Filed Under » Colin Kaepernick

The San Francisco 49ers today dealt Alex Smith to the Kansas City Chiefs in exchange for a second-round pick in the 2013 draft and a conditional mid-round pick in 2014. The team also included Colin Kaepernick in the deal with the Chiefs.

"Yes! I can't wait to play for the Chiefs!" Smith exclaimed when told of the trade.

"Son of a BITCH," he added, when informed of the full details of trade.

San Francisco head coach Jim Harbaugh said the deal was just too good to pass up.

"It was completely worth it for the look on Alex's face when I told him he was traded to the Chiefs — he was so excited — only to then tell him that Colin was going, too," said Harbaugh. "I will never forget the look of joy to complete depression in a moment. So hilarious. It made my day."

Harbaugh admits that including his young starting quarterback in the trade will likely hurt his team in the short-run.

"But, hey, we didn't win the Super Bowl with Colin anyway, so I felt that screwing with Alex like this would be the perfect way to get us over that loss and get us laughing and having fun again," said the coach. "And it was. Seriously, you should have seen the look on Alex's face. I hope someone got a picture of it. Priceless."

With just four teams still battling it out for the Super Bowl XLVII title, some undrafted quarterback on the Atlanta Falcons' bench has emerged as the new fresh face of 2012 NFL Playoffs, replacing Colin Kaepernick in the highly visible role.

Expected to taking over for Atlanta in a set of circumstances no crazier than Kaepernick continuing to start over a healthy Alex Smith, the unheralded benchwarmer from a Division III college will soon run, gun, and slash his way to an NFC Championship Game win against the Niners, making him the new young quarterback everyone won't shut up about.

"Colin Kaepernick used to be the NFL's next big star, but that's what we said about Russell Wilson, and about Robert Griffin III, and earlier that afternoon about Andrew Luck," said ESPN analyst Tom Jackson. "Logically this new kid is the future of football itself, just because he's the best not-old quarterback on a 2012 playoff team."

This new guy who you don't even know the name of yet will be one of this year's two Super Bowl quarterbacks. That means two full weeks of analysts talking up his upside, even though the upside of every fresh face of the 2012 NFL Playoffs has been weaker than the last one.

"Nothing proves that Colin Kaepernick can't win games in the NFL more than the way Colin Kaepernick won last week's NFL game," said fellow analyst Ron Jaworski. "He's been skating by with a gunslinging quarterback style, similar to Wilson and RGIII and Luck's gunslinging quarterback styles, that doesn't have the staying power of this new kid's gunslinging quarterback style."