All these years later, former head coach Mike Nolan still can’t let go of his selection of Alex Smith over Aaron Rodgers. It still eats at him because after all, it cost him his only head coaching position to date in the NFL.
In an interview on Tuesday with NFL.com, Nolan said:
“The other thing as Alex at the time was a good kid — a very good person, a safe choice, always trying to please. On the other hand, Aaron was very cocky, very confident, arrogant. So you can say, ‘Why didn’t you take him to begin with?’ Because that’s really what your best quarterbacks look like. They aren’t very pleasing. They aren’t very safe.
Basically, we thought in the long term that Alex Smith would be the better choice than Aaron. It was one of those, maybe, paralysis by analysis. We had so much time to think about it.
We put a lot of stock in changing Aaron’s throwing style. We also got caught up a little bit in that Alex was so mobile. That was a good thing. But in the end, we felt Alex would be the better long-time guy. Obviously, we were wrong in that thought process.”
The sad thing about this is, circumstances such as poor management and poor coaching greatly affected how the careers of Alex and Aaron Rodgers have panned out, and that’s a fact.
While Rodgers sat behind a Hall of Fame QB in Brett Favre and inherited a team with solid players and stability in the front office, Alex was thrown to the wolves. Coach Nolan said all the right things at the time like “Alex had to earn his job” and he would “be put in a position where he didn’t have to win the game” and other things like that, but the truth is, Alex Smith played on a terrible football team with no real offensive weapons.
They turned him from a spread offense at Utah into a pocket passing QB, and in his second season in the league, you saw the growth in Alex Smith. The 49ers finished 7-9, including a “coming out party” at Seattle on a Thursday night.
In 2007, and with his 3rd offensive coordinator since entering the league, Alex suffered a shoulder injury that cost him a chunk of the season, and upon returning, he lasted until an embarrassing blowout loss in which the 49ers were blanked at Seattle on a Monday night game.
Afterwords, Alex revealed that his shoulder injury didn’t heal as well as he had thought, prompting a rift between head coach and franchise quarterback that carried into 2008, when the 49ers hired Mike Martz to become the teams 4th Offensive coordinator in four years.
They even brought in one of Martz’s QBs from Detroit (J.T. O’Sullivan) who had an impressive preseason, all but overthrowing the former No. 1 overall pick. In the end, Alex didn’t even make it to the regular season, instead being put on injured reserve. Nolan meanwhile, was fired halfway through 2008 season.
That’s the Alex Smith-Mike Nolan story for you.
Alex didn’t “fail” because he was a “safe choice”, and Rodgers didn’t succeed because he was arrogant. When Jim Harbaugh took over the 49ers, Alex Smith’s career turned around, and he hasn’t looked back since, here take a look:
Alex Smith 2005-2010
TDs: 51
INTs: 53
Alex Smith 2011-2015
TDs: 91
INTs: 30
While Alex has had to carry the “game manager” label, he’s been anything but a bad pick. During the Nolan era, Smith fired just 19 TD passes to 31 interceptions (2005-2008). In the two immediate years after, he fired 32 TD passes to 22 interceptions.
Sorry to say, but Mike Nolan is wrong. Alex Smith is a good QB who ended up in a terrible situation with the 49ers, while Rodgers was also a good QB who ended up in a great situation in Green Bay. That’s the truth, like it or not.
