San Francisco 49ers: Is Colin Kaepernick the Problem on Offense?

Let’s get this out of the way to begin with—Colin Kaepernick will be the starting quarterback for the 2015 San Francisco 49ers.  There are no other quarterbacks under contract for that season, and it would be financially impractical to part from Kaepernick’s contract, anyway.

That was a feature, not a bug, when Kaepernick’s new contract was signed this offseason.  Here were Kaepernick’s career stats entering this season:

GS	Cmp	Att	Cmp%	Yds	TD	TD%	Int	INT%	Y/A	Rate	Sk
23	382	639	59.8%	5,046	31	4.9%	11	1.7%	7.9	93.8	55

Those numbers compare well to any other young quarterback in football.  The quarterback rating is especially impressive.  Among Hall of Fame quarterbacks, only Otto Graham and Dan Marino had higher quarterback ratings over their first three seasons than Kaepernick did.  Include all quarterbacks with at least 500 passing attempts, and Kaepernick ranks sixth of all time, behind Graham, Marino, Kurt Warner, Russell Wilson and Nick Foles.  That’s two Hall of Famers, one first-time finalist, and two of the top young quarterbacks in football today.

That has not been the case this season, to say the least.  Here are Kaepernick’s numbers in 2014, as well as his splits from Weeks 1-7 (before the bye week) and Weeks 9-14 (after the bye week):

Well, his numbers this year certainly aren’t anywhere near his career numbers leading up to this point, but I think you can see a clear trend—something happened to cause his production to plummet after the bye week.

Weeks	Cmp	Att	Cmp%	Yds	TD	TD%	INT	INT%	Y/A	Rate	Sk
1-14	248	409	60.6%	2,019	16	3.9%	10	2.4%	7.1	85.1	43
1-7	143	224	63.8%	1,719	11	4.9%	5	2.2%	7.7	94.3	19
9-14	105	185	59.8%	1,191	5	2.7%	5	2.7%	6.4	74.0	24

Kaepernick’s numbers before the bye week are comparable to—and maybe even slightly better than—his numbers from 2011-2013.  He was more accurate and throwing for more yards per game than his career averages.  Part of this was volume—you can see his yards-per-attempt figure dropped slightly and his interception rate rose slightly—but all signs point to a quarterback at least treading water, if not making a giant leap forward.

More advanced stats back that up, as well.  Kaepernick ranked 20th among all passers (subscription required) on Pro Football Focus’ rating from Weeks 1-8 with a plus-0.2 rating.  That’s obviously not great or mind-blowing, but it’s certainly solid.  Russell Wilson was only a plus-0.1, for example.  With a stellar defense, the 49ers can win with an average quarterback.

Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press

However, after the bye week, things quite clearly plummet.  Kaepernick’s completion percentage drops back down to his career average, and everything else shoots into negative territory.  All of a sudden, he’s not topping 200 yards passing a game, and he's throwing more interceptions and fewer touchdowns than at any point in his career so far.  His yards-per-attempt number drops by almost a yard and a half, so when he is completing passes, they’re dump-offs and short routes.

Again, this is backed up by the advanced stats.  Over the last six weeks, Pro Football Focus has Kaepernick as the fourth-worst quarterback in football (subscription required), ahead of only Blake Bortles, Kyle Orton and Brian Hoyer.  Perhaps even more concerning, he’s even getting a negative grade when running with the ball, which is his trump card that most quarterbacks can’t match.

What on Earth happened during the bye week?  How has a promising young quarterback turned in the past six weeks?  There are several possible hypotheses:

• Kaepernick’s mechanics and tendencies have degraded, and opposing defenses have figured him out.
• The team around him has collapsed, and Kaepernick’s not a good enough player at this point to overcome that.
• Kaepernick has played a tougher than normal set of opponents, and he's done poorly because of that.
• The stats are lying, and Kaepernick’s performance hasn’t actually dropped off.
• This is random variation, and not very predictive.

I think we can scratch the fourth hypothesis off the list immediately.  It doesn’t pass the eye test at all.  Kaepernick has looked uncertain and slow in the passing game over the last six weeks, taking too long to find receivers and occasionally locking in on a pass, regardless of what’s going on around him.  I don’t think anyone can reasonably say Kaepernick’s performance hasn’t declined.

We can also cross off the third hypothesis.  Coming into Week 14, here were the DVOA ratings of the six defenses the 49ers have most recently faced:

• St. Louis: -1.7 percent (10th-best)
• New Orleans: 12.9 percent (31st-best)
• New York Giants: 7.5 percent (25th-best)
• Washington: 7.8 percent (26th-best)
• Seattle: -9.7 percent (sixth-best)
• Oakland: 4.5 percent (22nd-best)

If anything, that’s more concerning than the raw stats would indicate.  Four of the six opponents are outside the top 20 in defense.  Now, it’s true that coming into this week, Kaepernick had looked truly horrible only against the Rams and Seahawks, the two toughest opponents in the set, but he also looked horrible on Sunday against Oakland.  Yes, technically Oakland is the third-best defense there, but there’s a bit of a gap between the Rams and the Raiders.

Had Kaepernick just looked bad against St. Louis and Seattle, you could make excuses.  Of course the Rams’ stellar defensive line crushed the 49ers offensive line and so Kaepernick didn’t have any time to make decisions.  The Seahawks have made better quarterbacks than Kaepernick look foolish, so that makes sense, too.

But it’s not just two bad games sinking everything else, so you have to dismiss the “tough defenses” factor.

Could it be random variation?  It is only six games.  If you flip a coin six times, there’s a 1-in-64 chance that you’ll get six tails in a row.  That doesn’t mean it’s a bad coin; splits just sometimes happen.

Tony Avelar/Associated Press

On the other hand, we’re not talking about a bad month here—we’re talking about more than a third of a season where Kaepernick has put up crummy numbers.  While it’s true that that doesn’t necessarily mean that sort of performance will continue into the future—past performance doesn’t always predict future performance—it can’t just be hand-waved as a couple of bad days in a row.  This is an extended funk.

So that leaves us with two possibilities—Kaepernick has regressed, or the offense around him has regressed.  I think we’re looking at a little from column A, and a little from column B.  The problem is with the team’s execution on offense, which is incredibly difficult to separate out from the performance of the quarterback.

Here are the pre- and post-bye splits for all of San Francisco’s key offensive players, via Pro Football Focus stats:

Position	Player	Weeks 1-7	Weeks 9-14
QB	Colin Kaepernick	+0.2	-13.7
HB	Frank Gore	-0.2	-3.4
FB	Bruce Miller	-2.3	+3.2
WR	Michael Crabtree	-4.4	-2.7
WR	Anquan Boldin	+0.2	+3.2
TE	Vernon Davis	-9.8	-7.2
LT	Joe Staley	+2.7	+12.9
LG	Mike Iupati	+6.2	+3.0
C	D. Kilgore / M. Martin	+4.6	-10.6
RG	Alex Boone	-4.2	+7.1
RT	J. Martin / A. Davis	-6.8	-5.3

Some players can be sort of crossed out as not the problem here, thanks to positive play over the last six weeks.  Three-fifths of the offensive line—Staley, Iupati and Boone—have been playing quite well, for instance, and Anquan Boldin has been going as strong as ever.

You can’t blame the swoon on Michael Crabtree, Vernon Davis or the variable right tackle position, either.  All three positions were doing bad in the first half of the season, when Kaepernick was doing alright.  Call them supporting problems—poor play that Kaepernick was able to work around in one half of the season, and not in the second half.

That leaves two contributing causes to explain Kaepernick’s drop-off—the lack of continuity on the offensive line and the disappearance of Frank Gore and the running game.

Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press

With Marcus Martin suffering an injury at the end of the Oakland game, the 49ers might start their seventh different offensive line against Seattle this week.  Staley’s been his normal rock at left tackle, and Iupati’s been fine at left guard, but the other three positions have been in flux all season long.  This lack of continuity goes a long way toward explaining why Kaepernick has been sacked 43 times this season—most in the league, and just 12 short of his career total entering this year.

With Daniel Kilgore going out at midseason and replaced by rookie Marcus Martin, you’re also losing a bunch of experience right in the center of the line.  Remember, last season they had savvy veteran Jonathan Goodwin calling the shots at center.  While Kilgore and Martin have brighter futures than Goodwin does at this point, that is a big drop-off to absorb.  Martin’s only just turned 21 two weeks ago, so the lack of experience there could be significantly hurting the 49ers this season.

As for the run game, Frank Gore has gone from averaging 4.2 yards per attempt before the bye to 3.9 yards after it—a slight drop-off, but a significant one.  Gore’s first-half numbers puts him in LeSean McCoy territory; his second-half numbers are more Steven Jackson  They’re not running the ball significantly less often—46.4 percent of carries in one-score games before the bye, 45.4 percent after—but they are doing it less effectively.

My theory is that those two facts, along with some actual regression by Kaepernick, are the source of the 49ers’ offensive woes.  All three would be bad enough individually, but combined they serve to only strengthen one another.

Does the poor offensive line play cause Kaepernick to have less time to read the defense, and provide fewer running lanes for Gore, thereby harming both the run game and pass game?  Yes, it does.

Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press

Does the lessened running game mean that teams are putting more players in pass defense and pass rush, overwhelming the offensive line and taking away all of Kaepernick’s options?  Yes, it does.

Does Kaepernick’s lack of accuracy and increased turnover ratio mean that the 49ers find themselves in longer, less run-friendly situations, and overtax an already struggling offensive line?  Yes, it does.

Look at it this way.  Great quarterbacks actively increase the play of the players around them.  That’s what the Aaron Rodgers and Tom Bradys of the world do.  It’s patently obvious that Kaepernick is not, at this point, a great quarterback.

Very good quarterbacks find ways to win despite poor performance from players on their offense.  This is the Tony Romo and Philip Rivers style of quarterbacking.  I think we can say with fair degrees of certainty that Kaepernick is not, at this point, a very good quarterback.

Here’s the question, though: Is Kaepernick just a run-of-the-mill good quarterback?  This is the level of the Andy Daltons, the Eli Mannings and, yes, the Alex Smiths of the world.  These players are good enough to win you football games when the players around them are doing well.  When their supporting cast takes a nose dive, they tend to go with them.  They’re capable of putting up horrible games—see Manning’s performance against the 49ers this year, or Dalton’s Thursday Night Football disaster against Cleveland—but also capable of being an important cog on playoff and even Super Bowl teams.

Tony Avelar/Associated Press

The Colin Kaepernick of 2012 and 2013 was at least at this level.  I would even argue that the Colin Kaepernick of the first half of 2014 was at this level—look at his numbers and general performances.  Yes, he had a stinker against Denver just before the bye, but for most of the first half of the year, Kaepernick was ticking along alright, if not spectacularly.  With two years of at least “good” performance, I think this is where Kaepernick’s “true” skill lies at this point.

So, you can construct a narrative that makes sense.  Of course Kaepernick’s performance dropped off; the entire team spiraled downhill at the end of this season.  Inject some talent into the offense, have a healthier and more experienced offensive line next season and change the offensive philosophy, and there is every reason to believe Kaepernick will bounce back and be a good quarterback once again.  Call this the optimist’s narrative.

However, you can also construct the opposite narrative.  Perhaps defenses have figured out Kaepernick, and he’s falling off a Robert Griffin III-sized cliff.  Perhaps, like Vince Young or Gus Frerotte, we have a young player who peaked early and it’s all downhill from here. 

Remember, every single offensive play runs through the quarterback.  There is no single player with a greater impact on an offense’s performance than the quarterback.  Perhaps, even if we gave him great receivers and the best offensive line in football, Kaepernick is done as a quality NFL player.  We’ve seen it happen before.  Call this the pessimist’s narrative.

Here’s the bottom line.  Kaepernick’s contract essentially guarantees him the starting job in 2015.  In 2016, however, Kaepernick would only have about $7.5 million in dead money, according to Spotrac.  Cutting him then would save the team more than $11 million against the salary cap.  That’s no guarantee.

Scott Kane/Associated Press

Kaepernick therefore has 19 games to prove to the organization that he is the quarterback he appeared to be in his first 30 starts, and that this most recent stretch of awful performances is an aberration of some sort.  He can make his offseason a lot more peaceful if he can start that turnaround over the next three games, rather than leaving it for 2015.

The 49ers organization owes it to Kaepernick to give him the best offensive weapons and philosophy they can afford next season.  They need to go all-in and find out, once and for all, if Kaepernick is the quarterback that will lead them to their sixth Lombardi trophy.  If they do that and Kaepernick can’t return to his previous form, then it will be time to move on.

The clock sits at 19 games.  Kaepernick would be well-served to not take this play clock down to the final seconds.

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