That is one excellent article that Mo linked above. There is a wealth of information in it. I’ll link it again.

http://espn.go.com/nfl/playoffs/2012/story/_/id/8854372/jim-harbaugh-knows-qbs-including-colin-kaepernick

Here are some excerpts from it:

This is what happens when you take an insanely athletic quarterback, cook up an offense that ignores 30 or 40 years of carved-in-stone NFL group think, and then pair him up with a fearless head coach -- Jim Harbaugh. Harbaugh played the position for 14 NFL seasons himself, grew up as the son of a head coach and spent his formative years at Michigan having Bo Schembechler yell in his ear hole, and he has now become the sport's leading guru at developing quarterbacks.

(Though Bo probably wouldn't if he were still around. The late Schembechler -- a committed three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust coach -- knew what an outlier Harbaugh is. Harbaugh now tells a story of how he called Bo after he got his first head coaching job at the University of San Diego. The feisty Schembechler make Harbaugh promise that he'd still use a halfback and fullback before consenting to give him any advice.)

Nobody at the college or pro football level has had as much success at developing quarterbacks as Harbaugh has lately. Many a coach and NFL general manager will tell you it may be the hardest job in the game.

Yet Harbaugh has now been a winner at developing quarterbacks four times in nine seasons. Before personally targeting Kaepernick as the man he wanted in the 2011 NFL draft, Harbaugh turned Josh Johnson into an NFL prospect at San Diego (an FCS school a step down from the top level of college football), presided over Andrew Luck's development at Stanford, then led Smith's resurrection with the 49ers after everyone termed his 5-year-old career a bust.

Just as remarkably, Harbaugh managed to pull it all off though he had to adjust his offenses to the very disparate skill sets of each man, and Stanford and the Niners had losing programs when he arrived. Luck is a classic drop-back passer. Smith is a deft game manager. And Kaepernick, well, he is Harbaugh's most fascinating project yet.

Harbaugh talked at length about the "quarterback DNA" he looks for in this 2011 interview with the Sacramento Bee's Matt Barrows before drafting Kaepernick. He expanded on how he once compared it to how an experienced birdwatcher can identify a bird from some distance away just by the way it flies.

"I feel like I've seen it enough to say, 'OK, that's an NFL quarterback,'" Harbaugh said. "But you want to find better, and also best … [Athleticism] has always been really important to me. I call it athletic instincts.

"It could be defined as he could go out and play soccer and make a soccer team or be on the basketball team and at least be the sixth man and be really good on defense and hustle and pass the ball as a point guard. He could go into center field and catch fly balls. We've all known those kind of guys. Someone who's good at everything. In high school, he was probably the best athlete in the school. He's just got those innate quarterback qualities … Just being around them -- they've got it. The ability to light up a room and people really want to follow them, a lot of qualities like that."

Brian Polian is the new football coach at Nevada, where Kaepernick went to school. He is also the son of NFL general manager Bill Polian, the man who drafted Peyton Manning over Ryan Leaf and presided over the Bills' dynasty that was quarterbacked by Jim Kelly before that. Brian, who also coached two years with Harbaugh at Stanford when Luck was there, says, "Five or seven years ago, I remember having a conversation with my father where I asked, "Do you think can you ever run this offense in the NFL? And he said, 'No. NFL defenders can run fast too. You have to keep your guy upright the whole season. In the long run, we just don't have the body of evidence that it can work or just one guy can do it.' "But I'll tell you what," Polian laughs, "after what these guys have done this season, I mean --- " It makes you re-think everything? "Right," Polian agrees. "It has to." Why wouldn't you want a hybrid quarterback who can do it all, given the choice?

"I think everybody kinda has to adjust kind of their thinking on what an NFL quarterback is right now," Trent Dilfer, the former NFL quarterback turned ESPN analyst, told ESPN radio's Colin Cowherd this week. "You look at the younger age groups, the quarterbacks coming up a lot of the kids are Colin Kaepernick, a lot of the kids are RG III and Russell Wilson. Smart. Tough. Great passers. But super athletic. And super BIG. And experts in the zone read game. And you know, it is a craft to read this run game out, much like reading defenses in the passing game. They're taking that brain work and applying it to the run game. & And I think we're going to have to adjust our paradigm of what an NFL quarterback is."

For now, the Falcons are, not surprisingly, still clinging to the old orthodoxies. Their safeties made some noise this week by warning how they intend to "blow up" Kaepernick with big hits on Sunday if he keeps the ball and runs against them. The Falcons have hinted they may assign a spy to shadow Kaepernick. The Falcons are insisting they won't be caught by surprise like Green Bay was when San Francisco sprung the Pistol on them a season-high 34 plays.

But look: The most amazing aside about the 181 yards rushing and 263 yards passing Kaerpernick shredded the Packers for is he gained 178 of his rushing yards before contact, according to ESPN Stats & Information. Repeat: Before contact. Think about that for a second.

They actually believe they can bottle up Kaepernick, a man who'd already outplayed Tom Brady and Jay Cutler and Aaron Rodgers in a mere half-season of NFL starts? How cute is THAT?

At 6-foot-4, Kaepernick is five inches taller than Seattle's Wilson and two inches taller than Griffin's listed height, yet he's probably faster. Passing from the pocket? Kaepernick throws the ball -- even the deep ball -- as well as either of them or rifle-armed Cam Newton, if not better. Thinking the game? Kaepernick was a 4.0 student in high school and smart enough to be recruited by some Ivy League schools before Nevada became the only FBS school to offer him a scholarship very late. and Harbaugh recently called Kaepernick's ability to pick up the 49ers' game plans early in week, "Savant-like." Kaepernick isn't "just" a running quarterback. He's a hybrid's hybrid.

He's said his best 40-yard dash time is 4.43 seconds. He's a whippet-like 230 pounds and has the longest, most coltish stride this side of Usain Bolt. He was a three-sport athlete in high school who led his football team to two central California football championships, clinched that Nevada scholarship offer after the coaches saw him play basketball, and -- even then -- had a throwing arm that's now left 49ers receivers like Randy Moss and Kyle Williams saying that they believe the stories that he had a 94-mph fastball as a high school pitcher. The Cubs drafted Kaepernick in 2009, three years after he last threw a baseball in competition.

The Niners traded up to take Kaepernick with the fourth choice of the second round after sitting tight and taking linebacker Aldon Smith with their No. 7 pick in the first round. The Kaepernick pick was Harbaugh's call all the way. Harbaugh just knew he was his guy, all right. But how?