© Joe Nicholson | 2020 Nov 1
If bad news comes in waves, then this latest one is a doozy for the San Francisco 49ers.
First they got beat handily by the Seahawks. Then Jimmy Garoppolo was essentially ruled out for the remainder of the season with an ankle issue, on the heels of arguably his worst performance of the year. Then George Kittle was ruled out for what looks like the remainder of the season.
Now there’s this. Adding insult to injury, Fox Sports’ Jason La Canfora reports that disagreement within the organization regarding Garoppolo’s initial high ankle sprain, the one he sustained in Week 2, caused a rift within the organization. Additionally, La Canfora has heard that the 49ers are unlikely to retain Garoppolo next season.
“I reported on this a couple weeks ago, that talking to the people in that building, and talking to people close to that situation, that nobody was making any assertions about ‘he’s our guy’,” La Canfora began. “‘He’s our guy beyond this year’, ‘we’re building around him’, and ‘he’s a guy that we’re comfortable paying $26 million a year to moving forward.’ It was not that vibe whatsoever.
“There was actually some tension, and some clashing, and some differing on opinions about his previous high ankle sprain, and now he’s got another one on top of that… I think there’s going to be a lot of recalibrations, and a lot of reassessments about where they are as a franchise, about what they need, and about what kind of money that they’re spending now.
“They have a bunch of guys coming up who they’re going to have to pay. I’ve known Kyle a long time, and know how he thinks. He’s won with Matt Schaub, and he was 7-4 in the AFC East at one point with Brian Hoyer throwing 24 times a game to Josh Gordon. He had the RGIII 2012 season in Washington, and then he’s winning a bunch of games with Kirk Cousins. I just know that they feel like they can go in a bunch of different directions, and maybe be more effective, more robust, and have more of their playbook open to them than they have with Garoppolo.”