Aaaaaannnnnnd in the middle of working on this comic I find out Kaepernick is benched for Blaine “WOAH THERE MOTHERFU*KER” Gabbert.

Obviously this comic was based on an actual play that happened in the Rams game (keep your eye on Smith at the bottom) and it’s pretty much Kaepernick’s 2015 season in a nutshell. I don’t know what’s happened to Kaep. I was a big supporter of the dude and I wanted to see him succeed just to stick it to the crusty old white sportswriters of the world. Whatever spark he had two to three years ago is gone. He has regressed to astoundingly poor levels. He is in the running for worst starting QB in the league right now. He just looks utterly broken. He’s never been able to make reads well but now it looks like he’s lost whatever confidence he still had. He used to take shots, now he panics and dumps it off, he’s turned into Kaeptain Checkdown (not sorry). He used to see an opening and run for it like a beautiful gazelle, then kiss his bicep. Now he just takes the sack. He looks like a scared puppy every play and it’s depressing.

Some of the blame can obviously be leveled at the 49ers as a whole. The 49ers have performed exactly as the we all expected after the offseason from hell. Maybe worse than expected. Kaep doesn’t have the talent around him anymore. His O-line isn’t good, Vernon Davis seems to have spent the last two seasons in hibernation seemingly not trying (And he’s gone now too). His coaching is a joke. It’s not nearly all his fault, but he is not the same QB we saw lead a team to a Super Bowl and then to an NFC Championship. He’s not even the same QB as last year. He’s gone full pumpkin. I think his benching is probably a good thing. Maybe it triggers something in Kaep’s brain, puts him back in underdog mode like he was at the beginning, when he played with a fearlessness he currently lacks. I think more likely he’s just done in SF. One or two bad years doesn’t mean the end, but the 49ers are not trending upwards right now and it might be best for both Kaep and San Francisco to move on.