Originally posted by YACBros85:
Originally posted by 49ers81:
Originally posted by NYniner85:
Jimmy do work on SNF! I'll root for you as long as you are in SF. I will also be objective and know he's an avg starting NFL QB, which isn't horrible but the truth. Either way we got some pretty bad QB play across the league and guys starting that have no business being starters. Jimmy is a starter.
when Trey comes back, I will root for him to succeed and understand it's a process. You don't wake up and magically become a great pocket passing QB. It will require reps and getting through all of it. Let's be objective about all of it and understand the process. I would think there's room for 49er fans to support both.
You see, this is where you keep getting yourself in trouble. You always claim you're just being objective about something which you assert is an "obvious" truth, which is that Jimmy is an average QB. That's you're opinion and you're entitled to it but that doesn't make it true. It is a common theme in this thread and, from the opposite side posted by others in the Lance thread. People keep mistaking their opinions for some hard truth and so they feel compelled to have to endlessly debate their point to convince everyone else that their opinion is the correct one, and everyone else is just too stupid to realize it, when in fact it's just your opinion.
It's like the hypocrisy of another poster in here who has been going on about how he and others don't REALLY dislike Jimmy, they are just offering valid "criticisms" of his play. Spending ten pages worth of posts arguing about whether or not a pass that Jimmy threw to Deebo against Chicago last year, that resulted in a TD that helped them win the game was a good pass or not. That's not just "criticism" that's pathological. Jimmy threw it, Deebo caught it, they scored a TD, who cares.
It's also like an idea, that is popular in here and is often echoed among some of the talking head class on TV, looking at you Dan Orlovsky, which claims that it's the defense and Kyle's scheme that are primarily responsible for the team's success and that Jimmy has virtually nothing to do with it and is just along for the ride. If that were true then just about any QB of average skill should be able to do it, but so far that hasn't been the case. They win with Jimmy and lose with everyone else. Does Jimmy have his shortcomings? Absolutely, but so far he has been the only one that has manged to keep the team competitive through the course of a whole season.
Now of course the hope with Lance is that he will have a higher ceiling than Jimmy in terms of his ability to attack down the field more frequently, which seems to be the only thing that some people in here care about. They will go on about how the threat of the deep ball puts more pressure on opposing defenses and forces them to defend the whole field and yadda, yadda, yadda. But if you read between the lines a bit you will usually find that they just think it's more "entertaining" to watch a QB throw the ball all around the field then the ground and pound, short passing game which seems to have been the team's philosophy for the past few year's. I will let guys like Jonnydel sort all of that out because he clearly has more insight on it.
The book on Lance has yet to be written. I think it is everyone's hope that he will turn out to be everything the team believed he could be when they drafted him, but he is still, clearly, a work in progress, People say that the conditions in the Chicago game were a big factor in that loss. Probably, but there was a game against Washington in 2019 where it was also pouring down rain and the team had five turnovers and yet they still found a way to win it with Jimmy at the helm.
Although it was a very limited sample size, the offense did not look particularly dynamic in the first couple of drives against Seattle. They were running the ball well but there was just something about it that seemed a bit off. It was pointed out by some analyst I was watching that on Deebo's long run on a read option Lance made the wrong read on that play and should have kept the ball himself. Deebo's skill turned what looked like a sure loss into a huge gain so it worked out, which I am cool with, but it was still, apparently the wrong call by Lance, which is just his inexperience, So now this whole experiment has been put on hold for another year, which is unfortunate in some ways but may allow for the short term benefit of the team being more competitive this year.
This whole situation is an odd one with a lot of competing narratives. Steve Young, who lost two straight NFC championship games as I recall because of ill timed picks, is telling anyone who will listen that Jimmy got "fired" from the job, which is hard to argue with. Dan Orlovsky, is telling anyone who will listen that Jimmy is just along for the ride and can't get the team over the hump. This from a guy who I don't think ever took his team to an NFL playoff game. However there is someone else out there, whose name escapes me for the moment, pointing out that one of the underlying dynamics at play here is that Lance was handed the job, because of his draft status, without the benefit of actually having earned it which is something that may have led to some of the recent talk being rumored to have come out of the locker room.
When Jimmy's status was still unclear as training camp approached and the team was saying, at least publicly, that they weren't going to release him I suggested that if that were the case they should just bring him back to camp and let he and Lance compete for the job and may the best man win. That would help ease any unspoken issues among the team about who should start and might have been beneficial in terms of Lance's development in terms of making him compete for a job that he had already planned on being his. I mean, if Lance is destined to be so much better than Jimmy than he shouldn't have had any problem beating him out in camp, right?
But that's not the way things worked out and now Jimmy is back as QB1 and we'll see how far he can take us. I am of the camp who believes that Jimmy is perfectly capable of taking the team to the Super Bowl and winning it but that it will require his consistently best play to do so. There seem to be a couple of pretty good teams out there at the moment so this may well be a tougher get than their 2019 run. But, if they can pull it off, that will just make it that much sweeter. Go Niners!
The issue for me is that when the run game gets shut down, so does the entire offense. Jimmy is great at converting 3rd downs and keeping drives alive when the run game is gaining positive yards. However, when the run game isn't working and he is asked to throw the ball 40 times the offense cannot put points on the board and we typically lose those games. Imo, its because Jimmy cannot beat teams over the top with his arm. No QB in the league throws 40+ short passes in a game and wins consistently. Defenses are too good, especially in the playoffs, to get beat one dimensionally.
I think this is a fair view but I would add a couple of caveats. One, it seems that games where QB's are asked to throw the ball 40+ times are usually an exception rather than a rule so I'm not sure that's an entirely valid point. Also I would argue that Jimmy probably can't CONSISTENTLY beat teams over the top with is arm. That doesn't mean he isn't capable of doing it at all. I seem to recall he was throwing it pretty well against the saints in 2019. Jimmy's deep ball is perhaps his biggest shortcoming along with his penchant for throwing kind of head scratching picks but his release and his ability to consistently convert third and longs is pretty elite.
I would also point out that in 2019 they decimated two playoff team's defenses with their running game, to the extent that Jimmy hardly had to throw at all. Of course the narrative that evolved around that was that Kyle "took the ball" out of Jimmy's hands, I have always looked at it as they stayed with what was working so why change it and Jimmy's lack of ego helps make that possible. He honestly doesn't seem to care how they win, as long as they win.
Kyle seems to prefer running the ball and playing good defense to the more wide open game that many other teams seem to favor. Maybe they do it because they have guys like Allen or Mahomes but those kind of QB's are actually pretty rare and pretty hard to find. I don't think I have ever argued that Jimmy is an elite QB, but when he is on his game he can be pretty darn good, he just isn't always consistent. If he can play the way he is capable of playing often enough this year they could end up making a run, which I imagine is what we are all rooting for. Go Niners!
