It was third-and-1, the ball at the Niners’ 11-yard line, the game tied at 20, and Mac Jones broke the huddle with an assuredness few had seen of late from the former first-round pick out of Alabama. He took the shotgun snap, planted his foot on his fifth step, and ripped the ball to Kendrick Bourne, who was running a dig, inside Rams defensive back Quentin Lake, and just outside and over the outstretched right hand of linebacker Omar Speights.
It was good for 18 yards, a first down, and kept alive a drive that ended in a 59-yard Eddy Pineiro field goal that was crucial in San Francisco’s 26–23 overtime win over the Rams in Inglewood, Calif.
The pass to Bourne also showed so much more. Had Jones not known what he was seeing and trusted it to the degree he did, something bad almost assuredly would have happened. Maybe he misses the short window he threw the ball into, and Speights picks it off. Or, he hesitates, and edge rusher Jared Verse, who knocked him down moments after Jones released the ball, buries him for a sack near the goal line.
It’s fair to guess, too, that a year or two ago, that might’ve been the result of the play.
Not now with Jones playing for the coach he thought would draft him in 2021.
There’ll be a lot of quarterback comparisons after Jones’s 342-yard, two-touchdown effort in San Francisco’s gutsy victory over their archrivals from downstate. So, if you’re interested, I’ll give you the correct one to examine, one that the Niners have actually made.
This is Sam Darnold all over again. And that’s more about, for now, what you couldn’t have possibly seen for yourself, rather than what everyone saw on national TV Thursday night.
The throw we described above is simply the product of it.
To paint the complete picture here, you do have to start in 2021, when the Niners traded up from the 12th pick to No. 3, and then dove in headlong to determine which quarterback they’d take. Jones was, indeed, the leader in the clubhouse at the start, with the assumption that Clemson’s Trevor Lawrence and BYU’s Zach Wilson were also in play. But San Francisco was open-minded about going in another direction, too, and was intrigued by North Dakota State’s Trey Lance.
In Jones, the Niners saw a quarterback who was a perfect fit for Shanahan’s existing offense, an elite processor who displayed high-end pocket movement and enough athleticism in college. Over time, the question became larger than just that. With half the league running his scheme, Shanahan had to ponder whether he wanted to stay within that box in a league that was now headlined by guys such as Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen.
What Lance could bring the Niners was an ability to change and grow the offense, past what all the other teams were doing themselves, and, importantly, what those teams’ defenses were practicing against, and getting ready for, every summer. As Lance continued to check character and football IQ boxes, the idea of evolving the offense through the development of another athletic cyborg grew legs.
The reasons it didn’t work are varied (including the Niners being too good a team to sink seasons into riding out the bumps with Lance, and the emergence of Brock Purdy), and too complicated to thoroughly vet out here. The bottom line is that the broken road the Niners traveled at the position led them back to Jones, who remained an excellent fit for the offense.
So Jones started fast, crashed in New England, was traded to his hometown Jaguars, where he spent the 2024 season working behind Lawrence. As a result, when he hit free agency last March, and as he explained to me in September, “I knew what I wanted, what I was looking for—I just wanted to get to a proven system.”
And, of course, there’s no system more proven than Shanahan’s. But beyond that, it was one he actually knew fit, because it wasn’t far off from the scheme he played under Steve Sarkisian (who replaced Shanahan as Atlanta’s OC in 2017) at Alabama.
Having studied the resurrection of other highly-drafted quarterbacks such as Darnold, Geno Smith and Baker Mayfield, he told me, “Honestly, it’s about being ready, and being in the right place at the right time.” Finally, and almost right away upon arrival earlier this year, he knew he was.
We can go back now to that throw to Bourne.
It was one of several like it, including another in the second quarter to the reborn Niner receiver, in between Rams defenders Kam Curl, Josh Wallace and Quentin Lake for 16 yards, and one more earlier to Bourne, too, thrown in a hole in L.A.’s zone coverage underneath, and turned into a 35-yard catch-and-run gain.
The passes came early and often, repeatedly, for three key reasons. The first is how Shanahan, OC Klay Kubiak and quarterbacks coach Mick Lombardi (who was with Jones in New England) built up Jones’s confidence, and then pushed him in the quarterback room. The second was how the Niners’ environment allowed his quirky personality to shine through, which led the team to love him and, over time, build its confidence in him.
And third, with his teammates’ trust and his confidence in place, the allowance Shanahan makes for all his quarterbacks to make aggressive mistakes on the field, which alternately allows them to go out on the game field and rip it, and play instinctively and as the players they can be, rather than question themselves in the most frenzied of environments. Of course, another reason they feel good ripping it is that their coaches end up right a lot.
One such circumstance came in Jones’s first start, when Shanahan told McCaffrey was going to come wide open on a flat route, and to trust it, and rip it. Sure enough, it was a touchdown.
“It was honestly exactly what they told me was going to happen on the play, which rarely happens—alright, Christian’s gonna break out and he’s gonna be wide open,” Jones told me. “I was like, ‘Alright, let’s do it.’ It’s pretty cool to experience that for the first time in my career. That was a great catch and a great route.”
Put it all together, and you get to the interesting part: The Niners are seeing shades of Jones’s rise in confidence and pace-of-play similar to Darnold in 2023.
By now, you know the rest of Darnold’s story, one that should caution us all against closing the book prematurely on any talented quarterback that’s made of the right stuff. And if you can cut through some of the morning-show hysteria that came out of Jones’s night, you can see that path he’s beating now back into becoming an NFL starter.
For now, though, Jones is the right guy in the right place, keeping Purdy’s team firmly on the tracks, and it’s been good enough for everyone involved.
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