okay, how about media guys like Whitner and Baldy calling out his play? It’s clear he isn’t the guy. Even on his best days he has to have a perfect gameplan of underneath YAC plays to win. He can’t throw it downfield at all. You cannot win with a QB who is ineffective past 7 yards. Even if it isn’t Shanahan’s go-to style, just the threat would open everything up. There’s zero threat with Jim.
The thing is that he is capable of throwing the ball downfield well enough when healthy. Last season he was hitting deep balls at one of the top rates in the league (Partly because he threw so few of them). I honestly do believe that the ankle injury is causing a hell of a lot of the problems that we’ve been seeing in his play of late, not just mechanically be it also in how he’s making his reads to favor the throws that he knows he can still make.
By no means am I advocating keeping him long term with the salary cap dropping next year and a huge cap crunch coming. But this all seems incredibly reminiscent of the time Niners fans got so frustrated with an Alex Smith struggling to play through a major shoulder injury behind a broken offensive line that they randomly decided that Shaun Hill was in fact the guy to rally around despite him having the arm of a cooked goose.
Making a defense worry about the deepball is nice and all but its not really a big enough part of an offensive system to warrant freakign out about unless you’re Al Davis and mandating that all your coaches start the game off with a deep shot because you’re an elderly dementia patient with the clap.
The three most prolific passers of all time (Brady, Manning, Brees) all weren’t exactly know for their rocket arms. Hell, most of their deepshots came entirely out of defenses getting so caught up in the underneath YAC stuff that it opened up deep secondary actions behind loaded fronts.
It feels like the endless time loop that is 2020 has sort of broken people’s mInds to the point that everyone has kind of forgotten Russ is doing this season with the nonstop deep balls is amazing but it’s absolutely unprecedented. Heck, Mahomes is probably one of the best pure deep ball throwers ever and even he would struggle slinging the ball like Russ is doing right now.
I get the frustration on the part of Niners fans but we’ve got to remember that a literal majority of the roster has missed significant time this year due to injury and that this season, there are three wildcard playoff slots to play for now.
Also the draft is always such a crapshoot and the class is deep enough this year that tanking for a QB this year is relatively meaningless unless you’re
that hellbent on drafting a guy with the same measurables as Mitch Trubisky and the occasional short range accuracy of Tomsula Kap (please note that I’m not saying Trevor Lawrence is going to suck like Mitch, although people were absolutely convinced that Jamarcus Russell and Ryan Leaf were going to be studs in the NFL). This is probably an irrelevant discussion because the Niners are probably drafting an edge rusher anyways.