We are less than a week away from the start of the new NFL season which will kick off on Thursday Night and end with the Super Bowl 50, scheduled to be played February 7, 2016 at Levi's Stadium - the new home of the San Francisco 49ers. For the last two and a half seasons, Colin Kaepernick has been the starting quarterback of the 49ers and since he took over the position he has thrown exactly 50 regular season touchdown passes.

The first one of his pro career came against the Bears during his first NFL start on Monday Night Football. It was a three-yard touchdown toss to Vernon Davis, who slowly but surely, became one of Kap's favorite targets. Davis, who's production nosedived in 2014, still leads the list of only 10 San Francisco players who caught at least one touchdown pass thrown by Kaepernick.

Thirty-eight, or 76 percent of Kaepernick's touchdown passes have been delivered to just three players. Already mentioned Davis, who tops the list with 16, Anquan Boldin with 12 and Michael Crabtree with 10 touchdown receptions. Crabtree is one of six players from the list who are no longer on the team. Here are the locations of Kap's targets when they caught those 50 touchdown passes classified by season and mapped out on one single chart.

At first glance, it appears as if Kaepernick equally distributed his touchdown passes across the field with relatively high number of passes which traveled 31 or more yards past the line of scrimmage. Tight end Davis caught three of those five bombs and was Kap's primary deep threat receiver, especially in 2013 when he was on the receiving end of all three of Kaepernicks' 30-plus yards touchdown throws. In his two seasons with the Chiefs, Alex Smith didn't throw a single touchdown pass 31 or more yards downfield. To no surprise, Kaepernick threw only one behind-the-line-of scrimmage touchdown pass, Boldin caught the ball three yards deep in the backfield and scored with 13 yards after the catch in the last game played at Candlestick Park back in December of 2013. For example, in his record-setting season, Peyton Manning threw nine of his 55 touchdown passes to his targets located behind the line of scrimmage. A closer look at the chart reveals area of the field where Kaepernick most frequently found his targets for a score. It was between the line of scrimmage and 10 yards past the line. For more on that, here's another chart with the number of touchdowns by zone.

We can see that Kap threw 23 of 50, or 46 percent of his touchdown passes while throwing to the right side, 13 of those if we narrow the location down to between the line and 10 yards downfield. On the opposite side, between the number and left sideline, we can count a total of 15 touchdowns, with 12 located in the middle or between the numbers.

Further on Kap's touchdown passes, only four were caught in the fourth quarter and 31 of the total count in the first half of the games. He was more successful away from home with 28 versus 22 touchdowns thrown in front of home crowd. One other interesting note, Kaepernick needed 1112 passes to reach the 50 mark. That's 29 more than Steve Young and 73 more than legendary Joe Montana, who needed 1039 passes to record his 50th regular season touchdown pass.

Playing under Jim Harbaugh, Kaepernick didn't have to operate in high-volume passing offense. He attempted 35 or more passes only in five regular season games, three of those five were played in 2014 when the 49ers didn't have the luxury of holding to fourth-quarter leads as often as in previous seasons. San Francisco got away with 2-3 record in those five games, with Kaepernick passing for a total of 1462 yards, with 10 scores and only two interceptions.

In his first two full regular seasons, Kaepernick recorded 21 and 19 passing touchdowns. Offseason changes, regarding coaching staff in particular, make it harder to predict his numbers for the new season. We didn't see a lot of Kaepernick in the preseason, but the general feeling is that the offense looks to be the weakest link of the 2015 49ers. And that is why it would be unreasonable to expect Kaepernick to surpass the touchdown count well above recent marks.