SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Niners head coach Kyle Shanahan is placing a few bets by bringing back Jimmy Garoppolo as the backup for new starting quarterback Trey Lance this season.
He’s betting that the Niners’ 53-man roster is, indeed, good enough to compete for a Super Bowl.
Shanahan is betting that the culture in the 49ers locker room is strong enough that he won’t feel internal pressure to make a quarterback change, should Lance struggle out of the gates of his first season as a starter.
He’s also betting on Lance probably getting injured again. Sorry, sometimes the truth is uncouth.
Oh, and there’s a little bet that another team will trade a top-60 pick for Garoppolo to save their season in a few weeks, too.
Shanahan is throwing his chips all around the roulette table that is the 2022 NFL season.
But the tallest stack of chips can’t be ignored. Shanahan is betting that the personalities of his top two quarterbacks won’t change — that Lance and Garoppolo are simply too cool to worry about how weird their seemingly unprecedented situation is.
And you know what? That bet might just pay big.
After practicing together for the first time this preseason, Lance and Garoppolo took to the dais at Levi’s Stadium on Thursday to answer questions about the team’s new quarterback room and one-of-one dynamic.
Both said all the right things: that they like their counterpart, that they have each other’s back, and their relationship is strong.
Both even used more-or-less the same phrase: “You guys won’t believe me, but…”
Consider me a believer.
Nothing either Garoppolo or Lance said Thursday came off as fake or phony.
Their bromance might be a bit corny, but all the great ones are.
There seems to be real, genuine like for each other, and, most importantly, a clear understanding of the new hierarchy.
Remember, Garoppolo could have demanded his release from the Niners’ football purgatory at any point over the last few weeks. He didn’t.
Why?
“That just wasn’t the way I want it to go,” Garoppolo said. “I’m one of those people that I don’t want to really ruffle the feathers too much here and there and kind of want to just go with the flow… Things worked out, and I’m happy now.”
If he didn’t want to ruffle feathers then — with his career as a starting quarterback in this league effectively on the line — then I doubt he’ll ruffle feathers once the season starts.
There’s a reason everyone — black, white, rookies, and veterans — likes Garoppolo, but even his best friends on the team know so little about him. He’s the ultimate go-with-the-flow guy.
In this case, he might have legitimately been too cool for his own good. The flow has Lance as the No. 1.
“If that’s going to take a blow to your ego, you got to check your ego a little bit,” Garoppolo said of being the No. 2. “I think you [have] to know where you are in this league, who you are as a player, who you are as a person.”
Garoppolo is 30. The ego might be checked, but he’s a professional, and he handled the situation — at least the public side — like one on Thursday.
The real question is how Lance would handle the situation.
Yes, he jumped Garoppolo on the depth chart, but he did it without a training camp competition.
Again, this is weird.
But this is where Lance’s small-town, small-school background — that perfect son-in-law professional persona — comes in handy. Lance handled questions about Garoppolo better than he has handled the Niners’ defense in training camp. He seems genuinely excited that Garoppolo is back in the fold.
“He’s been a big brother to me since the day I got drafted,” Lance said.
Yes, Shanahan ran the decision to re-sign Garoppolo by Lance, but the second-year player was never going to say anything negative, even if he thought it.
I am yet to find precedent for this kind of quarterback switch. Certainly in the modern, quarterbacks-as-destiny era, Garoppolo is the first established starter to be replaced ahead of Week 1 after staying with the team he led to a final-four season the year before.
The Niners at least traded Joe Montana — the losing quarterback in the 1992 NFC Championship Game — before moving to Steve Young in 1993. Alex Smith needed to get injured halfway through the season to lose his job to Colin Kaepernick in 2012.
By coming back to the Niners, Garoppolo is placing a bet here, too.
Bookies.com has Lance listed as the seventh most-likely starting quarterback to be replaced first this season. Plus-850, if you want to know the odds. That handicap might be aggressive, but it’s not ridiculous to think Garoppolo could start for the Niners again — on merit, that is — this season. Lance wasn’t exactly sterling in training camp.
But even if Garoppolo’s time as a starter is up, it behooves him to be Lance’s biggest supporter. Garoppolo could very well never be an uncontested starter in this league again. He’ll guarantee such a fate if he makes a scene this season.
Garoppolo’s value as a quarterback is now inexorably tied to his value as a teammate. It’s the curse of the slightly above average.
I bet he will find himself in the exact opposite situation he experienced this offseason — he’ll be fending off offers from other teams.
Everyone with the 49ers has something to win by simply playing this cool. Shanahan, Lance, and Garoppolo will lose big if this little experiment fails and drama creeps into the locker room.
It’s good vibes, or drama and mutually assured destruction.
The quarterbacks are choosing the good vibes, and I don’t expect that to change soon.
