DENVER – It can’t get worse than that. Right?
… right??
Sunday’s 10-point performance from the 49ers offense — their first game this season played in perfect weather conditions — was dreary enough to make a Bay Area kid switch from playing football to soccer. Or at least enough to have those kids in bed at an appropriate hour.
This is what happens when you have a rusty, average quarterback who has long been distrusted by his innovative play caller.
It felt like the 49ers offense was trying to run the wrong way up an escalator. It was as funny as it was embarrassing.
We’ve been here before. We all know what this feels like, what it looks like. At least, we thought we did.
That certainly felt worse than normal.
The blame game
There is blame to go around, as usual. Defensive players attempted to claim they were at fault for not securing a turnover or few, and yes, that would have changed the result. But you don’t take the blame for not getting the right bounce after limiting an offense to 9 points.
This is most clearly on Garoppolo and Shanahan, and much more the former than the latter.
If Garoppolo didn’t throw Deebo Samuel — with enough separation against Josey Jewell to walk into the end zone — a ball which required catching like a water balloon, the game would have been over.
He had multiple misses. Samuel also found himself uncovered earlier in the game for another would-be touchdown. In hindsight, it seems a dubious assumption that Garoppolo would have hit him in stride if he threw it his way.
You would think a veteran quarterback would be able to identify a coverage bust in the direction he is looking. Alas.
Shanahan, too, deserves blame for going away from the run game (running 19 times versus 29 pass calls, though those numbers never tell the whole story) and for calling a play-action screen that caused the safety.
He admitted he put Garoppolo in a “tough spot” on that one, though maybe it wouldn’t have been a safety Kyle Juszczyk or the duo of Spencer Burford and Mike McGlinchey hadn’t been demolished on their assignments.
Either way, it’s a questionable play call in a dicey area of the field.
But that’s what you get when Shanahan calls plays for Garoppolo, especially after leading up to this season with Trey Lance in mind. They’re clearly not in sync yet.
The notion with Garoppolo was that at least in the short term, you’d be better than with Lance. The ceiling would be lower, but the floor would be higher.
But what if the floor isn’t any higher? That’s a harrowing proposition.
If Garoppolo makes the same mistakes as Lance without the big-play upside, where does that leave the 49ers at the end of this season?
Why Lance was always the right call
The prospect of watching Lance and seeing how Shanahan developed game plans for him was enthralling.
Even if it went bad — and there were surely going to be some ugly games — the upside was unquestionably higher.
The discourse suggesting the 49ers should saddle themselves once again with Garoppolo’s mediocrity until Lance — somehow, without playing — was suddenly “ready,” is a head-scratching concept.
We know Jimmy. Jimmy’s OK. He’s likable. He throws the ball short and on time and sometimes he throws it further, and if it’s over the middle of the field, it’s probably alright.
When other areas of the field are involved (about 10-plus yards past the line of scrimmage), it gets a little sketchy.
Garoppolo hit two deep throws on the margins on Sunday. One was an excellent back-shoulder throw to Kyle Juszczyk. The other was the glaring, missed touchdown opportunity on the Samuel wheel route that he underthrew.
Otherwise:
He absolutely made some solid throws, like his third-down, on-the-money throw to Jauan Jennings outside of the numbers for the sole third-down conversion of the day. Jennings had a drop earlier in the fourth on a would-be completion down the right sideline, too.
Garoppolo’s first half was mostly solid, with a lot of those aforementioned timing throws.
But that evaporated in the second half, and the reliance on timing and SF’s lack thereof, was glaring.
From the perspective of a neutral viewer, and one who has a vested interest in the 49ers being entertaining, it’s worth reminding that football is a game.
It should be fun! It is an entertainment product!
The pervasive dread that comes with watching this team have to rely on perfectly-timed yards-after-catch plays and impeccable designs for explosives, is energy-draining. It’s exhausting.
It’s no way to live.
Not in an era of Josh Allen, Patrick Mahomes, Justin Herbert, Lamar Jackson, even Jalen Hurts, Kyler Murray and Joe Burrow (if he can stop taking a half-dozen sacks a game).
That was part of the promise of Lance; that the 49ers offense would no longer operate out of anxiety for what its quarterback could not do. They would barrel straight ahead into the NFL’s present and future.
Shanahan’s usage of Lance was questionable and perhaps unsustainable, but given Lance’s lack of experience, you’d hope he would have been used more as a quarterback and less as a downhill runner as the season progressed. The play calling options were only likely to widen.
Kyle Shanahan didn’t draft Trey Lance just because Jimmy Garoppolo is injury prone. He drafted him because he saw Josh Allen decimate his team (while they played an excellent game) in 2020, effectively ending their season. He looked back at Nick Mullens and a sidelined Garoppolo, who, even at his best, is not one of the best, and sighed.
But we don’t get Trey Lance this season. We get Jimmy Garoppolo.
Maybe this is all a bit harsh to Garoppolo in his first full game of the season. But there are worse fates than being called a “mid” NFL quarterback, and it’s hard to argue Garoppolo is anything else at this point.
There’s a reason no one was desperate to pick him up after his shoulder surgery (though the Pittsburgh Steelers probably should’ve given John Lynch a ring).
And as a soon-to-be 31-year-old with 48 career starts who lost in the Super Bowl because he failed to execute in the most crucial moment, you don’t get the benefit of the doubt.
This isn’t a Garoppolo hit piece. I, and others, have written him off time and time again only to find him still, inexplicably, as the just-OK quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers. He’s been unquestionably successful as a starter.
He lives perpetually in the grey area between awful and awesome. It’s why, when watching him, you feel like he’s bound to throw a pick-six as much as he’s going to hit one of those major chunk plays over the middle.
Whenever you peruse a stat sheet, thinking, “That was awful,” he somehow looks like he played just fine.
He was 18-for-29 with 211 yards, a TD, INT, lost fumble and safety on Sunday.
Those last two don’t show up in a traditional quarterback box. But it feels like that’s always the case with him. It’s rarely as bad or as good as you believe it to be in the moment, or how the stat sheet tells it.
The upside
Now, here’s the thing. It’s a long season.
Logic and the history of this team with Garoppolo suggests their offensive ineptitude is unsustainable. And there is absolutely some validity in Garoppolo being a bit rusty from not getting a full training camp ramp up.
But his suggestion that, “It was kind of my first week with these guys” is patently absurd. If things do go sideways, you wonder if more excuses will be made about how the lack of trust between Garoppolo and Shanahan doomed this unholy reunion from the start.
Pump the brakes on the total gloom, though.
It’s going to get better. And it wasn’t just Jimmy on Sunday. There were some drops and the offensive line wasn’t superb, in addition to some questionable play calling.
This is still a playoff-caliber team by any assessment. This might be the best defense in the NFL, and is at least in the upper echelon. The skill position players on this team are as deep and well-balanced as any other team in the league.
It doesn’t feel as dire as last year’s on-the-brink situation heading into Chicago, and there’s no quarterback controversy with Lance out of the picture for the year.
But Sunday was a stark reminder that Garoppolo’s timing and rhythm is massively important. If he’s not connecting on time with receivers, what is he really bringing to the table?
NFL defenses don’t respect him as deep thrower of the football. They don’t respect him as a runner. They respect the motions and Swiss army knife capabilities of the 49ers’ skill position players and Garoppolo’s ability to deliver the ball to them in spots where they can rattle off yards.
The prospective creativity of a Lance-led offense, and the exponentially higher upside? Gone. Into the ether. We’re back to living in these fine margins again.
So, to those of you folks out there who were clamoring for Jimmy Garoppolo to start, you got your wish.
Was that fun? Did you enjoy that experience? Was the prospect of a developing dual-threat quarterback too uncertain to stomach?
Well, here you go. You wanted your Jimmy G gruel. And now you’ve got it.
The rest of the season likely won’t be as bad as whatever that was against the Broncos — and it certainly could have been rough with Lance at the helm — but with Garoppolo, the 49ers are back to walking the perpetual tightrope on offense.