"We spoke with his representative," Luck said of Kap. "And the salary requirements that were broached in that conversation were exorbitant and certainly out of our range."

Luck claims the conversations with Kap's camp all went down about a year ago ... but he says talks with the QB after initial interest on the XFL's side never got far at all.

"We have some pretty significant salary restrictions, you know," Luck said in an interview with NPR over the weekend. "We're a start-up league, so we want to make sure that we can be fiscally responsible and fiscally prudent."

"And the, you know, salary requirements that some folks, you know, shared with us were in our case exorbitant, so we, you know, couldn't go down that path."

Of course, Kaepernick made over $40 MILLION in his 6 NFL seasons. Reportedly, the average salary for XFL players is roughly $55,000.