Jimmy Garoppolo's confidence has 49ers believing anything is possible

Jimmy Garoppolo’s confidence has 49ers believing anything is possible

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GREEN BAY, Wisc. – There’s more to Jimmy Garoppolo than meets the eye. Perhaps, there always has been.

How else do you explain how Garoppolo, the much-maligned and likely lame-duck quarterback who is playing with a sprained shoulder and torn ligament in his right thumb, has the 49ers back in the NFC Championship Game after beating the Green Bay Packers 13-10 on Saturday night at Lambeau Field?

“Jimmy G, you can’t say enough about that guy,” George Kittle said after the win. “The s—t he takes. Consistently people try to pull him down and all he does is try to lead this team. He is the sense of calm in the huddle, he is the sense of calm in the storm. He allows us to play football at a high level.”

Playing in freezing temperatures, the 49ers’ offense spun its wheels for most of the night, unable to get traction against the NFC’s top-seeded team.

At the center of the offensive struggles, whether fair or unfair, was Garoppolo. Such is the life of a quarterback of a team in the NFL’s final four.

Garoppolo went 0-for-3 in the first quarter, but all three passes were balls thrown on the money but dropped by Kittle, Brandon Aiyuk and Jauan Jennings, respectively. The 49ers trailed 7-0 late in the first half, but put together a drive that had them in position to tie the game.

That’s when the full Garoppolo experience took over.

Facing first-and-goal from the 19-yard line, Garoppolo had Kittle breaking open in the end zone. But the Packers got pressure and Garoppolo had to duck out of two sacks and was flushed to his right. Kittle broke open for a second time on the play, but Garoppolo didn’t set his feet and lofted a pass that was picked off by Adrian Amos.

For much of the night, that was the story for the 49ers’ offense. They couldn’t string together the plays to break the Teflon seal on the end zone at Lambeau Field.

Green Bay felt like it had control the entire night. They had the lead, an MVP quarterback in Aaron Rodgers and the 49ers’ offense was frozen in place. That was the feeling for those outside the game, but Garoppolo and the 49ers never felt that way. They never flinched.

“There was a calmness,” Garoppolo said after the game in which he finished 11-for-19 for 131 yards and the interception. “A sense of, we are still controlling this. It’s just going to take one drive. You just have to chip away. It was a mature type of game where you had to be patient with it.

“Even when they had the lead, I felt like we were in control of the game, as crazy as that sounds,” Garoppolo continued later. “You could feel it on the sideline. We were waiting on that one play to spark us.”

That big play eventually came in the form of Jordan Willis’ blocked punt which Talanoa Hufanga returned for a game-tying touchdown with 4:41 to play.

After the 49ers’ defense forced a three-and-out, the 49ers huddled around Garoppolo and started a nine-play, 44-yard drive that ended with a Robbie Gould 45-yard game-winning field goal that sent them to the NFC Championship Game.

It’s Garoppolo’s irrational confidence, that inability to see any way in which his team is going to lose, that might be the key ingredient to this improbable deep postseason run. Perhaps it’s one of the reasons Garoppolo deserves more credit for where the 2021 49ers find themselves.

No matter the circumstances, the game script, the deficit, the opponent or how he’s playing, Garoppolo merely brushes it off, never wavering in his belief that the 49ers will, eventually, deliver when it matters most.

That irrational confidence might be frustrating for coaches. It has fans heading for the local sanitarium.

But as Garoppolo believes, the 49ers believe. Never blinking. Never doubting. They just keep swinging, as they follow Garoppolo into whatever battle awaits them.

“Honestly, I’m impressed with his demeanor, just as a leader,” Nick Bosa said of Garoppolo. “A lot of people give him crap for whatever. But he is as cool and collected as a quarterback as I have ever had and he’s a perfect guy to lead us to where we need to go.”

Where they need to go is now one step away.

Next Sunday, Garoppolo will lead the 49ers either into Tampa Bay against his former mentor Tom Brady, or back to SoFi for Round 3 against the Los Angeles Rams.

Two years and a lot of twists and turns after Garoppolo had the 49ers 10 minutes away from a Super Bowl title in Miami, he now has them 60 minutes away from a return trip. A potential improbable final chapter in his tenure as the 49ers’ starting quarterback.

After starting out 3-5 and with Trey Lance waiting patiently on the sidelines, no one thought Garoppolo and the 49ers would be here on Jan. 23.

Well, no one except maybe Garoppolo. For the 2021 49ers, that’s all they need.

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Nick Bosa Makes His Opinion On Jimmy Garoppolo Very Clear

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Many have wondered if Jimmy Garoppolo is the right man to lead the San Francisco 49ers at the quarterback position.

After all, the 49ers drafted quarterback Trey Lance near the top of the 2021 NFL Draft. Several fans have been calling for Lance to take over.

While that could still happen next season, this is Jimmy Garoppolo’s team for now. And that team is heading to the NFC Championship Game.

49ers star Nick Bosa made his opinion on Jimmy G. extremely clear following Saturday night’s upset win in Green Bay.

“Honestly I’m impressed with his demeanor as a leader. A lot of people give him crap for whatever but he’s as cool and collected as as a quarterback that I’ve ever had and he is the perfect guy to lead us to where we need to go,” Nick Bosa said.

The 49ers are off to the NFC Championship Game, where they will face either the Tampa Bay Buccaneers or the Green Bay Packers.

Aaron Rodgers, meanwhile, is heading home early.

Niners QB Jimmy Garoppolo (shoulder/thumb) expected to play vs. Packers, but won’t be 100 percent

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Jimmy Garoppolo is banged up with more injuries than one, but an injured thumb and shoulder are not anticipated to keep him out of action on Saturday.

Garoppolo is expected to play, but will not be 100 percent in the San Francisco 49ers’ Divisional Round contest Saturday night against the top-seeded Green Bay Packers, NFL Network Insider Ian Rapoport reported Wednesday.

Garoppolo, who has a torn ligament and bone chip in his right thumb, sprained his right shoulder in the second quarter of the 49ers’ wild-card win against the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday.

On Tuesday, when asked if he was confident he would play on Saturday, Garoppolo was somewhat non-committal.

“Yeah, we’ll feel it out throughout the week, but yeah, just feeling good right now,” he said.

Garoppolo was listed a full participant in Wednesday’s practice.

In San Francisco’s 23-17 win against the Cowboys, Garoppolo was 16 of 25 for 172 yards with no touchdowns and an ugly second-half interception. In his Tuesday news conference, Garoppolo admitted that his shoulder injury affected his play thereafter.

Jimmy Garoppolo trade not expected to cost a first-round pick

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Most anticipate this to be the final season of Jimmy Garoppolo‘s career with the San Francisco 49ers, with the organization fully expected to go all-in on Trey Lance in 2022. With several teams annually in need of improvement at the quarterback position around the NFL, Jimmy G could become a wanted man, soon enough.

With Garoppolo under contract for the 2022 season and offering a fair amount of trade value, if the 49ers part with him, a team will likely have to trade for the QB with a career 33-14 win-loss record in the regular season.

Jimmy Garoppolo contract (2022): $24.2 million base salary

That’s led to plenty of speculation all season, with fans wondering what a potential Jimmy Garoppolo trade would look like. Since the 49ers already have their QB of the future on the roster, any potential trade is likely to be centered around draft compensation.

Jimmy Garoppolo trade compensation could get complicated

Some have pointed to last season’s Carson Wentz trade as a possible example of what a Jimmy G trade could bring back.

In that deal, the Eagles sent Wentz to the Colts, but what they got back was incentive-based, depending on playing-time. The Colts coughed up a 2021 third-round selection and a 2022 first-round pick, that could have been a second-rounder, had Wentz played fewer than 75% of the team’s offensive snaps this past season.

With Garoppolo being a bit tougher to evaluate, with so many differing opinions on him questioning how reflective his win-loss record is of his talent, an incentive-based trade might make the most sense. Whether it’s based on play-time as we saw with Wentz will be left to the decision-makers.

However, Jeremy Fowler of ESPN offers the latest idea on what to expect in a potential trade, and it might be less than some 49ers fans would like to imagine.

Fowler suggests the 49ers may not be able to get a first-round pick back in a Jimmy G trade since he just has one year left on his contract.

Any team looking to part with such a high draft pick would likely want some more long-term assurance that Garoppolo will stick around in his new digs for multiple seasons.

With that said, Garoppolo can directly impact his trade value based on his play for the rest of the playoffs. Jimmy G has been to the Super Bowl in 2019, if he should find a way to return, teams would be quick to line up for the chance to add someone with that pedigree to their starting lineup in 2022.

NFL Divisional Saturday Takeaways: 49ers Carry Jimmy Garoppolo in Huge Upset

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Matt Ludtke/Associated Press

San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan is widely regarded as one of the NFL’s brightest offensive minds.

However, it’s no secret that for all Shanahan’s innovation, he has something of an old-school approach. The 49ers win by running the football and playing defense.

It’s a strategy the team employed successfully in Saturday’s stunning upset of the top-seeded Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field. It was also (this week at least) a plan born of necessity.

The Niners didn’t win because of veteran quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo—they won in spite of him.

To be fair, Garoppolo came into the game nursing injuries to both his right thumb and shoulder. But as Nick Wagoner wrote for ESPN, the signal-caller said before the game that he knew he would have to tough it out and play well to win.

“It’s playoff football,” Garoppolo said. “We know what time it is, and there ain’t no time to rest right now.”

The toughing it out he did. The playing well part—not so much.

Quite the opposite, in fact, as Garoppolo completed just 11 of 19 passes for 131 yards with a passer rating of just 57.1. He also threw a brutal interception deep in Packers territory just before the end of the first half.

San Francisco overcame Garoppolo’s poor showing by grinding out 106 yards on the ground and holding Green Bay’s potent offense to just 263 yards of offense and one touchdown.

This was a game played in brutal weather conditions in which the Packers had a massive meltdown on special teams (more on that in a second). Next week, the Niners will either be inside or playing in Florida and are assured an opponent that ranks inside the top-10 in both yards and points per game.

Garoppolo will have to sharpen up to get the 49ers into the Super Bowl for the second time in three years. He’s going to have to make more throws and avoid making mistakes.

Accomplish that, and 49ers general manager John Lynch will have quite the offseason decision to make between Garoppolo and rookie Trey Lance.