On February 8, 2019, quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo signed a five-year, $137.5 million contract with the 49ers, who had traded their 2019 second-round pick to the Patriots the previous October for Garoppolo’s services. Obviously, head coach Kyle Shanahan and general manager John Lynch thought they had their franchise quarterback of the future, based on Garoppolo’s 17 games and two starts over three seasons as Tom Brady’s backup.
And given Garoppolo’s playing style (think a less impressive version of Tony Romo), it would seem that he’d perfectly fit Shanahan’s playbook, which demands a quarterback with a good head on his shoulders and the ability to run boot and make throws all over the field, but especially timing and rhythm throws to the short and intermediate areas of the play.
That hasn’t really worked out for a few reasons. First, there’s Garoppolo’s ability to stay healthy. In four seasons with the 49ers, he’s played in just 31 of a possible 64 regular-season games, and though he did help the 49ers to a Super Bowl appearance at the end of the 2019 season, Shanahan’s game scripts in that postseason told you a lot about he views Garoppolo. I’ve always believed that coaches can say whatever they want about their players; they’ll tell you how they really feel when they show you how those players are deployed.
In the divisional round against the Vikings, Garoppolo completed just 11 of 19 passes for 131 yards, one touchdown, and one interception. In the conference championship win over the Packers, Garoppolo went with the 1973 Bob Griese script with six completions on eight attempts for 77 yards.
And in San Francisco’s loss to Kansas City in Super Bowl LIV, Garoppolo completed 20 of 31 passes for 219 yards, one touchdown, two interceptions, and more than one missed open shot downfield. This deep overthrow to receiver Emmanuel Sanders with the Chiefs up 24-20, 1:40 left in the game, and the 49ers facing third-and-10 from the Kansas City 49-yard line is the veritable personification of the Jimmy Garoppolo Experience. If you task him with too much, you will experience regret.
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On fourth-and-10, the Chiefs matched San Francisco’s downfield routes, Garoppolo got sacked, and that was that.
The 49ers got the ball back after the Chiefs scored a touchdown to make the game 31-20, and Garoppolo responded by throwing a deep interception into double coverage from a clean pocket. Ballgame.
I mean… if that’s your guy, that’s your guy. I’m not here to tell Kyle Shanahan how to evaluate a quarterback. But in 2020, Garoppolo played in just six games, struggled through ankle issues, and completed 97 of 140 passes for 1,096 yards, seven touchdowns, and five interceptions before the 49ers shut him down. And things weren’t much better from a tape perspective. Teams have the book on Garoppolo, and that’s pretty clear. It was abundantly clear in Week 7, when Garoppolo faced his old team and completed 20 of 25 passes for 277 yards, no touchdowns, and two interceptions.
All you have to do to limit his effectiveness is to mush-rush the edges so it’s harder for him to boot outside, and muddy the middle reads so he has to think beyond his capabilities. Garoppolo is not, and has never been, a comfortable “Middle of the Field Closed” (MOFC) thrower. If things don’t make sense to him over the middle, bad things are going to happen. We saw this in the Super Bowl, and his interception by Patriots safety Devin McCourty in Week 7 is another perfect example.
Pre-snap, the Patriots showed a Cover-0 look — a man-based blitz concept with no deep safety. But McCourty dropped to the deep third, safety Terrence Brooks worked to rob the middle, and Garoppolo threw behind tight end George Kittle for an easy pick. You see this a lot from Garoppolo and other rudimentary quarterbacks — they throw late, and throw their receivers closed — because their processing speed does not match the speed of the game.
From 2017 through 2020, among quarterbacks with at least 500 passing attempts, Garoppolo ranks 35th in attempts (883), 32nd in 7,completions (596), 30th in passing yards (7,352), 28th in touchdowns (46, tied with Kyler Murray, who has just two NFL seasons), and 24th in interceptions (26). He ranks 10th in Adjusted Net Yards per Attempt (6.98) and 11th in passer rating (98.1), which is nice, but beyond the injury issues, the limitations he presents for a passing game are pretty considerable.
All of that leads to this: As the new league year turned over on Wednesday, new contract years were final, and the 49ers officially invested a cap hit of $26.4 million in Garoppolo for the 2021 season. Had they released Garoppolo, the dead cap hit would have been just $2.8 million. So now, with a reduced salary cap of $182.5 million, most of their secondary still on the open market, and the quarterback position still undefined, there’s Garoppolo with the seventh-highest cap number of any quarterback in the NFL, and the 49ers leaving $23.6 million difference on the table for a quarterback who has not earned that level of commitment. Not even close.
Lynch has seemed unperturbed by the schism between productivity, availability, and cost.
“So, we don’t need room right now,” Lynch said on January 4. “As we start to go through and prioritize and we’re in the process of doing that right now. When we start signing those players, that might be necessary. I think we’ve had good discussions with Jimmy. It’s been encouraging to see him back out on the field. Kyle spoke of it last week. There’s a lift when he’s out there. It’s one of the qualities he has that I admire. I think his teammates thrive off his presence, whatever it is. I don’t know why, but I do know why, but they do. I mean, that’s just kind of that ‘it’ factor. He has that and so that’s been fun to see him out there. I know that we plan on visiting with him here in the next couple of days. He’s working really hard.
“I think we’re encouraged, because when he saw the specialist and I think that was the hesitancy to put him back out there, that the severity of his second high ankle or reinjury led to, ‘Hey, there is an option where he might have to have surgery.’ We wanted to avoid that at all costs. We were able to do that. Unfortunately, we didn’t get him back on the field, but he was around the team and that was important. He was a good support for the guys on the team and in that room. So now, we just plow forward and we’ll see if we get to where that becomes a reality, where we need to do that.”
I am the furthest thing from a salary cap expert, so I reached out to two people who actually are: Jason Fitzgerald, who runs the seminal OverTheCap.com site, and Brad Spielberger, Pro Football Focus‘ salary cap expert who is also a contributor to OverTheCap.com. One of the primary reasons Garoppolo is finally “releasable” is that the 2021 portion of his contract represents the first year in which the deal isn’t ridiculously front-loaded, or Garoppolo doesn’t have a huge guaranteed roster bonus on Day 1. So, I’m thinking the 49ers can take some of that cap hit and lay it off to 2022, the last year of Garoppolo’s contract, and a year in which everyone knows there’s going to be a much higher salary cap based on multiple things.
“I think what they would be looking to do, and waiting until these spots officially fill gives them more leverage, is to do a simple pay cut for this year and leave 2022 as is,” Fitzgerald said. “I think the market is kind of setting with Ryan Fitzpatrick and Andy Dalton going for $10 million, and last year’s Nick Foles deal at $8 million, so you would go to him to see if you can slash his money in half, guarantee that number, and give him a chance to earn some of it back via higher-end incentives.
“If he refuses, and a trade isn’t an option, maybe they would do as you are saying by converting some money to a bonus to move half of it to 2022 (or guaranteeing some 2022 salary in return for a reduction this year), but I think they are ok with the cap this year even after the Williams deal.”
Re-signing left tackle Trent Williams to a six-year, $138.06 million contract presents the 49ers with a highly favorable cap situation, as Williams’ first-year cap hit in 2021 is just $8,226,250. Then, the bonuses and other automatic parts of the contract start to kick in, and if Williams is less effective for any reason, you start to look at the escape hatch via digestible dead money. Which in Williams’ case starts to become more manageable in 2023, when his cap hit is $26,27 million, and the dead money is $19,310 million. The difference with Williams is that he’s already proven to be one of the best players at his position, and he’s done so for a long time. Garoppolo holds no such chit.
“I held out this whole time that I think he could get traded or cut for this exact reason, because there’s almost no financial penalty,” Spielberger told me. “They could push some money out if they wanted to, but they probably don’t want to if they can avoid it.
“And even with the trade, I could see other teams balk at giving up draft capital knowing that he’s super cuttable. They may wait until the draft to see if they can improve their position; the salary won’t get the vet protection until Week 1.”
So, perhaps the 49ers are playing the long game here. Contracts can turn into mistakes and albatrosses for all kinds of different reasons, and this isn’t Garoppolo’s “fault” in the same way some of the worst contracts in NFL history have become. By all accounts, Garoppolo has done his level best when he’s been on the field. It’s just that the best hasn’t been good enough, or often enough, and if Garoppolo is San Francisco’s starting quarterback as the season begins, it starts to look like a team trying to justify a mistake more than anything else.