Wondering how I know the 49ers botched their offseason plans with Jimmy Garoppolo?
They’re admitting it now.
As we head into April, with the major part of free agency completed and the NFL Draft fast approaching, the 49ers’ roster still holds the quarterback they’ve been trying to trade for a full calendar year, Jimmy Garoppolo.
San Francisco has failed to check off the top priority of the offseason because there isn’t another NFL team interested in making a trade for No. 10. Only two teams even remain a possibility and neither has expressed any interest in making a deal.
So unless something dramatically changes, the 49ers will carry the most expensive backup quarterback in modern NFL history into camp.
And because a trade looks highly implausible, the 49ers have but two options with Garoppolo between now and Week 1 of the 2022 season.
Neither one of them is good.
Before we detail those, let’s examine how the 49ers have ended up at this point.
The 49ers made two critical errors in this elaborate process that all led to the botch job.
The first is that they overvalued the quarterback. This showed both a fundamental misunderstanding of the marketplace and the player. The rest of the league viewed Garoppolo as a lesser quarterback elevated by the players around him and Kyle Shanahan’s offensive system. And yes, this was the case before Garoppolo’s shoulder surgery. The 49ers clearly viewed him as a viable starting quarterback. Perhaps the truth lies in that delta, but a trade certainly did not.
The second is that they weren’t working with the player. Despite plenty of lip service being paid to Garoppolo at the end of the season — claims that the 49ers would work with the quarterback and his representatives on a trade — the Niners were blindsided by Garoppolo’s decision to undergo shoulder surgery. San Francisco’s brass has tried to spin it, but that is unwinding now. The truth: While it was always a possibility that Garoppolo would have to go under the knife, the 49ers were not part of that decision-making process and were peeved when that decision was unilaterally made. That’s despite the fact that Garoppolo had, over the years and countless injuries, frequently sought outside opinions and let the 49ers know after the fact.
The real reason the Niners were peeved, though, is because they knew what that meant for his already paltry trade value.
And so here we are. Trey Lance has been promised the starting quarterback job for 2022 but part of that arrangement — Garoppolo being jettisoned — has not happened.
“We had to make some adjustments and do some things like that, but we’ve got him on the books right now and we’ll keep it that way until something else can improve us,” Shanahan said Tuesday at the NFL’s owner’s meetings.
So here’s what the 49ers can do:
The first is that they can hold onto Garoppolo until he is healthy, which is expected at the beginning of training camp, and then cut him.
The monetary savings are meaningless for the team — though I’m sure Jed York wouldn’t mind. The time to cut Garoppolo was weeks ago, before the start of free agency, after which the Niners could use the savings (even truncated by injury guarantees) to improve the team. But seeing as the major portion of free agency is over and the Niners are cap compliant, it doesn’t make much sense to free up a ton of money.
But if the Niners were to cut Garoppolo before the final year of his contract, holding onto only $1.4 million in dead cap space, San Francisco would be left with only Nate Sudfield to back up Lance.
Yes, Lance would be operating without threat, but the Niners would be a markedly worse team and would only save a few bucks in the process.
That doesn’t seem like a good idea for a team that believes its championship window is open.
Of course, the alternative isn’t much better. The Niners could hold onto Garroppolo until he’s healthy and then try to trade him. Why any NFL team would want to trade for a $25 million quarterback at the beginning of training camp is beyond me, but perhaps a team will have a terrible fate befall them and find themselves in desperate need of the NFL’s 20th best signal-caller. That’s what the 49ers are hoping for, at least. That seems like bad karma.
Suffice it to say that I’m skeptical Garoppolo will ever be traded.
In that situation, the Niners would keep Garoppolo on the roster throughout the season. They’d let him finish out his contract in San Francisco and then become a free agent at the end of the season.
But this isn’t a win, either. The Niners would in no way be receiving value on Garoppolo’s $26.9 million cap hit and his presence on the team would complicate Lance’s first season as the starter — not only with fans, but in the locker room as well.
Yes, the 49ers would have an excellent backup, but they could well have a mess, too.
Remember how swimmingly last year went? It only went that way because all parties knew it was a one-year situation. What happens if it’s extended to year two?
And no, Garoppolo isn’t going to hold out or restructure his contract. He has already shown he won’t do the 49ers any favors in this process.
The Niners are stuck, and they can only blame themselves for the situation.
Shanahan and John Lynch’s grand plan of acquiring Garoppolo’s replacement and then recouping a worthwhile portion of the cost by trading Garoppolo was foolhardy from the onset. They wanted to have their cake and eat it, too.
Now they have too much cake — expensive cake, too — and some of it is simply going to go stale.
