One of the primary questions surrounding Super Bowl LIV is how much 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan will take the training wheels off the passing game and let Jimmy Garoppolo throw the ball at all. In San Francisco’s 37-20 win over the Packers in the NFC Championship game, Garoppolo threw the ball just eight times, completing six passes for 77 yards. Per NFL Research, that made the 49ers the third team of the Super Bowl era (the 1971 and 1973 Miami Dolphins were the others) to finish a playoff game with fewer than 10 passing attempts.
“Got to talk to Kyle or something,” Garoppolo said when asked what he’d need to do to get more throws. “I mean, we were running the hell out of the ball tonight. It made my life very easy back there. I think we had, like, eight pass attempts. A fun night.”
Fun then. Perhaps not as fun against a Chiefs team that can put a points explosion up on any defense seemingly at will these days. If the Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes are doing that against San Francisco’s defense — and it’s entirely probable that they will — it could be up to Garoppolo to make the difference.
And that’s where things could get weird. In the 49ers’ 27-10 divisional win over the Vikings, Garoppolo made two first-half mistakes when diagnosing coverage by linebacker Eric Kendricks. One was a near-interception that wasn’t, only because tight end George Kittle made an amazing play to break it up…
…and one was an interception, presumably because Kittle wasn’t around.
In the first half of that Vikings win, Garoppolo completed eight of 13 passes for 105 yards and a touchdown, and he threw that interception. In the second half, though the 49ers were only up 14-10 at that point, Garoppolo attempted just six passes, completing three for 26 yards. That was the beginning of the Great Garoppolo Caper (Where’s he hiding?!?!?), and as Hall of Fame quarterback Kurt Warner said on Thursday, it will now be up to Shanahan’s quarterback to balance the ability to make big plays with the need to avoid game-killing mistakes. I have expressed my own concerns about Garoppolo’s potential to do so, and given a few bits of schematic advice that might help (not that Shanahan needs it), and Warner, when asked if Garoppolo can deliver if asked in the biggest moment of his career to date, saw both sides of the equation.
“I definitely think he can deliver. My biggest thing with Jimmy is that, not that he can’t make every throw in bog moments… but there are times where he seems to, with play-action and the things they try to do to attack the field, sometimes he misses defenders. Either his vision gets clouded, or he’s so focused in trying to make the throw, he misses guys.
“Kind of like the game a couple weeks ago [against the Vikings]: They had a couple of opportunities for easy interceptions. They made one, and they didn’t make the other. I believe there will be a few of those plays for Jimmy in this game. I think that’s where he’s at as a quarterback. He’s done really good things, and he’s really good in the moment, but he’s just not there yet at seeing and deciphering and playing the game in that direction.
“I’m not worried that if they need him to play well, he can play well. The question is, are there going to be in this game… there might be one play. There might be one throw, and that throw could be the difference-making play in a Super Bowl. Do the Chiefs make that play? Can Jimmy avoid that [negative] play? That to me is a bigger question than, do I think he can make enough plays to win? Yeah, I definitely think that.”
It’s clear that Garoppolo has the talent to make those big plays. It’s also clear that he hasn’t quite developed in his skill set to the point where you can trust him to go off the hook at a Patrick Mahomes level. Warner’s opinion is justifiably higher when it comes to Mahomes; Garoppolo’s mission will be less to prove the doubters wrong than to confirm the belief that he can indeed become one of the NFL’s best quarterbacks.
Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar previously covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”