The NFL and Colin Kaepernick had agreed that the workout would remain confidential.

"We as the NFL are not going public with this," a Kaepernick team member recalls being told on the call. "But we cannot control the 32 teams."

NFL writers began receiving a text message from the league almost immediately after the call to be on the lookout for an important email, which led many to believe it would pertain to Antonio Brown. 

"They didn't give the 32 NFL teams a heads-up, but they gave the media one?" a Kaepernick source says. "Once they betrayed us on the confidentiality agreement, we knew what this was."