Colin Kaepernick and his supporters are aghast that the free agent QB hasn’t been picked up since splitting with his former team, the 49ers.
With everything from racism to politics being slung about out there, let’s look at something else his supporters might not want to look at.
He’s just not that good.
Yep, he’s just not that good. Even pushing aside the political time bomb he carries to any new team, there is his ability. Is he athletic, yes. But there are questions about his health. Did he fully recover from surgery last year? How healthy is he this year?
Those questions are compounded by the fact many teams see his QB ability as low. Teams have to tailor their offence to his style. He has yet to be known as a QB who can pick up other offenses. There are questions about his ability to read defenses, and throw passes which really matter at the critical time of a game.
He can run, but all too often when I’ve been able to watch 49er games, he stares down one receiver and then either forces a bad pass, or tucks and runs. When he does run, I cannot recall a time he tried to do a fake throw to catch defenders off guard.
Kaepernick came into the league with a group of other ‘running’ QBs. It was a topic I wrote about on my other Conservative blog, you can read it here. I felt the running QB was a gimmick which wouldn’t last. Well, opposing defenses have caught on and Kap hasn’t grown and adapted either.
Its that failure which has led to his downfall. Yes, he almost won a Superbowl, and then took the 49ers back the next year. But they also lost due to bad plays by Kap at critical points in the game.
If this was 2012, or 2013, Kap would have been snatched up by now despite his political problems and backlash from the fans.
Why?
People thought he could win.
Now, his stock has dropped and fans and teams don’t think he can win. And that is the bottom line for teams. Can he win.
So far, the answer with Kap is no.