While the used car market is booming for sellers, the market for premium, refurbished quarterbacks is seriously lacking this NFL offseason.
Just ask the 49ers, who are finding it difficult to sell their quarterback, Jimmy Garoppolo, to another team.
This is not the market San Francisco expected, and at this juncture, the team seems as likely to cut him as trade him.
What gives? A quarter of the teams in the NFL are actively looking for new starting quarterbacks and this year’s draft class looks like one of the worst in years.
Well, a few things are conspiring against San Francisco, including, it seems, Garoppolo and his camp.
It starts with Aaron Rodgers. He needs the attention and right now, he controls the entire NFL quarterback market.
I’m yet to talk to a serious person who expects Rodgers to leave Green Bay, but the reigning MVP hasn’t yet made his decision on whether he wants to stay or leave the franchise.
If Rodgers does say that he wants to leave, there will be a long process of teams making trade offers and Green Bay likely rebuffing them until they receive a true Godfather offer.
But once Rodgers’ situation is sorted, Garoppolo should be the top quarterback on the trade market.
And that gives San Francisco a ton of leverage, right?
Not really.
You can thank Garoppolo’s contract (and its $25.5 million cap hit) and latest injury for that. The lame-duck quarterback has a bad wing.
Garoppolo is set to have shoulder surgery which will keep him from throwing until just before training camp. That’s a huge risk for a new team — mental reps can only get you so far.
Having shoulder surgery is anything but “routine”, too. This is already a quarterback who rarely challenges downfield or toward the sidelines. He doesn’t have the arm strength to spare.
This latest injury becoming something that needs surgery is also the reason why the 49ers have spent the last year trying to move him. Kyle Shanahan couldn’t trust him on the field, yes, but more importantly, they couldn’t trust him to be on the field. The best ability is availability, right?
Some Niners fans might be over him, but Shanahan is revered as an offensive mind around the NFL. The Niners coach giving up on Garoppolo is a loud statement that the rest of the league has not ignored. If Shanahan has decided that Garoppolo doesn’t have what it takes to win a Super Bowl, other teams are smart enough to bury their savior complex.
Then comes the contract-compensation conundrum.
Garoppolo needs a new contract, which will at the very least make his 2022 cap hit more manageable to his new team. No one is taking that cap hit on full bore, even if it’s just a one-year problem.
The quarterback, of course, is looking for a longer-term deal.
Either way, someone is going to give a new contract to a quarterback with a long and active injury history who is being booted out the door by arguably the NFL’s brightest offensive mind; a quarterback who has imploded in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl and the NFC championship game and was the league’s highest-risk, lowest-reward starter last season.
This is a tough sell.
Between the fact that Garoppolo has proven to not be a quarterback capable of winning a Super Bowl, injuries, and the need for a new contract, there are now more quarterback-needy teams that are out of the running for Garoppolo than in it.
It’s even tougher when so many of those teams looking for new quarterbacks have head coaches and general managers on hot seats.
They’d be risking their careers on Garoppolo.
Who thinks that’s a good idea?
For most teams, it’s simply better to ride with the guy who has been in your system. Sam Darnold in Carolina, Mason Rudolph in Pittsburgh, Carson Wentz in Indianapolis, Taysom Hill in New Orleans, Drew Lock or Teddy Bridgwater in Denver.
And while I have no idea what the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are going to do, their chances of trading for Garoppolo seemingly went out the door with his shoulder surgery. They could be a team that entertains a one-year, cheap option like Mitch Trubisky, Marcus Mariota, or Jameis Winston.
There’s only one team that I see still being really interested in landing Garoppolo at this point: the Washington Commanders.
And if you only have one team showing serious interest, you don’t have a market.
Garoppolo would, personally, be best served by the 49ers releasing him. That would allow him to sign anywhere for any price.
But the 49ers are not going to give up on landing something — anything — for him, if for no other reason than his once easy-to-handle dead cap hit is now roughly $9 million thanks to injury guarantees from his shoulder surgery.
If the 49ers can trade him, whatever they will get back will now surely be less than they expected after a year where increasing Garoppolo’s trade value was front of mind in Santa Clara. You need a market to land a first or second-round pick.
If the Niners are lucky, they can land a conditional or future third-round pick for him, plus a fifth-rounder from Washington.
That’s effectively the same package they traded to Washington for an injured Trent Williams, who was never going to take another snap for the Commanders and needed a new contract.
History has a funny way of repeating itself in the NFL.
But if Washington doesn’t bite on a trade, I’m not sure who will.
And that leaves the Niners in a situation where they need to free up money to sign free agents.
The easiest way to do that is to cut your expensive backup quarterback, even with his new dead-cap hit. And yes, I said backup.
Washington and every other team in the NFL know it, too. And while it only takes one team to make a deal, the Niners find themselves with the best available quarterback this offseason and no place to sell him.
Was this past year wasted? Only time will tell.
But we can say this now: the Niners played the long-con and lost.
