If there was a secret to be kept about the 49ers’ quarterback situation, head coach Kyle Shanahan and quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo appeared to spill it after Wednesday’s practice.
With a little over two weeks until the regular-season opener in Detroit, Shanahan hasn’t revealed who’ll start. He was mum after the second preseason game, but changed his tune just slightly Wednesday.
“I’ve got a pretty good idea,” Shanahan said about who’ll start against the Lions, “but as you guys can see with everything I don’t know our schedule a couple days from now. So, I’ve always had a pretty good idea. But, there’s lots of days between now and then, at every position.”
This normally would’ve added an additional layer of intrigue to the battle between Garoppolo and rookie quarterback Trey Lance. We’d parse the words, phrasing and his non-verbal cues to try and decipher who he was talking about. But then Garoppolo stepped to the microphone for his post-practice press conference where he was asked about Shanahan’s answer.
“Hell yeah, I have a pretty good idea,” Garoppolo said with a laugh.
“It’s whatever he decides, yeah,” Garoppolo said to a follow-up question. “I have a pretty good idea. I’m pretty happy with where I’m at right now and everything and just the offense as a whole. Yeah, Kyle’s the head man. He’ll make the call.”
It sure sounds like Garoppolo is going to start against the Lions. His laughter and big smile through those questions and answers didn’t look like a player who was about to lose his starting job. It’s also worth noting that Shanahan and general manager John Lynch both said Garoppolo was upset when he was first told about the team’s trade up to the No. 3 pick. It’s hard to imagine he’d be happy-go-lucky about losing that competition in camp.
Not to mention Shanahan entered training camp firmly saying Garoppolo was the starting quarterback and Lance was the backup. He said he’d known for awhile who the starter would be, indicating his mind hasn’t changed.
While the starting job might be Garoppolo’s, he won’t take every snap. The 49ers appear poised to get the rookie into action. ESPN’s Nick Wagoner had this report from Wednesday’s practice:
After Garoppolo took all the starting reps during the first four rotations in team drills, he and Lance split work with the starters and backups for the final three “move the ball” rotations (sequences more like real games in which the offense continues drives when gaining a first down).
By unofficial count, Lance took five snaps with the starters in those periods and five more with the backups. Perhaps more interesting was that it was the first time in camp that Garoppolo worked with the backups. He had eight reps with the first team and four with the second.
When addressing this quarterback swap, Shanahan invoked the New Orleans Saints quarterback situation of the last couple years where Taysom Hill saw sporadic action with starting QB Drew Brees.
“I think I’m doing a little bit of more of it here these next two weeks, just for me to get used to it and stuff, so the guys get used to it,” Shanahan said. “Watching New Orleans doing it with Drew Brees and Taysom has been pretty cool over the last three years. I’m sure that took them some time to kind of get the flow of that. But it’s nothing that you can say, ‘Hey we did this in practice so this is how it’s going to be.’ You adjust to that in games and you prepare for everything, but you don’t know until you go through it. So that’s why I don’t sit here and pretend like I have all the answers because I don’t. You prepare for every situation, you work the guys to the best of their ability, and then you see what your gameplan is and you figure out what gives you the best chance to win that game. And you try to keep your thoughts just to that.”
There may not be a set number of plays each game for Lance, and his playing time may depend on how he performs. It’s pretty clear the rookie is going to play though and he’s going to do so behind the starter, Garoppolo.
The announcement hasn’t been made official, but it’s easy to presume who’ll start for San Francisco and what their plan is under center this season based on Wednesday’s events.
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