyway) and the NFL rids itself of this mess.
At the end of the day its obvious there wasn't any solid evidence that there was collusion between the owners otherwise he would have kept the court battle going. Congrats to him for bowing down and taking a massive payout but he can expect.a credibility hit at the same time.
I don't know how many times this needs to be repeated.
The case was already in court. The NFL tried to have the case thrown out claiming a lack of evidence. Kaepernick's team fought that attempt by showing the evidence they had.
The arbitrator allowed the suit to proceed to trial and rejected the NFL's attempt to throw the case out. I will repeat this again. A billion dollar company tried to throw the case out, failed, and the arbitrator decided that there was enough evidence that the NFL colluded against Kaepernick to allow this to proceed.
That means there was evidence. This is beyond dispute or argument. It is a 100% fact. Someone, somewhere, sent Kap's legal team some kind of evidence of collusion. It doesn't mean that the case would have decided in Kap's favor, but there was already evidence in Kaepernick's possession prior to discovery and depositions.
Have you read any of the material in the depositions? Stephen Ross outright says that they talked about this subject in league meetings, because the owners really are so dumb that they had to discuss this amongst each other. Jerry Jones was the one who introduced the subject. NFL owners are apparently as dumb as a lot of people think the players are.
They made Kap a godfather offer because that's better than losing even more. They may not have lost, but something made the NFL think they would. You don't get rich by giving away money for every bogus lawsuit.