Trades Ten Years Later - Blaine Gabbert for a 6th-round pick (Luke Bowanko)
I should have recused myself from writing this one.
Welcome back to Trades Ten Years Later and, coincided with the start of a new league year, welcome to our NFL coverage! A schedule for the upcoming week can be found at the bottom of this post.
The Names: San Francisco 49ers receive: Blaine Gabbert. Jaguars receive: 6th-round pick in 2014 (#205; Luke Bowanko).
The Team Context: I can’t believe THIS is my first time writing about any NFL team.
The Jacksonville Jaguars were born in 1995 and were great in the late 1990s. I moved to Jacksonville in 1998, when the Jaguars went 11-5, and was an unbelievably obsessed fan in 1999, when they went 14-2. Obviously it was an unequivocally great season; they went 14-2. Please let’s move on and do NOT ask who the two losses were against.
Basically as soon as the 21st century began, the Jaguars were terrible. They’ve had a couple of seasons you can point to as exciting and have won a few playoff games. Mostly it’s been abject misery. Their last consecutive playoff appearances were in 1998-1999.
The best part of living at rock bottom is the ease with which hope can be manufactured, and this was a new day in Jacksonville. In 2011, Shahid Khan agreed to buy the Jaguars and began working to upgrade the franchise synonymous with incompetence. Khan spent one season observing the team, during which they went 2-14 and got outscored by 189 cumulative points, featuring the unique combination of both a bottom-5 offense and defense in the NFL. Unsurprisingly, Khan decided to clean house and fired former GM Gene Smith to hire Dave Caldwell. The article announcing Caldwell’s hiring indicates that it would be Caldwell’s decision as to whether head coach Mike Mularkey would be retained and noted “that could be good news for the coach: Caldwell worked with Mularkey in Atlanta, and they do have a relationship.” It must not have been a great relationship, as Mularkey was fired two days later. “You’ve got to have a fresh start across the board,” Caldwell said, foreshadowing the circumstances that would lead to this trade fourteen months later. “I’ve always been part of a winner, I’ve never been part of a losing team,” Caldwell also added, ironically foreshadowing his tenure in Jacksonville.
Led by new head coach Gus Bradley, the Jaguars set to work locking in Caldwell’s first losing season. They lost their first 8 games of 2013, including a game in Peyton Manning’s Denver that tied a record for the largest point-spread in NFL history when Denver was favored by 28 points (the Jaguars lost 35-19 to valiantly cover). This was, to an extent, foreseeable – the Jaguars were entering 2013 without a good answer at quarterback (more on that later) and were embracing a youth movement. The only players on the roster over the age of 30 were stalwart center Brad Meester (36 and retiring after the season), recent waiver claim edge rusher Jason Babin (33 and released before the start of 2014), and kicker Josh Scobee (31 and a kicker).
The 49ers were also in a period of transition. One of the league’s marquee franchises had stumbled to start the 21st century, finishing 2-14 in 2004 to earn the #1 overall pick and select quarterback Alex Smith out of Utah. Smith was a two-star recruit in the class of 2002 and became the starter in his sophomore season under first-year head coach Urban Meyer. Meyer and Smith proved to be an excellent match, following a strong 2003 with a perfect 2004 that saw Utah go undefeated in regular season play with wins over Texas A&M, Arizona, and North Carolina. Utah was a member of the Mountain West Conference (oh yeah) and was the first “mid-major” school to earn an invite to a BCS bowl game when they played in the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl. Unfortunately, they were matched with a mediocre Pittsburgh Panthers team, who earned automatic qualification to a BCS bowl by virtue of winning the Big East (oh yeah). Utah won 35-7 and, with Meyer leaving to take a job at the University of Florida, Smith unexpectedly found himself declaring for the NFL draft even though he “played that whole season in college and never had a single inkling that the NFL was a possibility.”
Perhaps as a result of his own shock to be there, the Alex Smith era in San Francisco was tumultuous. Smith’s play was inconsistent but generally skewed towards “bad,” but he missed enough time with injuries and had incompetent enough coaches that it was hard to assign blame. In a particularly illustrative example, Smith injured his shoulder in October 2007 while being sacked by “Seattle’s 308-pound defensive tackle Rocky Bernard,” whose name is perfect for a 308-pound shoulder-destroying defensive tackle. The injury was diagnosed as a separated shoulder that would require a few weeks of rest, but no surgery. Smith was horrible in his return and coach Mike Nolan called him out for a perceived lack of toughness, resulting in the two feuding over the severity of the injury until a reexamination from Dr. James Andrews revealed that surgery would be required after all in December. At the start of the 2008 season, Smith mysteriously fractured the same shoulder and was shut down for the season. The culprit turned out to be a wire left behind from the first surgery, which had eroded the shoulder bone over time and necessitated another surgery to remove the wire and impacted bone fragment.
In 2011, Alex Smith had perhaps the first stroke of good fortune in his NFL career when the 49ers hired Jim Harbaugh as head coach. Smith started all 16 games for the first time in 5 years and the team went 13-3, advancing to the NFC Championship before losing to the New York Giants. Smith became a free agent that offseason, but re-signed with San Francisco on a three-year, $24 million contract that finally seemed to offer a stable situation. That peace lasted until November, when he suffered a concussion against the Rams and was replaced by backup quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Two games later, Smith was cleared to return to play, but Harbaugh preferred the exciting toolset that Kaepernick offered. Alex Smith was off to the best start of his career, but sat on the bench as Kaepernick led the 49ers to a Super Bowl appearance. He was traded to Kansas City a few weeks later.
This transition didn’t come without controversy, as Smith was leading the NFL in completion percentage at the time of his injury. There was a fine line for San Francisco to walk in filling out their quarterback depth chart – it was important to have somebody experienced enough to step in if the still-green Kaepernick started to falter, but lackluster enough that their arrival wouldn’t create another QB controversy. They rode the line admirably in 2013, swapping late-round draft picks for Colt McCoy. McCoy entered free agency that year, so the 49ers were looking for somebody new to fit the bill and ensure continued tranquility at the position.
The Player Context: Blaine Williamson Gabbert was a mega-prospect out of Parkway West High School in Ballwin, Missouri. Like most people from the St. Louis suburbs, the closest he came to leaving the state under his own volition came when he briefly committed to Nebraska before bailing to play for the in-state Missouri Tigers as the first five-star quarterback to join the team. Revenge for this particular grievance came in 2009, when Gabbert was viciously sacked by Nebraska defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh, resulting in an ankle sprain that compromised his performance for the rest of the season. Gabbert never quite lived up to the heights of his predecessor, Chase Daniel, but still had everything that scouts looked for in an NFL quarterback – draft profiles praised his “ideal NFL frame” and “top shelf arm strength and velocity.” Sure, he hadn’t been all that successful in his two years of Big 12 play at Missouri (oh yeah), but he was 6’5” and could throw the football a mile. Surely a smart NFL team would fix him.
Unfortunately for Gabbert, he was not drafted by a smart NFL team. The Jaguars traded their 1st and 2nd round picks in 2011 to move from #16 in the draft to #10, where they selected Gabbert. They made this decision so abruptly that Coach Jack Del Rio had no idea it was coming and was not in the room, having left to get food because he thought the Jaguars wouldn’t pick for a couple more hours. The Jaguars’ most recent draft investment at the quarterback position was Byron Leftwich, selected 7th overall in 2003. Leftwich was injured and inconsistent enough for his backup, David Garrard, to frequently outplay him in spot duty. Del Rio backed Leftwich publicly in the 2007 offseason as “the No. 1 guy,” but Garrard ended up winning the job that preseason and Leftwich was released. Garrard led the team to a great 2007-08 season that still stands as one of their best this century (won one playoff game) and earned a $60 million contract extension, following which the team basically eroded around him as he failed to inspire confidence in his ability to do anything about it. After Gabbert was drafted, Del Rio maintained that Garrard would continue to start, but ultimately gave him the Byron Leftwich treatment by releasing him five days before the season opener (and two hours after “introducing him as the starting quarterback at a kickoff luncheon at the chamber of commerce”).
The trouble with releasing Garrard is that Gabbert was drafted as a quarterback “for the future, possibly the not-too-distant future.” But certainly not for the present, even in the traditionally hyperbolic language of post-draft hype. At the time of Gabbert’s selection, Jaguars GM Gene Smith said “we feel like we have an excellent situation here to bring along a young player,” citing that Gabbert was an underclassman who played in a collegiate spread offense. That situation was upended with the release of Garrard, as Gabbert was now 2nd on the depth chart behind Luke McCown. McCown had just turned 30 and had never been seriously considered a starter in the NFL. In his second game, he went 6-for-19 and threw four interceptions as the Jaguars lost 32-3 to the Jets, at which point it was officially untenable to keep the #10 overall draft pick on the bench. For better or worse, the Jaguars were moving forward with Gabbert at QB.
For worse, as it turned out. Gabbert was truly horrible in 2011, completing just 50.8% of his passes as he threw 12 touchdowns and 11 interceptions. He averaged 147.6 passing yards per game (5.4 yards per attempt) and led the league in yards lost to sacks. This was the only time in Gabbert’s career that he would lead the NFL in any statistical metric. A December 2011 article titled “Finding positives for Blaine Gabbert” starts like this:
“When Jacksonville Jaguars interim coach Mel Tucker called Blaine Gabbert ‘courageous’ last week, Tucker lost credibility with regard to his public reviews of his rookie quarterback.”
The sentence provides two revelations: (1) Jack Del Rio had been fired as a result of this calamity and (2) Gabbert was visibly rattled as a result of “a poor rookie season during which he’s not played well on a team that hasn’t protected him consistently enough and which has horrible receivers.” Football Outsiders ranked his rookie season as the second-worst QB season of the prior two decades (ranking ahead of only David Carr’s rookie year) and by September 2012, there were questions as to why he was starting ahead of newly-signed Chad Henne. In late November, Gabbert was placed on injured reserve with a forearm and shoulder injury after starting ten games. Henne wasn’t good by any stretch in the six remaining games, but that was sufficient to outproduce Gabbert’s aggregate stats in the first ten.
That offseason ushered in the organizational cleanout ahead of the 2013 season. Gabbert was entering his third season on his fourth head coach and the GM who traded up to draft him had been fired. Gabbert missed two games with a hamstring injury in October and never reclaimed his starting job, with Gus Bradley opting to play Henne in the team’s London game against the 49ers (the Jaguars would lose this game 42-10 to fall to 0-8 on the season). Gabbert threw one touchdown and seven interceptions (three of which were returned for touchdowns) in his three 2013 games. Alfie Crow at Big Cat Country asked if Blaine Gabbert was the worst top 10 QB draft pick of all time, but wasn’t quite ready to elevate him ahead of Akili Smith.
The Trade: The writing was probably already on the wall that Gabbert was done in Jacksonville, but it became engraved when Henne signed a two-year extension on March 7 with promises that he’d be given a chance to start. Talks with San Francisco’s GM Trent Baalke began the next day and progressed quickly. David Caldwell cited a positive organizational atmosphere for Gabbert to develop as he called it “a good move for all parties involved.” The Jaguars received a 6th round pick and a conditional pick that never conveyed.
In the broader context, this trade was an avatar for how horrible things had gotten in Jacksonville. Alfie Crow revisited the question of Gabbert’s historical significance, this time comfortably repeating Football Outsiders’ conclusion that “Blaine Gabbert is the worst QB of the DVOA era.” Hays Carlyon looked at broader team context to point out that, in March 2014, the Jaguars only had four players left on the roster from their 2007-2011 drafts: Cecil Shorts, Tyson Alualu, and depth pieces Will Rackley and Chris Prosinski.
The Results: The Jaguars used pick #205 in the 2014 draft to select Luke Bowanko, a center out of the University of Virginia. Tasked with filling the big shoes of Brad Meester, who had been with the team since 2000, Bowanko took over as the starter by week three and “was up-and-down, but the team [was] excited about his potential” after his rookie year. Unfortunately that was basically his career peak, as injuries prevented him from seeing much playing time over the next two seasons. He was eventually traded to Baltimore for a 7th round draft pick, which is not a terrible ROI for a 6th round draft pick.
The Jaguars selected Blake Bortles with the #3 pick in the 2014 Draft. I’m not going to talk about that any further because this has been miserable enough for me to write already (we’re not revisiting Urban Meyer either).
As expected, Gabbert hardly saw the field in 2014 – Kaepernick signed an extension for $126 million over 6 years shortly after the trade. However, the team fell to a comparatively disappointing 8-8 that season and organizational conflict ended with Harbaugh taking the University of Michigan head coaching job, to be replaced by Jim Tomsula. If 2014 was disappointing for San Francisco, 2015 was disastrous as Kaepernick became a “clearly regressing quarterback” who “struggled not only with the rudimentary passing elements such as accuracy, anticipation and touch, but also with protections, field vision and decision making.” He was benched and subsequently placed on injured reserve with a murky labrum injury that required surgery but had not been disclosed at all earlier in the season.
This set the stage for Blaine Gabbert, who “came into the starting job with zero expectations for success” but ended up playing, in the words of James Brady’s post headline, “just well enough to screw over the 49ers.” At a still-young but less-terrified 26 years old, Gabbert “look[ed] confident and comfortable – more comfortable than he ever looked in Jacksonville.” It was widely expected that Kaepernick would be scuttled off the roster that offseason, and the 49ers nearly agreed to a trade to send him to Denver, but the trade would require Kaepernick to restructure his contract and ultimately never got finalized. Bafflingly, the 49ers ended up keeping both quarterbacks with the starting job essentially set up for a camp competition in 2016.
Surely, that would be uneventful.
Kaepernick fell behind in training camp, as he missed practices and recovered from a litany of offseason surgeries that left him unable to throw for a week in August. Around this time, he began protesting racial injustice by refusing to stand for the national anthem, first by remaining seated and then by taking a knee after a conversation with military and quasi-NFL veteran Nate Boyer. Even as a firestorm started to brew, the 49ers and new head coach Chip Kelly kept Kaepernick on the roster when they “determined that his ability as a quarterback more than offset any potential distraction over his refusal to stand during the national anthem.”
They might have been misestimating on both sides. The protests picked up steam around the NFL and reached the presidential level, with current president Barack Obama supporting Kaepernick’s stance and future president Donald Trump saying he should leave the country and “see if [he is] going to be making $20 million being a second-string quarterback.” You can tell Trump doesn’t really follow the NFL because he didn’t even mention “second-string to Blaine Gabbert.” By October 3, Kaepernick was on the cover of Time magazine. While this was happening off the field, Blaine Gabbert was playing atrociously on the field. The 49ers went 1-4 in the first five games of the season and Gabbert only eclipsed 200 yards passing in one of those games (he threw for 243 yards on 17-for-36 passing). Kelly was the 7th head coach Gabbert had played for in his six NFL seasons. After Kaepernick restructured his contract to remove $14.5 million in injury guarantees, the 49ers were comfortable starting him over Gabbert for the rest of the season. He was better than Gabbert, but not good enough to make the 49ers look competent as they finished the season 2-14. Gabbert became a free agent and Kaepernick opted out of his contract with San Francisco ahead of expectations that he would be released. GM Trent Baalke and coach Chip Kelly were also fired.
The Aftermath: Colin Kaepernick struggled to get a job after the end of the 2016 season. Blaine Gabbert struggled for a while, but ultimately signed with Arizona in May of 2017. For several NFL media members, the Gabbert Threshold was the point at which it became clear that Kaepernick was being blackballed by the NFL due to his protests. Kaepernick never played in the NFL again, but the protests continued and escalated to bizarre forms of political theater in 2017. Who can forget Jerry Jones locking arms with his players and taking a knee BEFORE the anthem, only to get the team to stand when the anthem began? What about Mike Pence attending a 49ers-Colts game and then walking out in counterprotest of the anthem protests, at an estimated cost to taxpayers of $325,000? Kaepernick probably got the last laugh, as broader protests against racial injustice in June 2020 resulted in a capitulation from the NFL where Roger Goodell issued an apology and encouraged teams to sign Kaepernick, then said that August that he “wished we had listened [to Kaepernick] earlier.”
Actually, scratch that, Blaine Gabbert definitely got the last laugh. He remained a backup for most of his career, but started a 2017 game for the Cardinals against Jacksonville. The Jaguars were having their best season of the 21st century (won two playoff games), but they were defeated by a Blaine Gabbert game-winning drive, following which he cursed out the entire franchise. Gabbert signed with the Titans ahead of 2018 and only started three games. Naturally, one of these was a victory over the Jaguars (please ignore that he was removed from that game early with a concussion, which doesn’t fit my narrative). Gabbert spent a few seasons as a backup in Tampa Bay, where he won his first Super Bowl (haha) and became a legitimate hero when he saw a helicopter crash while riding jet skis in Tampa with his brothers and raced to the scene to rescue its occupants. Then he signed with the Chiefs this past season and won his second Super Bowl (hahahahahahaha) as backup to Patrick Mahomes.
David Caldwell hung on as general manager until 2020. The man who “had never been part of a losing team” put together six teams with losing records (all 6-10 or worse) and one team with a winning record (10-6). He was replaced by former trade partner Trent Baalke, whose job performance was so quickly criticized that Jaguars fans wore clown outfits to the final home game of the 2021 season to protest his continued retention with the team. The protests didn’t work; Baalke handed out millions of dollars in contracts today as the Jaguars current GM.
Miscellaneous: Blaine’s younger brother Tyler was also a quarterback who committed to Nebraska and then decommitted to go to Missouri instead. “But it was important to Les and Jackie Cohen, who were each cradling one of their newborn twins — Daytona and Matthew, who were born on the Fourth of July — after driving two hours from the desert town of Victorville, Calif., to deliver a message to Kaepernick [that ‘he’s fired’].” Luke Bowanko got in a Twitter fight with the AAA Rays-affiliate Durham Bulls and decisively lost.
March 12, 2024:
49ers acquire: Jonathan Martin
Dolphins acquire: Conditional 7th round pick (2015 #232, Edmond Robinson)
March 13, 2024:
Eagles acquire: Darren Sproles
Saints acquire: 2014 5th round pick (2014 #169, Ronald Powell)