Garoppolo angry, but 49ers will be happy
Jimmy Garoppolo is angry.
He’s pissed off.
And the 49ers are thrilled.
“He’ll be fired up and he’ll come in and work his butt off,” head coach Kyle Shanahan said Monday. “The more mad Jimmy gets, usually the better he gets.
“He gets madder and stays healthy, this could be a good thing for Jimmy, too. Which could be a great problem for the
49ers.”
Garoppolo is angry because the 49ers made a huge deal to trade up in next month’s draft in order to land his replacement. Despite the looming threat, Garoppolo almost certainly is going to be the 49ers’ starting quarterback in September.
That’s a pretty boring take after all the headlines and fireworks coming out of Santa Clara in the past few days, but it is the accurate one.
Why? Because the 49ers were more successful in free agency than they expected to be, retaining almost all their key players. That means they have fewer needs than they had projected, and they think they can win right now.
And that means rolling the team with Garoppolo, while grooming the quarterback of the future. There’s an arms race happening in the NFC West, with new Rams quarterback Matt Stafford joining a division that already included Seattle’s Russell Wilson and Arizona’s Kyler Murray. The 49ers, at risk of getting left behind, had to do something daring to get better for the future while still competing in the present.
“As we went through free agency, we felt we have a team that can compete,” general manager John Lynch said. “We don’t think those two things have to be mutually exclusive: the opportunity to trade up to get a guy who can be a big part of our future and keep Jimmy. … That’s the plan we arrived at.”
The 49ers are betting fully on that plan by giving up two future firstround picks. They don’t expect those choices to be in the top 15 because they think they have the team to be successful.
Which is why they don’t want to turn over that over to a nervous rookie in Week 1. Or put it in the hands of a unpedigreed QB like Gardner Minshew or Sam Darnold. It will be Garoppolo’s team — at least to start.
The linchpin to the whole plan of action was when they resigned left tackle Trent Williams, whom they really expected to leave. If he left, the trickledown effect through the draft would have been enormous. But with Williams in the fold, the 49ers’ brass saw the opportunity to do two things: maintain the core of a team that was in the Super Bowl 14 months ago and move up to get a future quarterback.
Standing pat at No. 12 was not going to help them.
“We would have been left at the altar, sitting there at No. 12,” said Shanahan, who is under enormous pressure to get the pick right.
Shanahan called Garoppolo before the trade was announced Friday. The quarterback wasn’t too stoked.
“Obviously, no one wants to hear that,” Shanahan said. “He wasn’t totally excited. But he handled it great. This doesn’t change any of his circumstances right now.”
Right now. That’s obviously the qualifier. What will change Garoppolo’s circumstances? If a team — the Patriots or his hometown Bears are the first two that come to mind — decides that Garoppolo is worth a trade price that the 49ers simply couldn’t refuse.
Or, if whichever rookie they draft blows Garoppolo off the field in training camp.
The latter seems unlikely to happen, based both on history and the current state of the world. Few rookie quarterbacks step into the starting role and flourish right away; there aren’t a lot of Andrew Lucks in the world.
The pandemic also will be a factor. Some projected firstround quarterbacks have had limited or interrupted play in the past year. Teams don’t know yet if they will be able even to have OTAs. Protocols for training camp remain up in the air. This would not be the year to predict that a rookie could seamlessly take over a team and lead it to success.
So, the job almost certainly will be Garoppolo’s to start the season. That will make his teammates happy: They like him, and team camaraderie should not be discounted. But Garoppolo knows that it won’t be his for long.
He has to stay healthy and stay mad and fight hard for his job. That is something he hasn’t had to do, which, in retrospect, was a huge failing of the 49ers’ structure. Garoppolo was not threatened by C.J. Beathard or Nick Mullens. Garoppolo will, however, be very threatened by whomever the team selects at No. 3.
He’ll be pushed. He’ll be angry.
And that prospect makes the 49ers very happy.