One way to judge the strength of a team’s schedule before the season starts is to look at the quality of quarterbacks they’ll be facing. It’s certainly not foolproof, but there’s no good way to go about evaluating teams before they’ve taken a snap.
San Francisco’s strength of schedule is not great following their last place finish in 2020, and that’s reflected in the quarterbacks they’re set to face.
A couple rookies are scattered across the board, Deshaun Watson and Aaron Rodgers’ immediate futures are both up in the air, and then a number of opposing QBs fall into the middle tier of NFL signal callers that could either win or lose their team a game depending on the day.
We took a look at the 49ers’ schedule and put the quarterbacks in order from worst to best, with a couple of backup QBs added in due to uncertain circumstances.
Behold, dear reader, science: