There’s a video of Jimmy Garoppolo that the NFL’s official Twitter account posted at 4:15 a.m. PT on Sunday. The 30-year-old, who is now wearing a ball cap instead of a helmet, looks out at the crowd and beams before starting to skip into the Levi’s Stadium tunnel. And as he picks up speed, Garoppolo screams at the top of his lungs.
The Niners are Garoppolo’s team again. It was through a cruel twist of fate — Trey Lance broke his ankle in the first quarter of San Francisco’s Week 2 win over Seattle — and that will almost certainly end his season — that we got here . But we’re still here. And Garoppolo is ready for all the good, all the bad and all that comes with it.
So you can excuse Garoppolo if, less than an hour after the Niners easily dispatched the rival Seahawks 27–7, he asked a question about when he started feeling like himself and went somewhere else entirely. He was still at the peak of having played (almost) four quarters of football and, on this day at least, it was hard to look past that.
“I think the touchdown to [Ross] Dwelley obviously gave me a little bit of confidence, like, OK, now we’re rolling. Now we’re playing football,” Garoppolo told me, as his day came to an end . “I don’t know, it’s really just a better appreciation for the fans and the atmosphere. I sound like an old man saying this, but when I was young, I didn’t really appreciate that part of the game. I was so caught up in football and what’s going on in the countryside.
“And you have to have that. But there’s a sense that you have to smell the roses a little bit and look around.”
On Sunday, inexplicably, we got to see what Garoppolo is built for again, and we saw it in San Francisco. We saw it less than a month after it seemed a certainty that he had taken his last real snap as a Niner and weeks after he agreed to stay as a backup. There was a time in August, in fact, when it looked more likely he would be in Santa Clara as the visiting quarterback in Week 2.
But Garoppolo charted his own path by taking a curious leap of faith, hoping things would work out for him. And they did, even if it was an ugly breakup that made it so.
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Jimmy Garoppolo is back in the starting lineup.
Fourteen games down, two to go in Week 2, and we’ve got plenty to come. And as we said last week, we’ll continue to tweak the column after some wholesale changes we made to The MMQB last week. So in The MMQB this week, you’ll find…
• Our new Three Deep post, which will delve into Sunday’s Dolphins, Jets and Cowboys and their quarterbacks.
• The Takeaways, which will begin with a look at Trevor Lawrence in his second year, and one at Jared Goff in his second year in Detroit.
• We’ll wrap up with the Odds and Ends post, which will include my thoughts on the impending quarterback draft cast and why you shouldn’t be talking about it at all.
For now, The Lead this week will be looking back and looking forward as the Niners reboot an old formula with their old/new quarterback in the chair.
Before he and I get to what’s next for the Niners, Garoppolo had to address how he ended up back on the field Sunday in the first place. That part of the story unfolded just over 12 minutes into Sunday’s game, on a second-and-8 from the Seattle 21.
Before the photo, Ray-Ray McCloud waved, lining up to Lance’s right. Lance then called for the ball, put it on McCloud’s belly and followed his read to keep it. He ran behind left tackle Trent Williams, pulling right, to the right side of the line. Seahawks defensive tackle Bryan Mone and linebacker Cody Barton converged on Lance behind Williams, and under their weight, Lance’s right ankle bent backward and broke. Lance will have surgery on Monday.
“It’s tough, man,” Garoppolo says. “Injuries, it’s never fun, and especially for a guy like that, I’ve been in his shoes and it’s going to be tough at first. But it’s how it comes out. I’m a big believer in that. Trey’s a tough guy, he’s got a good mentality and I hope [that] the best for him.”
And when it was over, Garoppolo went with a group of his teammates to the practice room to see Lance and reiterated the message: He’s been there and he knows it sucks, but it’s important to get some of it out. positive aspects a difficult situation. The message might also resonate with Lance, as he just saw Garoppolo do this.
Back when the Niners moved up nine spots to position themselves for a quarterback in the 2021 draft, Garoppolo knew his days in San Francisco were numbered. After San Francisco took Lance with the intention of redshirting him as a rookie, Garoppolo knew he would have to grit his teeth, swallow his pride and do his best with a Super Bowl-caliber roster, until all with everything written on the wall.
You know the rest. Garoppolo helped the Niners to the NFC title game. San Francisco followed the path he laid out later to hand over the reins to Lance. Garoppolo had a shoulder injury that he first tried to rehabilitate and then had to have surgery on. And that surgery made it much more difficult to move Garoppolo than it would have been otherwise, and impossible to get the price (a pair of second-round picks) the team was looking for.
So the situation lingered, other teams filled their quarterback openings, and the Niners and Garoppolo were stuck between them. Which led to Garoppolo spending the first few weeks of camp lounging on a sideline by himself and going home when his teammates went to meetings, on the premise that no one needed to waste anyone else’s time if he didn’t want to be on the team
“A weird offseason overall,” Garoppolo says. “Back to the shoulder surgery, I didn’t think I was going to have to have it, and all of a sudden the rehab doesn’t work, so we had to get it. Then, yeah, being on the sideline, I had my guy catching balls for me, he did a great job, he’s one of the interns here, and yeah, it was weird. Honestly, just the whole situation, I didn’t know if I was going to be here. … I’m rambling, man “.
Drawing because, well, there’s a lot going on, right down to the personnel who were catching the ball on a practice field adjacent to where Lance was leading the first offense.
“It was funny, we had no receivers, so he was the only one who could catch me,” Garoppolo says, laughing. “He was actually [good]. He’s like 6-foot-3, so he has a good catch radius.”
But of course it would be hard for anyone in that situation not to think he was spinning his wheels. And Garoppolo was.
Kyle Shanahan was the one who, out of the blue, reached out to Garoppolo with the message: As frustration mounted on both sides over the lack of a real trade partner, the door was open for Garoppolo’s return. Not on the $24.2 million base he had to pay, of course. And not as a holder. But if Garoppolo wanted to stay, Shanahan said, the Niners would be willing to work something out.
“It was right in the middle of training camp, [Kyle] called me one day and pitched the idea, and it really wasn’t even on my radar until he said something about it,” Garoppolo says. “And then he kind of did it and obviously the restructuring being what it is, I think it had to be done just with the situation. I know it sounds weird, but things fell into place, honestly. It wasn’t like if he was planning for this to happen or anything.
“But I think if you’re a good person, good things will happen to you.”
And if there wasn’t an entry-level job with an applicant waiting for him, the more I thought about it, the more sense the status quo made.
“I mean, honestly, at one point, I didn’t think I was going to be a Niner,” he continues. “I was pretty set on going to a couple of different teams that I had in mind. And then all of a sudden things changed [at the] last second. There was a lot of familiarity with the organization, the offense, the guys, all those things played into it. It was just a good opportunity. I know we have a good team here and I know everybody keeps saying that, but we have a chance at a Super Bowl, and that’s what I’m trying to do “.
So he agreed to the Niners’ parameters: He would have to make less than Lance’s rookie deal average ($8.525 million) in base salary, with a chance to recoup more than he was giving up in time incentives of play, and got no-tag, no-trade provisions to accept the deal, which gave him some control.
Still, it’s not like he could have predicted what happened on Sunday. And, as we were talking, I’m sure he’ll keep saying how bad he feels for Lance, especially since, like he said, he’s been there before. “It all starts with Trey,” he says. “Obviously I feel terrible for him, I’ve been on that side; I’ve dealt with it.”
The ankle injury could end Lance’s season.
But it happened, and with Garoppolo’s patience and belief keeping him in a place where he would be ready, it didn’t take long for him to feel comfortable running the Niners’ offense again.
On his first snap, a third-and-6 in which Garoppolo would hit Brandon Aiyuk for four yards to make Robbie Gould’s field goal a little short, Seattle running back Uchenna Nwosu went free off the edge to the left of Garoppolo and buried it in the turf. upon arrival
“They beat me pretty good,” Garoppolo says. “So it woke me up in a good way. I was happy about that. And then, honestly, after that, it was just playing ball.”
The Niners’ next drive started with Deebo Samuel calling a 16-yard interference penalty on Coby Bryant, which was followed by Garoppolo finding Aiyuk for 12 yards, McCloud for 16 and then Dwelley for the 38-yard strike that held the quarterback to 4. -for 4 for 70 yards.
“Yeah, just a little bit of play action, we knew his linebackers were aggressive, they stepped up and we hit him in the back,” he says. “He cleared it with a stick and Dwelley cornered it for the touchdown. And he just made a little move on the goal line to go in there. It’s just … it was a lot of fun today, man.”
Winning, of course, is fun, and this Sunday was a little easier for the Niners. After that 4-for-4 start, Garoppolo was just 9-for-17 for 84 yards, and San Francisco still won by 20. The key, of course, was that the running game was working (45 carries, 189 yards) and the defense was dominant. And so, as had been the plan with Lance, the Niners’ draft didn’t ask too much of Garoppolo, and the team won by walking away.
There will come a time, sometime, when the Niners need the quarterback more than Sunday, and Garoppolo knows it. But this week just playing was enough.
Garoppolo knows, looking ahead now, what the expectations are. The 49ers brought him back as insurance to protect a team good enough to win a title, and now it’s fair to say the policy they hired is paying off handsomely, as clumsy and awkward as it looked to outsiders .
But then again, Sunday wasn’t about numbers or trophies. It was all about playing again and doing it with a group of teammates who stuck with him, another reason for him to stick around when he could have forced September free agency a few weeks ago.
“Oh yeah, those are mine,” he says. “Going to a new team in the middle of training camp? They changed me in the middle of the year; it’s hard to learn a new offense all of a sudden, new players and getting used to all that stuff. It was a very familiar situation here.”
For the first time in a long time, the Niners can say — without even a hint of qualification — that the feeling is mutual.
They have a shiny, fresh 1-0 record to show for it. They also have much bigger things in mind. Garoppolo does, too, as his relationship with his team just got a lot less complicated than it used to be.
And yes, it was complicated. When I asked him how he’s gotten so much off his back over the past 18 months, he joked: “What are you talking about, man?” But he admits now that there were things that touched him, and overcoming that meant being able to look beyond his own emotions.
“I mean, trust me, there are some things I take personally,” he says. “But for the most part, when things are out of your control, why bother? You just have to worry about the things you can control. We’re in the fucking NFL, man. Go have fun little bit.”
Garoppolo had a lot of fun on Sunday, and there’s plenty more to come.
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