The San Francisco 49ers have made a much anticipated change at quarterback. Colin Kaepernick will replace Blaine Gabbert this Sunday against the Buffalo Bills.
Why did the 49ers make this change? NFL Films Senior Producer Greg Cosell had an answer.
“The tape tells you Gabbert is not executing the pass offense properly,” Cosell said. “When the coaching staff dials up route concepts that beat the defense, and your quarterback doesn’t execute, either with bad throws or not turing it loose, you have to think long and hard about making a quarterback change.”
However, 49ers fans have seen this the movie before. A season ago, Kaepernick was benched in favor of Gabbert for his poor play. Is there reason to believe this episode of the Kaepernick show will turn out differently than 2015? Actually, there’s a chance.
“What you hope is maybe with a new voice in his head, new coach, different offense that he just registers it differently,” Cosell said. “At this point, there’s not point in saying he can or can’t do it — because we don’t know. All you can do is look at track record, and he has a very checkered track record. He played extremely well for 10 games as a rookie, and for a bit after that. And then all of a sudden he did not play well. So you just try and take all that information, kind of put it in the blender, and see what comes out.
“But very often when you change the voice in your head from a different coaching staff, things can click. We’ll see if that’s the case.”
The 49ers may be 1- 4, but it will be an interesting week in upstate New York.