So far, coaches and personnel men have only lined up to rip Colin Kaepernick anonymously.
But at least one coach who worked with the former 49ers quarterback is willing to go on the record saying he’s convinced Kaepernick’s unemployed because of football and not politics.
Steve Logan, who was quarterback coach of the 49ers in 2015 under Jim Tomsula, said during an interview on 99.9 FM The Fan in Raleigh that Kaepernick’s problem was that he was scheme-dependent.
Logan said he liked working with Kaepernick — “I never had a bad day with Colin. He’s a good kid.” — and that he thought he’d end up on a roster this year. But he repeated some familiar (if not completely accurate) criticisms.
“It has everything to do with his ability to play in the pocket,” Logan said of Kaepernick’s lack of a job. “Wherever he goes there will have to be a massive re-design of the entire offense to suit his skill-set, which is unique. But I’m just telling you why he’s not on a roster. It has everything to do with his ability to play in the pocket. And be really good in the pocket. Because the game has taken away his calling card, which is the zone-read. Defensive coordinators in the NFL will not let you beat them with that football play. You can irritate them with that football play but you cannot beat them with that football play anymore.”
(This is a very football answer to a football question, by the way. Football.)
Logan also was skeptical of the numbers Kaepernick put up last year on a bad 49ers team, and managed to rip another easy whipping boy in the process.
“His tape last year was not good in the pocket,” he said. “You’ve got to take in the score of the game in which the performance was taking place. This is Blake Bortles. Blake Bortles was putting up some good numbers a year and a half ago but when you peel the onion back and you find out they’re down three touchdowns. and he’s dealing the ball around and it looks great, it’s all against Cover 2, stone cold zone. This matters.
“You peel all that onion away and start looking at third-and-3 in a close game and see how they performance stacks up. This is where the rubber meets the road for any quarterback.”
With all due respect to Logan, that explanation stinks as badly as any onion. People who do dig into the film have laid out the evidence that disprove some of the easy talking points that have been used to bash Kaepernick, when the truth about his unemployment is fairly obvious to most people.
Logan’s a coaching lifer (former head coach at East Carolina) who isn’t coaching at the moment (which may also explain his hesitance to step away from the conventional coaching wisdom herd), but at least he was willing to put his name to it, which is more than most in the football-industrial complex are willing to do.