When 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh decided to install Colin Kaepernick as the starting quarterback after a concussion suffered by Alex Smith (and a great Monday night performance from the 2011 second-round pick), plenty of people in the media thought he was making a mistake.
Plenty of people in the locker room apparently did, too.
Receiver Michael Crabtree explained on Rich Eisen’s podcast that the decision created a (wait for it) schism in the locker room.
“I hate to talk about it. But you have the starting quarterback, and a couple of weeks later, he’s the starting scout-team quarterback,” Crabtree said, via Matt Barrows of the Sacramento Bee. “And he’s taking all the snaps with the scout team. It was kind of crazy to see. . . .
“You had guys on Alex Smith’s side, guys on Colin Kaepernick’s side,” Crabtree said. “I was on the winning side. . . . You can’t beat the guy who was hot. Kap was hot. As soon as he came in, even though we lost that game -- I think it was a tie, that game -- he came in and it just went up from there. We were scoring that many more touchdowns. We were just going every drive it seemed like. . . . We had like a triple threat with Kap’s feet, the passing game and the running game.”
Crabtree explained that Kaepernick eventually “kind of won everybody over by winning.”
In the end, they came within a Kaepernick-to-Crabtree fade route of winning a Super Bowl. And the question of whether Ravens cornerback Jimmy Smith interfered with Crabtree will linger long after the question of whether Harbaugh made the right decision did.