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Following up on the ongoing story. ... NFL Network's Rand Getlin, citing a source informed of the situation, first reported Thursday that Colin Kaepernick's agents have requested permission from the San Francisco 49ers to seek a trade.

ESPN quickly joined in on the fun, prompting Profootballtalk.com's Mike Florio to suggest that Kaepernick's agents have intentionally gone public with their desire. And that makes the timing of the reports very interesting.

After all, it was just Thursday morning that new head coach Chip Kelly told reporters at the NFL Scouting Combine that he and Kaepernick were on the same page. In fact, Kelly said that Kaepernick "wants to be (in San Francisco)" and that Kelly never wanted to come to the 49ers in order to get rid of the quarterback.

“I don’t know what the narrative is that, ‘Is he on the team? Is he not on the team?’” Kelly told Matt Maiocco of CSNBayArea.com. “It’s never been a question. I’m excited to work with Colin. I’ve never thought that, ‘Hey, I’m going to go to San Francisco and he’s not going to be there.’ I don’t know why everybody else looks at it that way, either. ... Kap’s really good. He had the ball on the 5-yard line, taking the team in to win the Super Bowl. You can just look at the tape and know how talented he is. Our job is acquiring talent, not getting rid of talent.”

This came the day after general manager Trent Baalke stood at the same podium and told the world that Kaepernick will be on the roster beyond April 1 and that he will compete with Blaine Gabbert to be the team's starting quarterback.

Indeed, Kelly went on to suggest today that the important thing for Kaepernick in the short term is to get healthy so that he can put forth his best effort in both getting the offense down and competing with Gabbert.

As Florio noted, whether Kaepernick’s agents have actually requested permission to seek a trade or have simply told reporters that they have, the cat is now out of the bag — if it wasn’t already. Before the Super Bowl, the New York Daily News reported that Kaepernick wants out and that he’d like to play for the Jets.

According to NFL Network insider Ian Rapoport, Kaepernick and his representatives have not yet received permission from the team to seek a trade.

As NFL.com pointed out, the news raises plenty of questions.

How will the 49ers respond? Have they been talking up their attachment to Kaepernick publicly as leverage for trade talks that they suspected were coming?

The answers to those and other questions remain unanswered for now. The one certainty is we can go ahead and add this to the list of off-season NFL soap operas.

It's one we'll undoubtedly be following closely over the coming weeks.