kaepernick is a great example of a qb with the ability to run who is still all about the team winning and not showboating for himself. just like tebow. stick with him and they will go far

poor Alex Smith. He finally becomes good at football and he's still probably going to lose his job

Plz start Smith

The argument for Smith is that you know what he's capable of and it's not bad, certainly good enough to win a superbowl with given how good the rest of the team is.

Kaepernick had a good game but isn't necessarily a starting caliber QB at this point.

Starting CK creates variance. I think if Harbaugh had to decide and lock it in now, it would be a bad move. At this point I'd try to see more of CK to see if he's for real or not.

icwudt

lol at comparing brady/bledsoe to kaepernick/smith, not even in the same ballpark

Yeah real ballsy coaching move to sit the QB with internal bleeding.

And start Kap, obv.

If the two were flip flopped people like Warren Moon would be screaming racism.

The fact that Smith has a concussion makes this decision easy. You start Kaepernick next week so Smith can have additional time to recover/"recover" then evaluate from there.

(fwiw if you have to lock it in for the rest of the season now I think it's easily Smith. Fortunately, that's not the case.)

veteran guy QB gets hurt, younger player comes in as injury replacement, outplays him, veteran QB gets healthy, controversy rages over whether or not the veteran can lose his job over injury, young guy is untested vs "battle hardened" veteran

lol?

Not surprisingly the more casual fans on this board(don't mean that in a condescending way, just referring to those who aren't regular contributors in the weekly threads) are greatly overrating how good Alex Smith is...

He is not good at all, people. The reason why his numbers aren't horrible the past two years is because Harbaugh is one of the best coaches in the league, and he has changed the offense to deal with a "game manager." He has instructed Smith to take very few chances and to always err on the side of caution by taking a sack/throwing the ball away instead of taking any risk. This works decently when you have the defense and supporting offensive cast to carry your team. However, thats thing thing- SF has an awesome all around team. For example, most people probably don't realize that PFF ranked SF the #1 o-line in all of football so far this year.

So yes, SF has been able to still be successful by having Smith take no chances whatsoever and letting the talent around him shine....but theres a real chance that Kapernick is a legit talent and can be a mid tier starting QB(lets say as good as someone like Joe Flacco for example) or better by playoff time if he gets more reps and continues to improve. And imo SF's supporting cast is so good that this improvement at the QB position would make them the best team in the league. Moreover, Kapernick showed enough in that one game that I think his downside is still around how good we already know Smith is(again, hes not that good...this media narrative about his improvement and his "protection of the football" is almost exclusively due to Harbaugh).

I don't think this is a particularly close decision. I think this is yet another case where many old-time coaches are afraid of "taking chances" in the same way that they are afraid to go for it when its mathematically correct on 4th down. I forget the name of the cognitive bias, but I've heard it discussed with regards to blackjack before- Even though some people know that its mathematically correct to hit on some cases(when you have 16 and dealer shows a 9 for example), people are inclined to take the passive route because if they take the aggressive(yet mathematically correct) route and don't succeed they feel as if they contributed to their failure moreso, whereas if they take the passive route and fail they can just blame the cards(or their players in the case of NFL decisions).

I also think that theres a clear trend of QB prospects developing much quicker than in the past. This is very clear to see with young QBs playing in year 1(and succeeding) much more than in the past. I don't think this is limited to football either- guys like Kyrie Irving and Anthony Davis are studs from day 1 in the NBA too. I think its the pre HS/HS/NCAA development process becoming more and more optimal for elite prospects to the point where they are now pro league-ready by the time they hit the pros. I think that NFL coaches have been too slow to adjust for this, and they hang on to prospects like Alex Smith and Mark Sanchez for far too long. I think that in today's NFL its optimal to decide quickly on whether or not these guys "have it" or not. Smith doesn't "have it", we already know this and its holding back a title contender to keep pretending that he might suddenly discover it.

i agree with every word of assani's post

unfortunately it's also assani, so he could be trying to be 100% wrong

hmmmm

No. Bledsoe missed 14 games because of his injury. It's not even close to he same thing. There was no decision to be made.

Or am I remembering this wrong?

Edit: Looks like Bledsoe wasn't ready to come back until week 9 or 10. So still, not the same.

i like to bash alex smith as much as the next guy, but i think he at least deserves a little bit of credit for how he's played this year. not saying i'd stick with him necessarily. But in the last 5.5 quarters he's played he's 25-27 for 304 yards, 4 TDs and 0 INTs. Sanchez couldn't do that if there was no defense on the field

alex smith is not a good qb. he just isn't. he's decent but he's not OMG YOU CAN'T BENCH HIM!

his AYPA is as high as it is because his completion % is as high as it is. his competition % is as high as it is because he throws the fewest deep passes in the NFL. 13.8% of his passes are > 15 yards attempts, ranks 34th out of 34 qualified qbs. (kaepernick: 26.5% deep passes this season, 65.3% overall completion percentage to smith's 70. granted, it's only over 50 attempts, but it's still night and day)

harbaugh is amazing enough at what he does to make smith look capable. smith is a below average NFL qb helped greatly by an elite head coach

Srm speaks the truth.

throw this out. it means ~nothing

advanced metrics say smith is replaceable

eye test says smith is replaceable

the last 2 times he played the giants AT HOME say smith is replaceable

pity over the fact that the guy got shat on for 8 years and finally gets a prolonged shot to work with an elite offensive mind says "give the guy a shot"

Sanchez put up 19/27 for 266 yards, 3 TD, 1 INT in leading his team to 48 points in week 1.

Selective sample sizes aside, it doesn't change the fact that a deeper statistical analysis reveals that Alex Smith is not a very good NFL QB, which is made even more true by adjusting for the talent around him on offense(and the talented D which often gives him the ball in good starting field position).

I still maintain that this "rather lose passively than lose due to correctly applied aggression" cognitive bias is playing a huge role here. People look at the possible downside of Kapernick sucking and it "ruining their season" and want to take the safe route. In reality the correct thing to do is to evaluate the overall EV of both options, and when doing so I don't believe its a particularly close decision.

what? it's a plenty relevant statistic in the context of Kaepernick being reputed to have a much stronger arm and one of the discussed upsides of Kaepernick being an ability to "open up the offense". idk if he's gonna continue to throw 26.5% deep going forward, but it certainly "means something" in comparison to throwing 13% deep or 20% deep or whatever.

Smith has spent most of the year on the field with a big lead, whereas ~40% of Kap's snaps were in that Rams game in which he had to make up 17 points in the 4th quarter. Add that to the fact that we're talking about a statistically insignificant sample with error bars from here to Birmingham and you can, in my estimation, safely throw it out of the equation.

Let me be clear, I think it's likely that Kap will be throwing deep more than Smith, but that the data which IRM cited does not make it more or less likely.

lolwat

smith has played in 3 blowout wins and 5.5 close games/losses. only 64 of his 217 attempts came in those blowouts

The Patriots were coming off a 5-11 season and started off 0-2 with Bledsoe, and Brady played well for a decent chunk of games before getting the nod. Creating variance was favorable for them, and they had a larger sample of evidence to decide that Brady was better. The decision was made especially easy by the fact that they never had much superbowl equity with Bledsoe, so the possibiilty of Brady being better now and especially the kurtosis that he'd be good going forward dwarfed the hell out of any risk that came with benching Drew.

This is a much harder decision since the 49ers had such a strong hand with Smith. It's difficult to say with confidence that CK maximizes their SB equity simply because he had one good game. Especially from a coach's perspective this is much less cut and dry, IMO almost every coach sticks with Brady > Bledsoe, very few go with CK > Smith.