Nick Mullens on pace for 2nd-most passing yards ever through 16 starts
Nick Mullens’ tenure as a 49ers starting quarterback hasn’t always been pretty. He’s 5-9 through 14 games, and his play has been inconsistent enough that at one point this season he lost the QB2 job for a week. However, his raw numbers are an indicator of why the team has kept him around since scooping him as an undrafted free agent out of Southern Mississippi after the 2017 draft.
Mullens is on the verge of doing something only one other quarterback has done in NFL history: eclipse 4,500 passing yards in his first 16 starts.
Going into Week 14 against Washington, Mullens has 14 starts under his belt. In those 14 games he’s racked up 3,926 passing yards. That alone would be good for 21st all-time through 16 starts, but Mullens has two more to go.
Patrick Mahomes is the all-time leader in passing yards through 16 starts with 5,100. That’s not an attainable number for the 49ers’ signal caller. Second place currently belongs to Andrew Luck who posted 4,374 yards in his first 16 starts. That’s a number Mullens can, and should pass.
The former UDFA is averaging 249.1 yards per game in his career. That would put him on pace for about 4,424 passing yards – the second-most ever by a quarterback in his first 16 games. En route to that he would eclipse the likes of Dan Marino, Aaron Rodgers and Deshaun Watson.
San Francisco’s next two games are against Washington and Dallas. Washington’s defense is playing very well of late, but the Cowboys boast a defense that could surrender a lot of yards to a QB like Mullens who’s capable of getting the ball to his playmakers in the space head coach Kyle Shanahan schemes open.
Mullens hasn’t always been perfect as a starter, and poor play from either him or the team has often given him plenty of garbage time to run up those stats. Still, completing passes in the NFL isn’t easy, and climbing up this list that includes some of the game’s all-time greats is something Mullens will always be able to hang his hat on.
