Squint, and you could see the past as present again. There was Jimmy Garoppolo, dressed in a red practice jersey, throwing over the 49ers’ Dre Greenlaw in 11-on-11 drills, smiling and talking a few words of smack after his quick release helped him find an open target. The desert heat can make you see things, but this was no mirage. Garoppolo’s red jersey was of the noncontact variety, worn over his Las Vegas Raiders silver and black to remind defenders not to take down the quarterback during a recent joint practice between Garoppolo’s new team and his old one.
Shouldn’t this have been … awkward? Tensions rise over long, hot training camp days under normal circumstances, but here was Garoppolo, going against the team that was so eager to ditch him it traded three first-round picks in order to draft his replacement a year after Garoppolo got them to a Super Bowl. He’d won two-thirds of his starts for that team, and it tried to move on from him first with a quarterback who’d thrown just 711 in-game passes since middle school, and then with another quarterback who was the very last pick in the 2022 draft. This is classic villain origin story stuff—though, apparently, not for Jimmy G.
“I don’t know,” Garoppolo shrugged. “You’ve just got to move on quickly because things in this league, if you dwell on things and start thinking of all the bad shit, it’s going to pile up on you. And then you won’t last very long.”
Reasonable enough. In the world of NFL quarterbacks with attitudes, though, Garoppolo is an outlier. It’s a trope of the position to have a long memory for slights real or perceived—most quarterbacks seem perpetually in their Reputation era. Tom Brady, the most accomplished man to ever play the position, named his production company after his draft slot, 199, rather than after his Super Bowl count, seven. A meaningful event in the deterioration of Aaron Rodgers’s relationship with the Packers came in 2021, when the team made the not at all surprising decision to release wide receiver Jake Kumerow shortly after Rodgers had said some nice things about Kumerow in a radio interview. Entering the NFL in 2018, Baker Mayfield crafted his identity around the “chip on his shoulder,” even though he was the first player picked in the entire draft. In 2021, Jalen Hurts said he had not a chip but a “boulder.” In the predraft process, the lack of a chip on Trevor Lawrence’s shoulder was somehow viewed as his only flaw.
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If Garoppolo was looking for his doubters, they wouldn’t be hard to come by. In fact, it would be difficult to find a more maligned winning quarterback. As Garoppolo played the majority of the season last year for a team that was openly trying to move on from him, and even after he’d already said a heartfelt goodbye to players, coaches, and fans, passive aggression just seemed to follow him. On Christmas Eve in 2021, the day after a 20-17 49ers loss to the Titans, general manager John Lynch liked a tweet from a fan account he’d been tagged in that read, “Leave Jimmy in Nashville.” (Lynch later said it was an accident.) When Dolphins running back Raheem Mostert, a former 49er, said last fall that Tua Tagovailoa is “a quarterback who can actually sling it,” it was immediately read as a slight against Garoppolo. (Mostert said his words were taken out of context and he didn’t mean it that way.) His own star receiver, Davante Adams, told The Ringer he didn’t “see eye-to-eye” with the Raiders front office shortly after they signed Garoppolo to a three-year, $72 million contract in March.
Over the course of the Niners’ visit to Las Vegas, Garoppolo’s former coach Kyle Shanahan spent a fair bit of time defending how much love he’d shown his former pupil.
“Anytime I’ve been asked about Jimmy and what he meant to us and how he was, I’ve never said it differently,” Shanahan said. “Jimmy was unbelievable here.
“I think he was the best quarterback here in about 20 years, since Steve Young. He has an unbelievable record, and every time he played and stayed healthy, we’re either in the Super Bowl or NFC championship game, so I hope no one insinuates I’ve ever said differently.”
It’s a nice endorsement. Unbelievable record or not, though, they moved on. It’s not right to say that Garoppolo is oblivious to all the little digs or immune to the sting of rejection. Though gracious with every question he faced about his San Francisco reunion, Garoppolo was noticeably more animated when talking about his current team than his former one. He stammered a little while beginning to answer a question about how it felt when current 49ers starter Brock Purdy had praised him as a leader. “That’s cool to hear,” he said, sounding a bit surprised.
But there is a definite Zen quality to Garoppolo. Longtime teammates have commented that they’ve never seen him angry. He ignores his phone and is a notoriously bad texter. His Twitter account has been inactive since 2019. His Instagram is used sparingly and almost exclusively for sponsored posts. He’s been accused of seeing everything as too copacetic, including when sideline cameras captured him chuckling it up about something on the sideline during last year’s NFC championship game, when his team was down multiple scores and Christian McCaffrey was playing emergency quarterback. He was a well-liked teammate in New England and San Francisco—his charisma and rapport with Patriots players were a few of the things that made Brady territorial in Garoppolo’s backup days—and is quickly forging similar relationships in his new home. He’s also now a bachelor in Las Vegas with $125 million in career earnings, so it’s fairly easy to imagine Garoppolo waltzing through life in a sort of Jon Hamm in 30 Rock bubble, though that wouldn’t be entirely accurate. I asked Garoppolo whether he found the doubts about his ability to be a true franchise quarterback motivating, and he said he does carry some of that energy, just quietly.
“It’s in there,” Garoppolo said. “Everyone has different ways of dealing with stuff. Some people like to vocalize it and put it out there. Some people like to keep it in and just let their play do the talking. There’s different ways to go about it, but that’s how I’ve always been. I ain’t changing.”
Garoppolo’s self-assurance makes him an engaging character in the NFL’s ever-developing quarterback soap opera. It very likely helped him navigate the ups and downs of his San Francisco tenure without letting it devolve into all-out drama. But his equilibrium makes it hard to define the stakes of the next chapter of his career in Las Vegas and what’s really driving him. The Raiders—in a division with the Chiefs and in a stacked AFC—aren’t seen as Super Bowl contenders, and if Garoppolo isn’t making his next act all about proving that the 49ers were wrong to let him go, then what does he want? To throw a few in-cuts, cash some checks, and head home in January?
In the rosy light of training camp hopefulness, what Garoppolo seemed most energized by was the chance for a fresh start and a return to an offense that, while not known for being nearly as quarterback friendly as Shanahan’s, was the one he played in when the hype around his career was at its apex. Garoppolo called Josh McDaniels’s scheme the one he was “born into in the NFL” and said that his camp has been a process of reacclimating himself to it.
From the looks of it, that has gone better as the days have worn on. Not just adjusting to McDaniels’s offense and his new teammates but also returning from last year’s foot surgery, Garoppolo had a difficult start to camp, including a three-interception day early on that might have been a six-interception day were it not for three drops. By the time the 49ers came to town before the first preseason game, though, things had improved. Against San Francisco’s stellar first-team defense, Garoppolo had another pair of strong practices. In the first day of 11-on-11 work, Garoppolo led two long drives, one of which was punctuated by a touchdown pass to tight end Austin Hooper. The starting offense did less the second day I watched, when several players, including Hunter Renfrow and Michael Mayer, didn’t practice and star receiver Adams left early with what turned out to be a minor injury. But the Raiders were still energized by the performance of their defense, which got six interceptions off 49ers quarterbacks.
In limited preseason work, Garoppolo has been impressive. Against the Rams on Saturday, he had 4-for-4 passing on a perfect drive that ended with a Raiders rushing touchdown.
That’s progress, but the Raiders will still have serious questions about their offensive line, about McDaniels’s ability to scheme his players open, and about Garoppolo’s capacity to maximize a downfield talent like Adams, not to mention Garoppolo’s troubling injury history. Finding success outside the Shanahan scheme would be the surest and fastest way for Garoppolo to beat the play-action automaton allegations, but it’ll be a tall order, even given his familiarity with McDaniels. It’s entirely possible, maybe probable, that the 49ers will keep humming along behind Purdy in 2023 while Garoppolo keeps throwing the same picks and the Raiders fall flat. I don’t think Garoppolo made a calculated choice not to set this season up as a revenge tour, which is probably for the best.
I do think Garoppolo’s equanimous approach masks what an interesting juncture this is in the genuinely strange NFL life he has been leading ever since he was a perceived replacement getting under Brady’s skin in New England. Garoppolo’s departure from the San Francisco nest offers a chance for the NFL world to arrive at some answer to the question that’s been asked ad nauseam over the last several years: How much of the 49ers offense is just Shanahan schematic magic? If Garoppolo wanted to lean into that dynamic a little more, it would have the narrative weight of one of the stories of the upcoming season. But he just doesn’t.
Just after the first 49ers-Raiders joint practice was whistled officially over, Shanahan went off in search of a player. He was looking for Las Vegas defensive end Maxx Crosby to offer an apology. Shanahan recalled that the 49ers had been “jerks” to Crosby in their predraft interview in 2019, when defensive line coach Kris Kocurek, new to the staff at the time, was a little too intense at the whiteboard. He and Crosby laughed it off and reminisced. Yet Shanahan did not seek Garoppolo out after the practice. The quarterback was too far away, on another field, he said.
Instead, Garoppolo strode off the practice field and went to wash up before greeting a media room crowded with locals and visitors, many from his old stomping grounds. He flashed a toothy smile.
“I love those guys,” Garoppolo said. “We had a good time out there.”
