The 49ers’ Super Bowl window is closing rapidly and flipping the QB for draft picks is the only remedy.
The 49ers’ heartbreaking loss to the Chiefs in Super Bowl 54 has fractured San Francisco’s fanbase into two groups: One believes that Jimmy Garoppolo, who has started only 26 games during his career, is still inexperienced and just needs time to develop into the franchise quarterback they needed him to be against the Chiefs on Sunday night in Miami.
And then there are the realistic 49ers fans. The fans who see a 28-year-old quarterback who has been in this league for the better part of a decade now and is already two years into a contract that made him the highest-paid player in NFL history at one point in time. They also realize how short Super Bowl windows are — especially when that window is, in part, propped open by a dominant defense. There isn’t time to wait and see on Garoppolo. Windows open and close in an instant in the NFL. Just ask the Jaguars, Bears and Rams. Three teams that thought they had time to let their young quarterbacks figure it out … until they didn’t.
The 49ers should be a good team in 2020. Kyle Shanahan will still be cooking up the offensive game plans and calling the plays. It’s irrational to expect the defense to perform at the same level it did in 2019 (that doesn’t tend to happen with historically good defenses), but it will be good, at the very least. But simply “running it back” and hoping for a different ending will not go so well. The 49ers have to get better, and it’s going to be hard for them to do with their offseason resources.
(You’ll find the 49ers all the way on the left, toward the bottom … where no team wants to be on this graph.)
As a result of the trades for Dee Ford and Emmanuel Sanders, the 49ers do not have a pick in the second, third or fourth rounds of the 2020 NFL draft. They also have less than $20 million cap space, while several key players are headed for free agency, including Sanders, DE Arik Armstead and FS Jimmie Ward. The team will also have to give raises to exclusive rights free agent CB Emmanuel Moseley and do-it-all FB Kyle Juszczyk, if the 49ers pick up his club option for 2020. LT Joe Staley said before the playoffs that he isn’t thinking about retirement but it appears to be a distinct possibility the team will have to plan for. On paper, the 49ers were arguably the deepest team in the league but that will not be the case next season. They’ll have to let some of those free agents walk and do not have the draft capital or cap space to replace them
But there is one way to get more of both: Trade Jimmy G.
It would be a radical move, for sure — and one that a lot of 49ers fans would take issue with — but the team could save $22.4 million in cap space by moving on from the 28-year-old while also bringing back some much-needed draft capital.
NFL teams have typically balked at moving on from a competent QB even if it’s clear he’s not The One. Mostly because there usually isn’t an obvious replacement available via free agency or trade. But that’s not the case this offseason when there should be several viable replacements available, including Tom Brady, Philip Rivers, Jameis Winston and Teddy Bridgewater, to name a few. And it’s not like we haven’t seen Kyle Shanahan cobble together productive passing games with underwhelming talent at the quarterback position. Just last year, his offense allowed undrafted free agent Nick Mullens to average 0.13 Expected Points Added per dropback. Garoppolo averaged 0.19 this season … with a much better supporting cast and against an easier schedule, per Football Outsiders. San Francisco should not be afraid to re-enter the quarterback wild.
It’s really the only hope. If the rest of the 49ers roster is going to be worse off (and that’s looking like a certainty barring some offseason wizardry from GM John Lynch) an upgrade at quarterback is a must if this team is going to make it back to the Super Bowl.
The only resource they really have to make that upgrade is Jimmy G himself. There is just enough shine left on him — even after an underwhelming performance in the Super Bowl — to dupe some poor team into trading for a 28-year-old vet who still can’t get to his second read or throw consistently outside the numbers. The 49ers don’t have to dip their toes into the free-agent waters or draft a developmental QB prospect. They can just give Carolina a call and enquire about Cam Newton, whose future with the Panthers is still up in the air.
Newton would be a perfect cog in Shanahan’s offensive machine. The 49ers run game was already among the best in the league; now imagine throwing a run threat at quarterback in the mix. Opposing defenses haven’t stood much of a chance playing 11-on-10 in the run. Playing 11-on-11 against a Shanahan offense would be brutal, as we saw during the 2012 season when he was working with a rookie Robert Griffin III. Newton is also an underrated pocket passer who will allow Shanahan to call more dropback passes instead of relying on the tricks he used to make Garoppolo functional: play-action fakes and passes no further than five yards past the line of scrimmage. His menu of play calls would expand tenfold — and it’s already pretty robust as things stand.
Even if it’s not Newton, the 49ers need some change at the position, which should have been made clear after their postseason run. Shanahan made things so easy on Garoppolo during the playoffs, and he still couldn’t hold up his end. He threw the ball only 58 times over the course of three games and his passes traveled 7.6 yards downfield on average. Yet, Garoppolo still managed to throw interceptions on 5.2% of his throws. How bad is that? Well, Jameis Winston threw interceptions on 4.8% of his passes during the regular season and his average pass traveled 10.5 yards downfield. And it’s not like Garoppolo putting the ball in harm’s way was some new development. He threw 13 interceptions during the regular season and had another eight dropped by defenders. There’s a reason why Shanahan doesn’t ask him to do too much thinking.
The hope is that Garoppolo improves and eventually develops into a quarterback who no longer needs schematic training wheels to produce at the level he did this season. But I just don’t know how that happens if Shanahan is forced to keep those training wheels on for the sake of the team. The 49ers roster is built to win now, not to be in “develop a quarterback who is already 28 and gets paid like a top-tier passer” mode. “Practice” isn’t any better of an answer; Garoppolo has been practicing for six years now and still needs half-field reads to be comfortable in the pocket. The best-case scenario — or at least the most realistic one — is Jimmy G following the same developmental track as Kirk Cousins, where he incrementally gets better but never quite fully figures out the issues that make him a liability in the first place. I don’t think “Maybe one day he’ll turn into Kirk Cousins” is something any NFL fan should be hoping for.
Whatever the 49ers end up doing, moving on from Garoppolo has to be taken into consideration. The front office wisely gave itself an out when putting together his contract; it was essentially a front-loaded two-year deal with a team option. Most of the guaranteed money was paid out early (his salary cap number was $37 million in year one but is closer to $27 for the remaining three years). San Francisco will owe only $4.2 million in dead cap if it moves on now, and it has time to make that decision: $15.7 million of Garoppolo’s 2020 salary becomes guaranteed on April 1, well after free agency has begun.
Will they be smart enough to bail or will they continue down this path to nowhere? The 49ers defense isn’t going to get any better. And neither will the team if the quarterback situation doesn’t change sooner rather than later.
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