Alex Smith

[MHSL82]

Was the team's interest in Peyton Manning the low?

AS: No, definitely not. That was more of a bump in the ... that was more of a little blurb. For me, the most frustrating thing was, for sure, the first time dealing with my shoulder. As a youngster, I was trying to play through it. I'd do it so differently now if I could go back. It was frustrating at the time how it all got dealt with, how that all played out. That was really hard. I felt I was getting pushed to come back, then I did, and then it's, 'Well, you're not playing good.' As a young player, that was really hard for me to handle. That and 2010 was a long year. That was pretty frustrating just in general. To go through that first, what did we start (0-5), that was a long year. That was very frustrating because it was the exact same team the next year, pretty much. We had the rookie class that came in and helped. But other than that, it was an identical team, and how badly we underachieved. Frustrating for a lot of reasons. It was tough.

 

[MHSL82]

What's the best thing about being in Kansas City?

AS: It's great. It's early. For one, the environment, everything about it has been great, the area, the organization, the fan base. The first thing I heard when people found out I was getting traded, the first thing they talked about were the people of the Midwest, the people of Kansas City. It's been that way since I've been here, just humble, good people, supportive. That's been great. And the work environment. It's so fun to come into a healthy work environment where you can cut it loose and you'll get coached and taught to get better. Anytime I've had success it's been in environments like that - at Utah and even the last couple years in San Francisco, creating teaching environment where you don't get defensive guys and finger pointing.

 

[MHSL82]

Did Harbaugh emphasize footwork?

AS: He was a big into-fundemental guy. Andy is even more, I think. Andy is very detailed about it. I've had a lot of coaches over the years, and as a quarterback your biggest pet peeve is that, you throw a ball too high and he tells you to get it down, right? It's like, 'Well, thanks. I could have told you that. We all know that.' Coach Reid's so great at why. Why did you throw that too high. And talking to you about that: 'Hey, you're standing up too tall and your front shoulder went up.' He does such a great job of doing that. Right there on the spot, he sees it.

 

[MHSL82]

There's more, but I wasn't going to put them all here, just click on the link if you'd like to see the whole thing.

 

[69er]

Bye Felicia.

 

[MHSL82]

It hasn’t been smooth road for Chiefs QB Alex Smith

The Kansas City Star

Alex Smith never expected this life. NFL quarterback? Yeah, right. He grew up smart, skinny and uncoordinated. When he was 14, his dad tried to talk him into quitting football. You look more like a distance runner, he said. His friends thought he’d be a professor.

Here he is anyway, the new hope of the once-proud Chiefs, talking about a wild career over barbecue on the Plaza.

Smith is only 29 but he has already seen so much. He has worked through the guilt and anger and depression of his best friend’s suicide. He’s been the NFL’s No. 1 overall draft pick, and he’s been benched. He’s been booed, cheered, paid, left out and traded. He is a husband. A father. Smart enough to earn an economics degree in 21/2 years.

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Before Smith became a pro football player, he was a skinny pain in the neck for his parents as the third of four children in San Diego.

“The worst child we had, by far,” says his father Doug, a retired high school principal and football coach. “He was the most obstinate, threw the most tantrums. He lived his whole early life in the corner.”

Eventually, they found that Alex’s stubborn streak could be helpful in sports. The same hard-headed attitude he showed when his dad asked him to mow the lawn came through in persevering through the struggles of being a 5-foot-nothing, 130-pound freshman quarterback whose father wanted him to quit and join the cross country team.

Alex stuck with football, though, even if nobody looked his way. Helix Charter High had this running back, Reggie Bush, who was one of the best players the state ever saw. So Alex played his last two years in front of coaches from every major college in the country, mostly handing the ball off to Bush, graduating at about 170 pounds with just two scholarship offers.

“And one of those was from my uncle,” he says of then-Louisville coach John L. Smith. “So I’m not sure if that counts.”

Ivy League schools wanted Alex, but he hated the idea of not having a bowl game to work toward. So he went to Utah, and if college coaches didn’t think much of him, he didn’t disagree. Alex just hoped to play, someday, and then worry about getting a real job after graduation. Maybe he’d go to law school.

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Utah was a perfect 12-0 during Alex’s junior year. He ranked second in the nation in passer rating and was a Heisman Trophy finalist — joined by Bush, his old high school teammate.

Alex seems to have been the last one to know how good he was. He swears he only played one college game — the 2005 Fiesta Bowl his last year at Utah — knowing he’d be in the NFL. And that was only because his brother had talked to some scouts. He had no reason to come back to Utah — but also had no way of being ready for the NFL.

He became the No. 1 pick before his 21st birthday. More reporters and photographers covered his first day of workouts with the 49ers than any but his last game at Utah.

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The news came late at night. And late-night news is hardly ever good news. It was 2008, five years ago this month. Smith’s fourth NFL training camp. His shoulder had required surgery, and the pain, ominously, hadn’t yet gone away. The fight for the 49ers’ starting quarterback job consumed him.

Then came the phone call. His best friend, a man he grew up with named David Edwards, was dead. Suicide. Smith had talked to Edwards the day before, but he hadn’t returned a follow-up call. Smith’s heart sank. His mind drifted.

“Hands down, the best friend I’ve ever had,” he says. “Not close, at that point. I have my brother, but he (Edwards) was literally like my brother. He was so close to everyone in my family.

“But at the time, I’m caught up in me and my shoulder and all this stuff and you can’t help but think, ‘What if I’d paid a little more attention? What could I have done?’ I had no idea he was hurting like that. I just had no idea.”

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“He wants to please everyone, like, ‘I have to do everything right to be who I want to be,’” says Doug Smith, Alex’s father. “What it helped him realize is, ‘A lot of what you’re doing to yourself is (baloney). And don’t do it. There are bigger things in life. Focus on that. Focus on the big things — what you can control.’”

Nothing happens overnight, but certain events stick in the memory. For Smith, one of those events was a 2009 game against Andy Reid’s Eagles in Philadelphia. The 49ers fell behind and Smith started pressing. He threw three interceptions and heard a fan base blame him for the loss that followed.

That blowback was his turning point. Smith had spent five years trying to live up to his billing as the No. 1 pick. And for what? Was it helping?

No more.

“That was a big moment for me,” he says. “I’m not going to play like that anymore. I’m going to play for me and not play for anyone else, except my teammates and the guys that matter. I was happier, and I played a lot better football." That attitude would see him through his toughest moment as a player.

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They kept waiting to see if Smith would crack. If he would blow up. Cuss someone out. Or, maybe he would become detached. Laze through a practice. Zone out during meetings.

Would’ve been understandable, of course. Smith was leading the NFL in passer rating last year when he suffered a concussion in week 10. You know the rest of the story.

Smith, meanwhile, held a clipboard. Wore a baseball hat. Waited. And, by all accounts, remained a good teammate.

“I had two choices, right?” he says. “I can sit and bitch and be miserable and hate life or, you know, I can stick with it. I didn’t know what was going to happen. Didn’t know when I could play. It could’ve been the next game, or the middle of the Super Bowl. And I knew if I was going to have that chance, I might be playing for my next team.

“So I wasn’t going to let it derail me. I felt like I was on a good path, and I didn’t want that to knock me off.”

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Smith had so many good friends on the 49ers. Teammates with whom he’d been through so much. Those guys went from a 10-loss season under Mike Singletary to 13 wins the next season with Harbaugh in 2011 — within a special-teams fumble of the Super Bowl with Smith playing quarterback. He knew this was the best team he’d ever played on, and he wasn’t going to be the guy to make a stink and distract from the greater good.

“t’s hard. We’re winning games, making a run. I had a new role. I didn’t like it, but I was going to take it on. I knew there would be another day, and to me, that’s the thinking.

“Was I pissed?” Smith said, “Yeah, absolutely. To say the least. But it’s a team game, and there’s something special about that. The locker room is a special place… I wasn’t going to put myself above a team in the middle of a season.”

So Smith became the league’s most overqualified backup quarterback. He was engaged in the quarterback meetings, helped Kaepernick where he could, helped other teammates during the week.

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Smith says the thing he’s most proud of in his football career “is doing it differently.” He was an overlooked recruit who became the No. 1 pick in the NFL Draft, and was labeled a bust before going 19-5 with a 95.1 passer rating the last two seasons.

“You get a taste of playing in the playoffs and what that’s like, and it’s a completely different world,” Smith says. “You get a taste in those meaningful games, you get that taste and you can’t get it out. You want more. That’s what I want."

 

[MHSL82]

Warning/Disclaimer: A friend who knows that I follow Alex Smith's career sent me the following article. Do not read it if you don't want to read more Alex Smith stuff. I put this disclaimer in because some who've known me may take it as more than it is and someone suggested a disclaimer if I posted things that aren't my words if I didn't want them taken as mine.

More importantly, do not assume that what is here is what I believe or that anyone is saying the Smith is better than Kaepernick. I am only sharing because someone sent it to me and it has some stats and info that I hadn't read elsewhere. Some of the claims he makes may be true or false and are not proof that if Smith were used differently that it would work out better. Again, Kaepernick > Smith.

This is not the entire article. I shortened it to what I thought the gist of it was.

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Alex Smith and The Run Game; The Defense; in the Red-Zone (random info)

Alex Smith in the Red Zone

As I noted in my first article, "Alex Smith played football before Jim Harbaugh was his coach. Remember?" I do believe Smith improved overall as a QB under Harbaugh but there were some areas I felt he was restrained, particularly big play opportunity. After reading juvatbull's articles about Smith's passing splits I wanted to take a peak at his redzone stats and I noticed something else.

Under Harbaugh, Smith saw his attempts reduced drastically; Harbaugh tailored his gameplan around conservative QB play and this hinged on a paranoid QB. I do not have any tangible evidence to back this up, but a quick glance at some game film tells me that Smith had a lot more freedom as a QB under Singletary. He was much more willing to scramble behind the line of scrimmage and make a play, he appeared more mobile (though he had some happy feet at times) and gunslinger-ish in his 2009-2010 seasons.

There were two features of the Alex Smith-led 49ers that no one really argues: they played lights out defense and they were much too willing to settle for FG's in the redzone. I think that this formula worked very well, but I also think that it was Harbaugh's doing and not Smith's.

I have not seen this mentioned anywhere, but I apologize if it has. Before Harbaugh became HC, the best facet of Smith's game was unquestionably his red-zone decision making and ad-libbing. In 2010, Smith led the league in redzone passer rating (112.8), throwing a whopping 13 TD's to 0 INT's, and, just in case you think this was a fluke, in 2009 he threw for 16 TD's and 0 INT's.

As soon as Harbaugh took over, his performance in the red-zone suffered. His completion pct. went from 70% in 2010 to 37% in 2011, and while he did throw 13 TD's again in 2011, he added 2 INT's.

In 2012 he threw 12 TD's and 2 INT's in the redzone over the first 8 games, but the INT's are deceiving. His comp pct. jumped to 74% in 2012 and over half of his attempts in the redzone went for TD's, which is pretty remarkable.

I am not sure what to expect of Smith's red-zone performance under Andy Reid, but if the preseason is any indicator, his ability to extend plays may be even better than before. This preseason I have seen Smith bend in half backwards Mike Vick-style to complete a pass and spin out of a sack like Tony Romo. Both his ability/willingness to extend plays and red-zone performance suffered under Harbaugh, but his improvement in the redzone from 2011-2012 suggests I might be overstating it.

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Alex Smith and the Defense

People see these stats and assume the defense was causing Smith's performance, but what if I told you that Smith's performance directly benefitted the defense as well? What if I told you that in 2011, the Niners defense allowed only 14.3 points per game and that in the first 8 games of 2012 they were on track to best that mark, allowing only 12.9, but that as soon as Kaepernick took over they started allowing 21.3?

And, just in case you think that the offense also saw some kind of full TD per game increase, the offense scored 23.6 ppg under Smith and 26 with Kaep. Here is a great chart, mostly yanked from another article, that charts some of these stats. (It is, of course, worth noting that Smith and Kaepernick faced different teams over these games and also had to deal with varying injury issues on their own team (Justin Smith being of note))

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I do not think Alex Smith is better than Colin Kaepernick, but I also think the days of San Francisco consistently having one of the top two scoring defenses in the league are over. You can't play explosive, boom/bust football on offense and consistently put your defense in the best possible situation; they simply don't go together.

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Alex Smith and the Run Game

Reading the defense is a skill that is most often attributed to game managers, but I think it is a vital skill to have. As the chart shows, Kaepernick was much more explosive than Smith was on a per play basis, but isn't it surprising that the team averaged less yards per carry under Kaepernick? Look at the huge dip in Frank Gore's production. When Smith was under center Gore consistently ranked in the top five in YPC, but with Kaep under center he was averaging a very mediocre 4.01. For all the gushing you hear people do about the opportunities the read-option opens for the run game, it seems that a cerebral QB who continually changes plays to put his RB in the best position to succeed is a better asset to have.