Jikkle wrote:thesack12 wrote:49ers offense this season:
7th in total yards
1st in yards per pass attempt
1st in yards per pass play
1st in yards per completion
1st in yards per play overall
1st in red zone efficiency
3rd in explosive plays (plays over 20 yards)
QB's that finished in the top 10 in passer rating, completion %, and yards per attempt:
Rodgers
Kyler
Herbert
Dak
Burrow
Garoppolo
I'm as excited for Lance's future as anyone, but Trey wasn't going to lead this offense to that kind of production this season.
Jimmy G doesn't suck as he does make some big boy throws at some key times but a bulk of his throws are throwing to open receivers down the middle of the field and them getting a ton of YAC. That's not his fault but he's still not throwing it like the other guys you listed aside from Kyler who almost had an identical year as Jimmy.
But the biggest issue with Jimmy is he consistently makes mistakes of the backbreaking kind. Just look at his last 3 games that he's played and they all had one or more backbreaking mistakes on his part.
Titans game he threw that INT in the endzone when they had a chance to go up by 14 or at worse 10. Threw a 2nd INT that gave the Titans the ball on the 18. And that missed pass to Juice. I can give him a bit of a pass since he hurt his thumb but that endzone INT at least shouldn't have happened.
Rams game he again threw an INT in the endzone in the 4th quarter during a tied game where we could've at least gone up by 3 points. Luckily he won the game at the end but it was a hole that he dug in the first place.
This game he had a costly miss to Aiyuk that might've sealed the game and he had an INT that lead to a TD that could've lead to a loss.
So 3 games in a row he's made major costly mistakes.
It's speculation but with Lance starting Week 1 I do believe by the time we got to today he'd be able to mostly do what Jimmy is doing now with the added benefit hitting bigger plays with his arm, improving the run game, and likely less costly mistakes. He'd still have some INTs but at least so far the ones he's thrown have been early in games and not major momentum swings.
By no means is Jimmy a great QB, but the standards he is held to are unfair at times, and the amount of flak he gets is largely unwarranted.
As far as YAC goes, of course Jimmy benefits from that. That said, the QB delivering the ball in an accurate/timely fashion to set up the receivers to do YAC damage is absolutely part of that equation, and its an ingredient people rarely take into consideration.
To springboard off the above point, Garoppolo was 2nd in the NFL in on target % with 81.5% and the 2nd lowest bad throw % at 12.9%. Only Joe Burrow bested him in both categories.
As for Trey Lance, again I will say that like most I'm excited to for his future. He checks a lot of the boxes, he has the tools to be great, and has already shown real tangible development. I love his upside.
But lets look at things objectively for a minute. All of Trevor Lawrence, Zach Wilson, Justin Fields, and Mac Jones had illustrious college careers and all had SIGNIFICANTLY more experience coming into the NFL than Trey Lance did. Not to mention, Trevor/Fields/Mac all came from top flight college programs where the opposing competition was legitimate. Trey Lance was coming in with only 17 career college starts at the JV level of college football. And had only played in 1 game in like 18 months, and couldn't even formally practice during that timeframe.
How this year's rookie QB crop fared:
Lawrence: 31st Y/A, 29th Rating, 28th QBR, 29th comp%, 30th on target%, 28th in bad ball%, 24th INT%, 12/17 TD/INT ratio
Wilson: 30th Y/A, 31st Rating, 30th QBR, 31st comp%, 31st on target% 31st in bad ball%, 26th INT%, 9/11 TD/INT ratio
Fields: 22nd Y/A, 28th Rating, 31st QBR, 30th comp%, 29th on target%, 30th bad ball%, 31st INT%, 7/10 TD/INT ratio
Jones: 15th Y/A, 15th rating, 16th QBR, 8th comp%, 19th on target%, 17th in bad ball%, 19th INT%, 22/13 TD/INT ratio
With the exception of Mac Jones, (who you could argue is already close to a finished product) all the 1st round rookies struggled mightily this season. Actually they were downright bad, terrible would even apply.
Of course, every player is different and other than Mac those other guys were on bad teams with mostly questionable coaching staffs. All of that is valid counterpoints, but the rookie QB crop was so categorically board across the board and none of them really showed flashes, at least not to any thing resembling remotely consistent. Perhaps Trey Lance would have been able to make a meteoric rise, but its not likely. And the fact that Shanahan has insisted on continuing to roll with Garoppolo, even recently with his injured throwing thumb) speaks volumes to me. Its pretty obvious Kyle believes Jimmy gives the 49ers the best chance to win.
As for Trey himself, his lowly 57.7 completion % is well below the mendoza line. It actually puts him in between Fields and Wilson in the bottom 3 of the NFL. Of course, Lance's is a much smaller sample size.
To summarize, all things considered (Trey's inexperience/his reputation for being inaccurate/rookie QB struggles & growing pains, ect) In my opinion it would be a GIANT leap of faith to think that if Lance was driving this car from jump that the 9ers would currently be in the same position or actually in a better one. The 49ers offense this season was at the top of the league in most metrics.
Actually, if we are peeling away all the layers of the onion and looking at things objectively, this season has played out almost perfectly in regards to the QB position. We got our QB in the future. We didn't have to throw him to the wolves, and he is developing organically. He still got 2.5 games of very valuable experience. Jimmy played very solid football overall this season, and thus has raised his trade value. The team has already won a road playoff game, and has decent shot t0 maybe even take home the Lombardi.
I mean really, its playing out exactly as they hoped it would.