San Francisco 49ers: Colin Kaepernick Ranked 18th Among Starting Quarterbacks

There’s nothing to get the offseason blood boiling like a ranking of quarterbacks, and that’s what ESPN has provided. By polling a group of 35 NFL insiders who were given anonymity—eight personnel directors, six general managers, four head coaches, five offensive coordinators, five defensive coordinators, three salary-cap managers, two ex-GMs, two ex-head coaches and one offensive assistant coach—they split starting quarterbacks into four tiers.

For San Francisco 49ers fans, the most relevant point is where they ranked Colin Kaepernick. Last year, the same survey had Kaepernick ranked 14th, at the bottom of “Tier 2”, which is defined as quarterbacks who are “good enough to figure prominently into a championship equation” but are “less consistent and need more help” than the best quarterbacks in the game.

This year, Kaepernick fell to 18th, at the top of Tier 3—or, to be more specific, he fell from an average ranking of 2.5 to 2.94, which implies that he fell from having half of the evaluators tab him as a Tier 2 player to having nearly everyone agree he’s a Tier 3. Tier 3 quarterbacks are “good enough to start, but need lots of support, making it tougher to contend at the highest level.”

One personnel director probably best summed up Kaepernick in the article when he was quoted as saying the following:

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[Jim] Harbaugh allowed him to get exposed a little by trying to have him win, to be the centerpiece of the offense instead of what he does naturally – running. He showed his arm strength, but also his inaccuracy as a thrower. That is not going to get better. He cannot be a 2 by being a dropback QB.

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A head coach put it a little more bluntly:

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He has unique ability, but having played him more than once, I never felt like he could beat you from the pocket, and I still feel that way.

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For the record, the seven head coaches who have faced Kaepernick more than once are Bruce Arians, Mike Smith, Ron Rivera, Mike McCarthy, Sean Payton, Pete Carroll and Jeff Fisher.

Mike Sando, who compiled the data, provided us with a breakdown of the votes. Last year, Kaepernick had 14 second-tier votes, 12 third-tier votes and one fourth-tier vote (“unproven” or “not expected to last in the lineup all season”). This year, only five of the evaluators were confident enough to put Kaepernick in the second tier, with 27 placing him in the third tier and three having him in the fourth group. A general consensus seems to have been reached among NFL evaluators.

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There’s no doubt in my mind that Kaepernick’s 2014 was an example of a Tier 3 season. Kaepernick, being fit into that square-peg role by the 49ers’ offensive playcalling, saw his QBR drop for the second consecutive season, going from 71.8 to 68.6 to 55.9. His yards per attempt dropped, his interceptions rose—in almost, but not all, metrics you can use to evaluate quarterbacks, Kaepernick dropped off last season. You can put a lot of the blame on other players—poor offensive line play and poor hands from his receivers being two of the biggest ones—but quarterbacks in higher tiers are able to succeed without needing excellent support at all levels. 

However, these rankings aren’t supposed to be of the 2014 season, but of the team going forward. There’s certainly a lot of uncertainty surrounding Kaepernick, thanks to his off-season work, the addition of a deep threat like Torrey Smith and the introduction of a new coaching staff.

The possible range of Kaepernick’s 2015 performance feels much wider than that of more proven quarterbacks like Aaron Rodgers or Matt Cassel. There’s the possibility of him bouncing back up to the levels he showed when he was first in the NFL, which could see him being a top-five quarterback. There’s also the possibility that Kaepernick has been exposed as a limited player and could plummet down to the Geno Smith and Kyle Orton level.

Very little would come as a shock for Kaepernick’s development in 2015, thanks to the large number of unknowns surrounding him. He’s only had two-and-a-half seasons as a starter, after all.

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In reality, I do expect him to bounce back into that Tier 2 range, with Tier 1 seeming like far too much to expect in one season. This is very subjective of course, but there’s reason to be optimistic surrounding his development, considering the players who had similar situations to Kaepernick in the past.

Should Kaepernick be 18th, then? It seems alright from a shoulder-shrugging, “who knows what will happen” perspective, but maybe we can do a little better than that. I’d love to have some statistical basis for the rest of these rankings but, with my crystal ball in the shop, we’ll have to make do with my own subjective opinions of players.

There are some quarterbacks who I feel have to be ranked ahead of Kaepernick for the ranking system to really have any merit. Thanks to their track record and recent success, arguing that Kaepernick will be better in 2015 than any of these players is a hard pill to swallow. They are, in no particular order, Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady, Andrew Luck, Ben Roethlisberger, Peyton Manning, Drew Brees, Philip Rivers, Russell Wilson, Tony Romo and Matt Ryan. These make up 10 of ESPN’s top-11 quarterbacks, coincidentally, with only Joe Flacco breaking up a perfect 10-for-10 agreement in my case.

There are also some quarterbacks who you really can’t have ahead of Kaepernick for the ranking system to make sense. Not only would I include the two unproven rookies in this list, but I’d also place three players who played last season, but poorly. Besides Jameis Winston and Marcus Mariota, this includes Blake Bortles, Brian Hoyer and Geno Smith.

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So, that places Kaepernick somewhere between 11th and 27th on my quarterback rankings. It seems to me to be pretty certain that Kaepernick will fall somewhere in that range—and the average of that range is 19th, just below ESPN’s 18th—but maybe we can hack that list down a bit more. The further we cut that range down, the less sure you can really be about performance, but we'll get closer to one solid number. If you see anyone ranking Kaepernick as a top-10 or bottom-five quarterback for 2015, you can probably dismiss the list.

Now, with increasing levels of nitpickiness, how can we cut this down more?

Eli Manning and Joe Flacco have rings to point to, and Flacco got his in a head-to-head matchup with Kaepernick. Add that to years of experience, as well as no signs of significant decline just yet, and I’d place them above Kaepernick at the moment. I wouldn’t have Flacco in the top 10, like ESPN has him, but there’s still range in the upper teens ahead of Kaepernick.

Kaepernick’s best ability as a passer is incredible arm strength, but he’s outmatched there by Matthew Stafford. It’s hard to know what Kaepernick would do with a player as transcendant as Calvin Johnson, but it’s hard to argue that Kaepernick’s raw strengths as a passer outshine Stafford’s, so I’ll place Stafford higher.

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Kaepernick is a threat with the ball in his hands as a runner, coming up with the wave of read-option looks in 2012. Another player in that group was Robert Griffin III, but while Kaepernick has continued to have success—never having worse than an 8-8 record—Griffin has plummeted. Injuries to his legs and a seeming lack of grasping NFL passing concepts has him below Kaepernick in my book.

Matt Cassel and Josh McCown are backup-quality players starting for teams without better options. While Kaepernick might fall down to that level after another bad season, he’s at least a team’s preferred option rather than simply the best available. I have to rank Kaepernick higher at this point.

That cuts our range down to 14th through 24th without too much argument, I hope. Any ranking that places him somewhere in that range wouldn’t brook too much argument from me, at least. Everything after this point is really cutting against the grain.

Cam Newton shows up on Kaepernick’s list of similarity scores, just like Russell Wilson does—all of them are dual-threat quarterbacks who are still going through the final steps of their initial development process. 

While Newton is fairly clearly a full step ahead of Kaepernick at this point, I’d argue Newton took a half-step ahead of Kaepernick last year. The two-time Pro Bowler still raises a lot of question marks with his decision making and accuracy, but his legs elevate him to a solid NFL starter—sound familiar? I’ve spent a lot of time watching Newton this offseason as I’ve been covering the Carolina Panthers, and if forced to pick, I’d take Newton right now over Kaepernick.

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The Arizona Cardinals actually looked like a somewhat decent offense when Carson Palmer was behind center. He couldn’t be further in type from Kaepernick—an aging quarterback with roughly no mobility coming off of a torn ACL. If he’s healthy—and a bad ACL will hurt him less than more mobile players—then I think I’d take his experience and accuracy over Kaepernick for 2015.

Is sure-but-safe better than Kaepernick’s more boom-or-bust play style? That’s hard to say, but after a season when Kaepernick threw zero fourth-quarter touchdowns and four fourth-quarter interceptions, a player like Alex Smith, who simply will not lose you games, seems more and more enticing. I had Kaepernick firmly above Smith before his 2014 season, but the poor results last year would have me select Smith until knowing what a new offense will do for Kaepernick’s skill set.

While Kaepernick’s numbers have dropped every year from 2012 to 2014, Ryan Tannehill is on the exact opposite trend. He started out well below Kaepernick, but he’s seen his completion percentage, yards, touchdowns and quarterback rating increase from year to year from 2012 to 2014. Because of their relative starting points, they’re only now meeting in the middle, as it were—Kaepernick in 2012 was much better than Tannehill, Kaepernick in 2013 was solidly better than Tannehill and Kaepernick in 2014 might or might not have been better than Tannehill. I can follow trendlines, so I’d have to put Tannehill ahead of Kaepernick at this point.

Nick Foles had an amazing half-season in 2013, throwing 317 passes with only two interceptions. He didn’t really follow that up in 2014, and there are some rumblings that he might be a product of Chip Kelly’s system, rather than a solid quarterback on his own merits. I think his arm strength is lacking and he doesn’t have great field awareness, though his accuracy trumps Kaepernick’s. All in all, though, Kaepernick is solidly ahead of Foles on my list.

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The ESPN rankers were very high on Derek Carr, ranking him as the best of the 2014 rookie class, ahead of Teddy Bridgewater. I don’t see it the same way. Bridgewater managed to lead a team quite well despite the sudden and unexpected loss of Adrian Peterson, around whom the entire offense was built. Carr averaged just 5.5 yards per attempt last season, the lowest amount in the NFL. It remains to be seen what he can do when not checking down all the time. I’ll take Kaepernick’s proven level of performance over Carr's when it comes to the battle of the Bay Area quarterbacks.

That leaves five quarterbacks between 18th and 22th—Colin Kaepernick, Sam Bradford, Teddy Bridgewater, Jay Cutler and Andy Dalton. I sort and re-sort these quarterbacks on a regular basis, and any ranking can really be heavily impacted by which film I watched more recently or my mood that day. This is where I feel it’s safest to rank Kaepernick entering the 2015 season.

A realistic optimistic projection can have him jump into the upper teens—a second-tier quarterback who can get the most out of solid players and lead the 49ers back to the postseason.

A realistic pessimistic projection can have him drop into the mid-twenties—a fourth-tier quarterback who isn’t going to set records for futility but still needs to be replaced if the 49ers want to contend in the future.

The middle ground prediction has him just about where ESPN ranked him—it turns out, if you poll a bunch of experts and average their results, they’ll come up with a decent set of rankings. Ranking Kaepernick 18th or 19th seems entirely justified at this point.

Bryan Knowles is a featured columnist for Bleacher Report, covering the San Francisco 49ers. Follow him @BryKno on Twitter.