Go back to the summer before the 2014 season and you wouldn’t need to look for long before finding someone who’d predicted the San Francisco 49ers would win the Super Bowl that year. It wouldn’t have been considered “bold” by anyone except maybe Colin Kaepernick’s fiercest skeptics. In fact, one such skeptic was an opposing player who had this to say (anonymously) about one of the NFL’s most exciting players the two seasons prior:
“I don’t think he’s a factor if we’re on our stuff. They run a bunch of phantom routes to get him free to run.