Update: Kaepernick is still not signed as of Aug. 30, and anonymous NFL execs keep spouting the same things. So we’re bumping this piece from Aug. 14 again. -Ed.
It’s important that we have an honest discussion about why Colin Kaepernick still has not signed with an NFL team. To have that conversation, we have to examine everything, on and off the field, critically and objectively.
My job in this honest conversation is to talk about his play on the field. I've made clear how I feel about his protest, so that wouldn't be breaking any new ground. While I have also talked about his level of play last season, this is my first time actually writing a breakdown of Kaepernick's 2016 film.
When I watch film and write about it, I feel like it’s my job to educate readers about what I saw. To do that as best as I can, I try to avoid a bunch of technical talk, and I put everything in plain English so even a casual fan can understand what I'm trying to convey. I think it’s even more important to do that when talking about quarterback play. Many times, quarterbacks get put on such a pedestal that after reading a write-up about one of them you may come away thinking they are doing quantum physics every weekend, when that is clearly not the case.
With Kaepernick, there’s been so much misinformation put out there by "anonymous sources" that I want to take things a step further and talk about some facts that add context to his 2016 performance. I hope this can help to reset the thoughts of a lot of people who think they know how he played even though they haven't watched a lick of film.
I'm not going to try get everyone who reads this to believe Kaepernick is the greatest quarterback evaaaaaa, but rather that his play on the field last season would be worth at least a roster spot in the NFL — if not a chance at a starting position — if all this was about merit.
So let’s start off with some facts.
Fact: Kaepernick has had three offensive coordinators in the last three seasons. He had Greg Roman in 2014, Geep Chryst in 2015, and Curtis Modkins last season.
Fact: None of those offensive coordinators ran the same system.
Fact: Kaepernick only started eight games in 2015.
Fact: Kaepernick’s completion percentages in his last three starts of 2015 were 59.3, 54.2, and 48.8 percent, respectively.
Fact: Kaepernick’s 2015 season ended when he had surgery to repair a torn labrum in his left shoulder.
Fact: He also had surgery on the thumb of his throwing hand and his left knee (the one he plants with) early last offseason.
Fact: Kaepernick wasn't able to practice much before training camp last year and didn't see on-the-field action until the third game of the preseason.
Fact: In spite of all of that, the Broncos tried to trade for Kaepernick last offseason to be their starting quarterback.
To recap, Kaepernick was rehabbing most of last offseason at a time when he was having to learn his third offense in three years. His injuries still hadn't healed enough at the beginning of last season for his head coach to feel comfortable starting him. So Kaepernick sat for the first five weeks, until coach Chip Kelly decided it was time to start him in Week 6 against the Buffalo Bills.
I am not going to be so tedious as to go game by game breaking down every throw. However, since most of the questions surrounding Kaepernick center around his ability to throw the football, I will focus on how he performed overall with the passing game last year.
Before I do that, how about we dispel some of the things you may have heard or maybe even assumed about his play last year.
One thing I've learned from several years of writing about the NFL is that when someone says they are an "NFL fan," what they usually mean is that they are a fan of the particular team they follow. Oh, they can usually tell you everything from Genesis to Revelation about their team, but aside from their team's opponents they typically aren't very knowledgeable about other teams around the league. Let’s be honest: Unless it’s your shitty team, most folks aren't investing much time into watching a bad team play unless their team is playing them.
Let's be real here: Raise your hand if you are not a 49ers fan and watched more than two full games of them last year.
...
Some of y’all are lying, but that's OK!
Anyway, let’s do some quick myth busting about how Kaepernick played based on his tape.
"You have to design an offense to fit Kaepernick, which is why he wouldn't make for a good backup."
You know, most of the people who say this can never answer if you ask them to explain what they mean. Besides the fact that many, many teams have incorporated a lot of the college spread concepts that some folks think are the only things that Kaepernick can do well, there is also the fact that the overwhelming majority of passes that Kap threw last year came from the pocket.
No, seriously.
I had a former GM tweet to me that Kaepernick was basically a quarterback who only excelled at throwing on the move. I wonder how that squares with the fact that Kap only ran 38 bootleg/half roll/waggle plays in 11 games.
Or the fact that of those 38 plays, only 30 of them resulted in a pass attempt.
Or that of those 30 pass attempts, he completed only 16 balls for a 53 percent completion percentage, well below his overall completion rate of 59.2 percent for the season.
Mind you, Kaepernick attempted 331 passes last season.
Oh, and 282 of those passes came while he was in the pocket.
"Well they probably had him throwing a lot of screens to get his completion percentage up."
Yeah, not so much.
I combined all of the screens, speed sweeps, and shovel passes that he threw last season. You wanna know how many passes that added up to?
Guess.
No, really. Guess.
Twenty.
Two. Zero.
Out of 331 passes, Kap had a grand total of 20 "gimmie" passes.
And three of those weren't completed because they were knocked down at the line.
I don’t know, man, that kinda sounds like a "normal" passing game to me.
I’m just sayin’.
"He took way too many sacks though."
I mean, I'm not going to shit on his offensive line even though it wasn’t all that good. And I'm not really sure whether the 36 sacks Kaepernick took last year would be considered a lot. What I do know is that most of those sacks were due to nobody being open and the pocket breaking down, rather than Kaepernick just holding onto the ball.
He did better with his movement in the pocket and keeping his eyes downfield looking for available options than he had for most of his career last season. I also know from watching the film that he had 35 scrambles on passing plays that resulted in positive yards, including 24 which went for 5 yards or more.
Sometimes it was a lot more than 5 yards:
I'm not saying those scrambles offset all the sacks. But if it’s me, I think I can accept those 36 sacks with that context in mind.
"All he threw were short routes, even if they weren't screens."
OK, so this one has at least some validity to it, but again, it needs context.
First of all, who in the hell was Kaepernick going to be throwing deep to as far as his wide receivers go?
Wait, before you answer that, imagine someone just put a Draco to your head and promised to blow it smooth off if you couldn't name the 49ers’ top three wide receivers from last season.
A bunch of y’all just whispered a final prayer.
Look, one thing I don't see nearly enough is folks admitting that the 49ers had a bunch of No. 2 and No. 3 receivers last year at best, without any guy at the position who could credibly be considered a true No. 1 receiver.
Torrey Smith was supposed to be the big-play guy, but you rarely see him pulling away from anybody on film, and with his six drops in Kaepernick's 11 starts, he might as well have had feet for hands:
Jeremy Kerley had only two drops, but he couldn't beat man coverage to save his life, and he was not a guy who was going to make a lot of contested catches last season.
Quinton Patton was basically the No. 3 guy and still managed five drops during those 11 games. To say he was an unreliable option in the passing game is probably being generous.
The truth of the matter is the only real weapon Kaepernick had at his disposal in the passing game was tight end Vance McDonald, but he came out of the Jets game in the second quarter in Week 14 with a shoulder injury and never touched the field again the rest of the season.
The backup tight end, Garrett Celek, while decent at getting open, also had six drops.
I've said previously that at times Kaepernick would've been better off with literal garbage cans on the field rather than his eligible receivers, and perhaps that was a bit harsh. However, when you have a situation where guys are dropping the ball and rarely making any tough catches, damn near any quarterback is going to have a hard time succeeding.
At the same time, while Kaepernick did not throw a lot of deep balls out wide, he did throw plenty of deep digs, corner routes, and post routes.
Those count as big plays, too, no?
I'm not making the case that Kaepernick was the best thing since sliced bread last season. He certainly still had some things he needed to work on. I charted 31 of his passes last season that were obviously bad, meaning off target, and early on he seemed to have some issues throwing to his left. Most of that had to do with mechanics and footwork, stuff he’s had a full offseason of being healthy to work on.
What’s most important about how Kaepernick played last year is recognizing how much he improved over the course of the season.
The simplest comparison is to look at his completion percentages his last three games. He posted completion rates of 60.5, 75.7, and 77.3 percent. Contrast that with his aforementioned last three starts of 2015. But even that eye-popping difference doesn't come close to informing you about how much the guy improved.
In his first two starts, against the Bills and Bucs, Kaepernick threw seven obviously bad balls. In his last three games — against the Falcons, Rams, and Seahawks, three teams with pretty good defenses — he threw only a total of six.
When you watch him go through his progressions in those last three games, he does it so much quicker than he did in the first two that it might as well be night and day. The 49ers might have only won one of those three games, but I think anybody who actually watched the film, even a novice, would be hard-pressed to say he didn't look like an NFL starter:
And then there was the Miami game:
Listen, man, Kaepernick put his team on his back in that game and damn near at least tied it at the end all by himself. Yeah, he had the one interception, but that was on a drop by Smith, a ball that went through his hands on a drag route. (Here is where I mention one of Kaepernick's four interceptions on the season was on a bootleg. But you know, that's all he runs — LOL.)
The rest of the game, the guy was putting in major work:
I'm talking 63 percent completion rate on 46(!) throws, even though there were five drops. He had to throw the ball away five other times, and only one of those passes was a screen.
I know I said I wanted to focus on his passing, but I just have to mention he ran for over 110 yards that game as well?
And I'm telling you, as good as those stats sound, they still don't do his performance that day justice.
But for Ndamukong Suh destroying the right guard at the end of the game and forcing Kaepernick into what was essentially a game-ending scramble with nobody open, this game was more than likely going to overtime at the very least because of his performance. That's why it’s so problematic to talk about wins and losses as a measurement of a QB's worth because if the rest of the team was on his level that Sunday, they would've have blown the doors off the Dolphins.
You can't really throw out the Bears game because, hell, it did happen. Aside from that disaster, Kaepernick's season was one of steady progress on the field. By the end of last season, he was throwing the football and going through his reads better than I have ever seen him do in his career to that point.
One thing that also stood out to me was ball placement. In previous years, it was enough for Kaepernick just to throw a catchable ball to his eligible receivers. But last season, I noticed him throwing guys away from the nearest defender:
That is a small thing you can only see from watching film, but it makes one hell of a difference when you talk about cutting down on PBUs and not getting your receivers killed on a regular basis.
I will leave it up to you to decide why he had a team like Denver, coming off a Super Bowl win, trying to trade for him last offseason after his miserable 2015 performance. This year after he played markedly better, especially at the end of the 2016 season, and threw the ball better than he ever has in his life, the guy hears nothing but crickets.
I think I'm going to end things here because at the very least I think with the GIFs and the context and the stats, I’ve made a strong case to any impartial observer that Kaepernick played well enough last year that he should be on an NFL roster. That is my only aim.
You don't have to agree with me that he could easily be starting somewhere like with the Jets or the Browns, but if you are still convinced he "isn't good enough," then I'm not sure you could ever be convinced otherwise.
All I really want is for us to be honest about why he isn't on a roster right now. Then we can debate whether he’s blackballed or not, which is the much more pertinent debate to have.
Unfortunately, the misinformation about Kaepernick’s play started early this offseason and has shown no signs of slowing down. Myself and other analysts who have spoken out about his actual film have been fighting an uphill battle.
So for once I'm going to ask you, the reader, to do something I've never asked before: Even if I haven't necessarily convinced you, but you think this was fair assessment, I want you to share it with your friends who also enjoy football so they can be more fully informed about Kaepernick's play as well.
The more people I can get to recognize his ability, the more likely we can actually start talking about the real issue here.