By passing QBR. When you account for rushing, Kaepernick clearly exceeds what Siemian is capable of. When you account for the fact that Kaep has proven he can take a good team to a Super Bowl (and almost lead them back to win it), I think that also counts for, well, more than "nothing."
At some point, particularly when you talk about the NFL, you have to take your head out of the stat book and look at what a guy has actually accomplished on the field. That isn't meaningless no matter how many arguments one wants to make to the contrary, particularly for the QB position. Look at how many statistically proficient QBs struggle to win even 1 playoff game.
It matters. Not enough to anoint a guy like Kaepernick as your savior when he clearly doesn't have that level of ability, but as a stopgap for a year or two before your playoff-level talent disappears, you could not find a better option than Kaepernick.
If I had a nickel for every time this crap happens in a discussion like this I'd have enough money to buy the Browns and then regret it.
You know how this argument has gone? We need to look at the numbers and see Kaepernick is actually a good quarterback, except for the ones that show he isn't, or ones that we don't "trust", in which case we need to look at what's done on the field. Which is, you know,
not a goddamn thing the last three years.
There's a reason those Football Outsider's stats earlier had a bunch of good QBs at the top of the passing stats, but a mishmash of good/bad/awful QBs(including Bortles and Osweiller) at the top of the running stats: running is not their primary job. You know why Kaepernick had good ratings running? Because he can't read defenses very well, so he rlies on his legs. As PFF noted, he was one of the worst quarterbacks in the NFL with a clean pocket in 2016.
Here's another way of looking at it: he was only good when the team around him was loaded with talent and an excellent, if
batpoop-crazy head coach. A team that went to he NFC championship game the year before with Alex Smith. Maybe he was the product of the team, the same way the Jets went to back-to-back AFC Championship games with
Mark Sanchez under center, only for it to be revealed later that Sanchez isn't actually very good when the defense isn't carrying him. Once the Niners started hemmoraging talent to early retirements and stuff, voila, Kaepernick wasn't an amazing QB anymore.
Side note: that part about the Super Bowl irritates me. Maybe if he and the rest of the team hadn't spent the first half doing nothing but getting their collective asses beat before the power went out, he could have come
all the way back. This is what infuriates me about comebacks, like the last Super Bowl where the Falcons blew a 28-3 lead. As much as I loved,
looooooved watching the Falcons blow a 28-3 lead, they never would have been in position to blow a 28-3 lead if Brady had played better, so it bothers me that Brady gets more credit for digging their own hole than just playing well to start with.
(Did I mention the Falcons blew a 28-3 lead? Because they blew a 28-3 lead. I don't know if I said it enough.)
So yeah, like I said earlier, if he wants to be a backup somewhere, he should be. Period. But this constant overselling of him is just painful to read and doesn't help anyone. It reads like there's a conclusion people
want but can't figure out the right order of hoops to jump through to get there.