The statistics are shameless—sixty-mile-per-hour spirals! 181 rushing yards against the Packers in the playoffs! A 38 on that esoteric and lewd-sounding metric known as Wonderlic!—but the most mind-blowing of them isn’t gaudy. Just...weird.

"I want you to know," Colin Kaepernick says, "that I had negative running yardage as a high school quarterback. Yes, I was fast. Yes, my coaches knew I was fast. But we had no backup QB." And at six feet five and 170 pounds, Kaepernick seemed like such a fragile emu that his coaches were terrified he’d get injured. "So they told me not to run."

The San Francisco 49ers quarterback, who took over as starter ten games into the 2012 season, then came just three errant passes shy of bringing the 2013 Lombardi Trophy back to the Bay Area, accompanies this declaration with a broad smile and a forceful tap-tapping of his right index finger against a table. It is the one and only instance of cocksureness he allows himself during our time together. He’s amused by this counterintuitive stat of his, but not as much as he’s proud of it, and edgily so. Because in its inverted way this non-number speaks to a much larger point: that one should be very careful making assumptions about where Colin Kaepernick’s unorthodox quarterbacking style came from and what it "means."

Do you know what you’re seeing when you look at Colin Kaepernick? Do you? Fact is, people have been staring at this gangly biracial Adonis all his life and getting him dead wrong. So hold your answer for a moment to consider when you’re seeing Colin Kaepernick: at the cusp of a golden age. Has there ever been such a bounty of quarterbacking talent in the NFL? It’s not just the sheer mass of it, the fact that even before last year’s astonishing freshman class of Luck, Wilson, and Griffin, there were already a half-dozen future Hall of Famers in the mix. It’s the diversity, the multifacetedness of it, the spate of quarterbacks with track speed who can simultaneously read and improvise, and may not even conceive of reading and improvising as distinct abilities. And it’s not just that there are more of these guys than there have ever been; it’s that coaches are building teams around them rather than force-fitting them into offensive molds.

Pants by En Noir / Shorts (beneath) by Nike Pro Combat / Sneakers and Gloves by Nike

Still...it takes some getting used to. Many of us football fans don’t, or even can’t, yet fully believe in the likes of Kaepernick. Yes, he’s miraculous, we think. But you can’t build a dynasty on..."that." We followers of this most militaristic of sports, with its medieval-minded conquests of turf, are the proverbial armies fighting the last, rather than the current, war. And this new breed of QB who comes bearing the promise of old-fashioned out-of-the-pocket artillery and drone-like speed and accuracy seems too good to be true. When confronted with the likes of Kaepernick, a 25-year-old possessed of neon athleticism yet an almost pathologically shy demeanor, a guy who really has no antecedent, we tend to ask a question—yes, that old question—that simplifies and judges in equal measure: Is he a "student of the game" or a "great natural athlete"? In other words, is he a traditional quarterback who can stay in the pocket and play with his head, or a sandlot scrambler who can improvise on broken plays (but will be out of the league the minute he loses a step)?

Do we have to mention the racial coding that comes with this either/or proposition?

Actually, we do. Because three weeks after Kaepernick took over from the concussed Alex Smith in last year’s ninth regular-season game, a national "controversy" erupted over his tattoos. Sparked thusly in a Sporting News column that, oddly, sidestepped the fact that most of Kaep’s tats quote biblical passages extolling God’s Providence: "Approximately 98.7 percent of the inmates at California’s state prison have tattoos.... I’m also pretty sure less than 1.3 percent of NFL quarterbacks have tattoos. There’s a reason for that. NFL quarterback is the ultimate position of influence and responsibility. He is the CEO of a high-profile organization, and you don’t want your CEO to look like he just got paroled."