Running back Frank Gore spent four seasons with quarterback Colin Kaepernick in San Francisco. But Gore apparently never played with a quarterback until he signed with the Colts.
Gore gushed about Andrew Luck during a recent visit to The Jim Rome Show, and it’s hard to read Gore’s words without considering the implications for the quarterback about whom Gore never said such things.
“He runs meetings like a coach,” Gore said of Luck. “Basically, I’m playing with a coordinator on the field. He’s a football God. He sees everything, and he sees the big picture of everything.”
Gore made similar -- but not quite as strong -- remarks earlier this month.
“He’s different. He knows what’s coming,” Gore told Rome. “He lets me know when [there’s] something I don’t see. He’s just different. How he’s in the huddle, off the field, in the meetings, he runs it. He runs the show, even in the offseason, he ran it. One day he had running backs, the next day he has receivers. He’s just different. He’s a football God.”
There’s a chance that Kaepernick now has the same abilities, and that he simply wasn’t able to do so because his former head coach in San Francisco, Jim Harbaugh, had a habit of running the show. As Matt Maiocco of CSN Bay Area recently explained it, Harbaugh “often took control and made the play call to the offense” during training camp and regular-season practices. (He even once practiced in full gear as the team’s No. 3 quarterback.) Under Jim Tomsula, Kaepernick now runs the show.
“It allows the players to have confidence in hearing your voice and you’re the one who’s going to be giving them direction on the field,” Kaepernick said. “It’s something that every quarterback should have the ability to do.”
The real question is whether Harbaugh did the same thing at Stanford, when Luck was the quarterback there. If so, Harbaugh trained Luck well -- and possibly trained Kaepernick well, too.