We’ve all got our Jimmy Garoppolo takes. Is he terrible? Incredible? He’s shown both sides. In reality, he’s somewhere in the middle. Given the frequency of those extremes, he’s probably just an average quarterback.
Garoppolo said it himself after his two-interception performance, in which he threw for 322 yards and completed 26-of-35 passes, but missed multiple key chances and had one other pass which should have been intercepted.
“Some good, some bad,” Garoppolo said.
In the case of Thursday night, that bad heavily outweighed the good.
Garoppolo is dependent on scheme and talent around him to succeed. We have seen this for roughly two full seasons now, and a handful of half-seasons. This is who he is.
Kyle Shanahan said it himself last week. Garoppolo’s play is generally a bellwether for the 49ers’ status as a team.
“Jimmy hasn’t been much different to me all year,” Shanahan said. “I think we’ve gotten better around him.”
On some nights, like Thursday, he is the arbiter of the 49ers’ destruction. Besides a couple iffy special teams plays, he was the only point of criticism in the first half. The defense’s coverage collapsed in the second half against A.J. Brown and allowed Tennessee to convert 9-of-16 third downs, but that’s all moot if Garoppolo doesn’t throw away their chances to go up big, early. And he did.
His interception and wasted, potential touchdown opportunity to Kyle Juszczyk, plus a near pick to a linebacker over the middle, had his head coach decide to sit on the ball rather than try and push it downfield for a potential field goal before halftime.
Shanahan said after the game that he was trying to avoid a turnover to end the half. That is not something you hear or see Brandon Staley worrying about with Justin Herbert or Sean McVay with Matthew Stafford. There are myriad other examples.
It was another admittance by Shanahan that he will never fully trust his quarterback. Given what we’ve seen from Garoppolo when Shanahan does trust him, that’s understandable.
But that distrust is also what has made this season so confounding. Clearly, the 49ers believe Garoppolo gave them the best chance to win, or at least knew, for the most part, what they were getting from him. Trey Lance is clearly more talented, but clearly not as well-versed in Shanahan’s system.
It’s the concern that was had when Shanahan drafted Lance. Would he be willing to adapt his system to incorporate talent that may thrive better with tweaks and adaptation outside that system, or stick to his scheme, which is unquestionably elite. We haven’t had a clear answer to that question, but the 49ers opted for the known commodity.
After a handful of encouraging attempts early, Shanahan he couldn’t figure out how to keep Lance involved in the offense without getting out of his playcalling rhythm. Aside from a few snaps in relief against Jacksonville, he hasn’t sniffed the field in any real capacity since the Week 5 loss to Arizona.
So, here we are, stuck with Garoppolo, who, for most of this season, has been solid. Calling him anything beyond that seems a little ridiculous, given that he’s asked to throw almost exclusively in-breaking routes over the middle, at most 15-to-20 yards past the line of scrimmage.
Teams which don’t have great defensive coaching like the Titans, and/or have terrible linebacker groups, have allowed those windows to stay open for much of the game. Tennessee didn’t shut those throws down every time, but they made Garoppolo hesitate a fair amount.
Garoppolo doesn’t often show the capacity to throw the ball away when he needs to, like when he took a crushing sack immediately after a holding penalty early in the fourth quarter.
He’s a gunslinger with short-range cannon. Because he struggles to stretch the field and depends on hitting his comfortable throws in rhythm, he sometimes fires into windows which cease to exist by the time the ball arrives, or were never there to begin with.
To his credit, within that limited game plan, he’s excelled for a long stretch this year. He thrives at throwing on time and into those tight windows, which, when they are completed, set the 49ers’ yards-after-catch fiends on a platform to thrive.
There have been plenty of impressive moments, too. He has been fantastic, for the most part, in two-minute situations. He had a clutch throw against the Eagles early in the season to build a late, two-score lead, nearly had a comeback win against the Packers, led two game-winning drives over Cincinnati, and after all his failures on Thursday, was part of a game-tying drive.
When you look back on those drives, though, it’s usually about the plays made by the 49ers’ skill position players, almost always rumbling on for 20, 30, 40-plus-yard plays. Most of his impressive throws come in his wheelhouse, over the middle of the field.
At this point, the 49ers are a team which can win with Garoppolo, but do not seem capable of winning when he plays this poorly. They aren’t as deep as they were in 2019.
Just as anyone who had followed this team for an extended stretch expected, there seems to be a ceiling. Shanahan would not have drafted Trey Lance if he felt like Garoppolo was the man to take them to the promised land.
But there’s no sign of Lance, despite Shanahan saying at the start of the season that the 49ers would make sure Lance never went another season without playing football again. They’ve hyped up his practice squad reps as developmental, despite asking him to imitate other quarterbacks throughout the week.
This brings us back to the quandary of this season. Garoppolo is playing for two reasons. The 49ers believe he gives them the best chance to win right now — and they have certainly been competitive with him — but they also want to trade him this offseason, and believe that him playing well into the postseason will increase, or at least maintain his value.
It’s a hell of a gambit with quarterbacks like Russell Wilson and Aaron Rodgers potentially on the market, and it comes with the clearer downside of Trey Lance, the future, failing to gain much in-game experience.
This is an exhausting road to wind down again, but Thursday night highlighted the duality of the Garoppolo experience. When he’s good enough, it’s great, and that’s in large part thanks to Shanahan. But when he’s not good enough, it can collapse in catastrophic fashion.
The 49ers’ brass didn’t believe in Garoppolo to the extent that they drafted his replacement instead of using three first-round picks to add reinforcements. It’s games like these that remind you why, and make their approach this season all the more confounding.
This team is still likely to make the playoffs, and given their talent on both sides of the ball, can absolutely make a playoff run. But when they face smart teams who take away Garoppolo’s favorite throws, it’s a stern reminder that his limitations force them to carve a narrow path to success.