The Alex Smith Effect

After the 49ers beat the Detroit Lions on Oct. 16^th Head Coach Jim Harbaugh was seen giving a post-game speech in the locker room while standing a notch above his team, in the heat of the moment he claimed “There’s something remarkable going on here.” Harbaugh was right, there is something going on here, it does have to do with the 49ers, but the remarkable thing going on is not as apparent as even Harbaugh might think. The remarkable thing happening in the 49ers locker room is not their record, it’s Alex Smith. Okay, so no one expected the Niners to be 5-1 at this point in the year and be ranked in the top 5 among most sports power rankings across the land, so I will give credit where credit is due. But I want to focus on Alex Smith and the effect he is having and ultimately will have on, not only the 49ers, but the entire NFL. I will even take it a step further and talk about his effect on the sports world in general.

In 2005 the 49ers selected Alex Smith #1 overall in the NFL draft. As a Quarterback the pressure put on a #1 overall pick is immense, heck even being selected with just one of the 32 picks in first round can put immense pressure on a player. The Quarterback position takes on a little more pressure as a top pick because of the leadership role that player is expected to take. Most QB’s fail when being selected this high. Including 2005, the year Smith went #1, there have been 18 QB’s selected in Round one of the draft; of those 18, only 13 are starters. Let’s break that stat down even more. From 2005 to 2007 there was 8 QB’s selected in the 1^st Round, of those 8 only 3 are starters still (Smith, Aaron Rogers and Jay Cutler.) The other 5 QB’s are; Jason Campbell, who was starting but just suffered a season ending injury which prompted his team to trade for another former 1^st round QB Carson Palmer, all but ending his reign at the helm in Oakland. Vince Young, who showed flashes of his great college self in Tennessee was let go and waits for an opportunity behind Michael Vick in Philly. Matt Leinart, who I think, is still in Houston as a back-up but after I’m done writing this I’ll go down to the bars around USC in downtown and see if I can’t find him droning on about old college football stories. Jay Cutler (not one of the five), yes, he is starting but don’t forget he was traded by then new Broncos Head Coach Josh McDaniels (who now is no longer with the Broncos either), to Chicago. Jamarcus Russell, isn’t just gone from the NFL, he can’t even make an Arena Bowl squad, and has a hard time staying out of trouble with the law. And, Brady Quinn, who according to the last national article written about him, by Yahoo, is a nice boyfriend but still has little to no hope starting in the NFL. The point here is that the expectations were high for these young men and most of them have failed to reach anywhere near those goals. Aaron Rogers Super Bowl win last year is really the saving grace of the QB club since 2005, now enter Alex Smith.

In 7 season’s Smith’s career stats stand at %57.7 Comp., 10,489 Pass. Yards, 59 TD’s, 55 INT’s and a QB rating of 74.3, pedestrian numbers to say the least. The 49ers are 19-31 in those games that he started (sadly that includes the 5 wins and 1 loss from this year as well). Smith missed the whole 2008 season after being operated on. In 2010 the “other QB” the Niners were contemplating selecting in 2005 won the Super Bowl with Green Bay. Niner fans had given up on Smith and rightfully so (although some clowns run around the internet claiming to have known the rising of #11 was coming it was just taking some time, like 7 years of time). Most NFL clubs would have given up on Smith at this point. The interesting fact is that the 49ers didn’t. Why, you ask? Let’s look.

 It’s well documented that Alex Smith had 6 Offensive Coordinators in 6 years, this year Harbaugh brought in Greg Roman who now makes it 7 for 7 for Smith. For years people have mentioned this stat when evaluating Smith and it’s been his double edged sword all along. The constant change has never allowed Smith to get to really know one system. All 7 years have been a brand new learning curve. Therefore Smith has had trouble simply adapting to the NFL life because it’s a different beast every year. The saving grace was that since he was a former #1 over-all pick the new head coaches or their OC’s saw something in Smith, they believed that if he just had some “time” in “their” system he would start to come around, so, Smith stuck around. After last season it was a foregone conclusion that he wouldn’t be coming back but then Harbaugh got hired and what was one of the first things he did? Go play catch with Alex Smith. Now I can’t account for the exact reason why Smith is better this year except for some of the obvious facts that he isn’t trying to do too much, he is managing the game better, and Harbaugh has instilled an offense according to his personnel instead of instilling an offense and trying to make his personnel fit it (like trying to put a square block through a round hole).

The remarkable thing is that Smith should  be gone, he should be a back-up somewhere at this point, he should be mastering the art of clip-board holding and hand signals… but he isn’t. If Alex Smith ends up leading this team to a 12-4 season or better (this is an actual possibility) and takes his team to the play-offs and can make some noise there, then how does the NFL move forward in evaluating first round picks? Do they just chalk this up to a “special” situation?

In this day and age teams have gotten less and less patient with player development. Blame it on salary caps over-valuing the time you can spend on a player trying to get him productive (a whole other future blog post) or that we as a society have gotten used to our lives becoming so much faster and easier that it has translated into sports, we no longer have the patients to wait for an app to download or a first round pick to pan out if he doesn’t produce quickly. Case in point; take the QB’s from 2005 to 2007, only 2 of the 8 are still with their original team (Smith and Rogers). The 49ers alone have acquired 2 other first round picks from that 05’ draft WR Braylon Edwards and CB Carlos Rogers, they even picked up 1^st rounder’s from 06’ and 07’ (S Donte Whitner and WR Tedd Ginn Jr. via Free Agency and trade respectively). Players are being released after only two years’ experience now days, while their original teams assume they aren’t worth the roster spot anymore. Just two weeks ago Aaron Curry was dumped by the Seahawks for a 7^th round pick and a conditional 5^th rounder, gasp! Let me catch my breath… ahh, okay, better. Yes, Curry, the 4^th over-all pick two years ago, referred to as the “can’t miss pick,” missed… apparently. But now he’s in Oakland and starting to impress, imagine if the Seahawks had let him hang around as long as Smith? We still have to see if Curry can make anything of himself in the NFL but I think it’s safe to say that he hasn’t been given a fair shot yet.

And therein lies the problem. If Alex Smith does succeed after 6 seasons of total let down then where do we draw the line with other players? How will baseball teams start to look at their minor league prospects? (dare I bring up a Liriano-Nathan reference here?) How will basketball teams assess their young draft picks? (Dare I bring up any Warriors draft picks over the past 20 years they’ve shipped off too early?). Let’s face it, exec’s don’t want Smith to succeed, if he does then they might start hearing arguments that they need to give players more time to develop, that could force them to keep around players that they were wrong about and they could end up blowing millions trying to make the situation work.

In the mean time I am okay with NFL teams being impatient and the 49ers showing some patients because as Smith, Rogers, Whitner, Ginn and Edward’s have shown some of these players just needed a little time to make something “remarkable” happen.