Everyone in the Bay Area has already penciled in Blaine Gabbert as the San Francisco 49ers’ Week 1 starting quarterback.
Everyone except Chip Kelly.
If Kelly is the offensive genius Jed York, Trent Baalke and many others believe him to be, nothing with the 49ers’ quarterback position should be set in stone.
Kelly’s first major task in his second stint as an NFL head coach is to determine if he can quickly rebuild Colin Kaepernick from scratch.
Before Kaepernick buckled under a plethora of injuries in 2015, he was disintegrating before our eyes. Once considered the most promising young quarterback in the league, Kaepernick couldn’t read defenses, had tunnel vision on the field and the previous coaching staff lost trust in his playmaking abilities. On third-and-long, Kaepernick was relegated to throwing screen passes or the team would just opt to run the football. It was a bewildering fall from grace.
Are these issues correctable? When did his downward spiral even begin? How was Jim Harbaugh able to prop up Kaepernick? Or was his success at quarterback completely correlated with a strong supporting cast?
These are the exact questions Kelly has been asking himself since the day he took over in January. He’s dissected every piece of No. 7 film in his laboratory.
“First and foremost, they’ve got to be a great decision-maker,” Kelly told reporters at the NFL Combine about what he’s looking for in his quarterback. “That’s the most critical factor.”
This is where the hard work begins.
For Kaepernick to fully grasp Kelly’s offense, the 28-year-old will need extra attention in training camp. Kelly should give it to him. Kaepernick has run into serious trouble with footwork, vision and blitz recognition — issues that NFL quarterbacks before him have gone back to the drawing board and corrected. Accuracy has plagued Kaepernick for many years, but if Kelly decides to hit the reset button and retool him from the bottom up, everything will start on the mental side. Patience from the intense coach will be required.
Regardless of last season’s 7-9 record in Philadelphia and the turmoil within the walls of the organization, there’s little denying Kelly was nothing short of a quarterback whisperer in two of his three previous NFL seasons. Nick Foles threw 27 touchdowns to just two interceptions, a stunning display of correct decision-making that Kelly had just about everything to do with. Once a turnover machine in New York, Mark Sanchez averaged 268 passing yards per game in 2014, shattering previous marks he set with the Jets. Kelly took two quarterbacks with serious flaws and won football games with them, not despite them. It’s exactly why Kaepernick cannot be completely disregarded.
Who says some hand-holding between Kelly and Kaepernick can’t jumpstart the former Pro Bowler? It’s going to be hard for Kelly to tell how much Kaepernick is improving because it’s impossible to simulate an NFL game in training camp, but his competition in Gabbert isn’t exactly Joe Montana or Steve Young. It’ll be more difficult for Kaepernick to succeed without legitimate weapons flanking him, but Kelly’s system is quarterback friendly.
After all, the quarterback and head coach are already paddling in the same boat. Three years ago, both were labeled as the next best thing in the NFL. Three seasons later, both have been deemed lost causes with attitude issues. A Kelly-Kaepernick revival would be the ultimate comeback story for both parties involved.
Kelly will set the tone, likely playing much more of a good cop this time around. He’ll have to pay close attention to what’s going on with the defense. He’ll grade film after each sweltering day in Santa Clara. But in the back of his mind — or maybe in the front of it — the offensive wizard will have an itch he’ll want to scratch with Kaepernick.
To be clear, this is Gabbert’s job to lose — but how much of that is circumstantial? Kaepernick hasn’t fully been able to participate in offseason workouts after surgery on his shoulder, knee and thumb. Gabbert did play the best football of his career coming in as a relief pitcher in 2015 and he’s a faster thinker than his challenger on the field. But his ceiling when both are playing their best football is nowhere close to Kaepernick’s.
The bottom line: if the 49ers thought Kaepernick was completely washed up, they would’ve shipped him off to the Broncos or Jets, collected their fourth round pick, and moved on with life. He’s too big of a distraction to keep around if the team really has zero plans on starting him at all in 2016.
Chip Kelly has not officially written off Colin Kaepernick. And at the start of 49ers training camp, neither should we.