The 49ers welcome the Raiders to Levi’s Stadium on Sunday, and that will be head coach Kyle Shanahan’s last opportunity to analyze who will be his Week 1 starter at quarterback. He has two choices — veteran Jimmy Garoppolo, who is entering his fifth year with Shanahan, or third overall pick Trey Lance.
The decision to go with the experienced veteran or the hyper-gifted rookie is a common one among coaches, and every coach has a different rationale. We know that eventually, Lance will be the guy — the 49ers traded the farm to move up and take Lance with the third overall pick. You don’t do that unless you know that he’s your guy over time. The question now is, do you start Garoppolo in the short term because he’s more familiar with the offense?
“I think he’s just had more command at this time than he has any of the other years,” Shanahan said of Garoppolo on Wednesday. “Jimmy always gets there eventually, but I think he’s come in, and I think that’s natural with it being his fourth or fifth year. He came in the middle of our first year, but I think it’s a lot easier for him just knowing what’s coming off my lips before it does. Knowing exactly how to spit it out, where to go. When you don’t have to think and all that stuff’s effortless, the semantics of play calls and the offense, I think it’s a lot easier to play.”
That’s fine in theory, but the practice is a bit tougher to analyze. There are things Garoppolo can’t do well, and given that this is his fifth year in Shanahan’s system, you can start to assume that he won’t.
Lance is rawer at this point, which of course makes sense. There are a ton of similarities between what Lance ran at North Dakota State and what Shanahan likes to do — Touchdown Wire’s Mark Schofield has covered this extensively — and that will reduce the ramp-up time. But the 49ers still have Garoppolo on their roster despite the fact that Garoppolo carries a $26.4 million cap charge in 2021, and the dead money after cutting him would be just $2.8 million. Perhaps Shanahan sees a scenario in which Garoppolo does enough to get the 49ers over the hump this season, and then, the chips will fall where they fall.
Again, that’s sensible in theory. But when you turn on the tape and watch what’s happening with these two quarterbacks, it becomes quite easy to make the case that the 49ers should start Trey Lance in Week 1 of the regular season against the Lions, and that should be that.
Why is this so? It has as much to do with Garoppolo’s limitations as it does with Lance’s potential.