After years of defending him, 49ers fans now claiming Jimmy G isn’t good enough for Rams
Story by Kenneth Arthur
• 7h • 3 min read
If the
Los Angeles Rams have any inkling that Jimmy Garoppolo might not be good enough to make the 53-man roster, they better get Ryan Tannehill on a plane to L.A. before it’s too late. But the Rams
will not cut Garoppolo and would not overreact to however he’s performing—
good or bad—in the first two weeks of his first training camp with the team.
This hasn’t stopped the same
San Francisco 49ers fans that used to defend Garoppolo in the face of similar criticism from spreading rumors that the Rams are thinking of cutting the veteran quarterback (who Sean McVay has been a fan of for many years before this) because of “rumblings” based on a few errant throws in practice. You would think that 49ers fans are used to Garoppolo’s errant throws and weird decisions by now, and yet that didn’t stop San Francisco from paying him over $100 million.
The Rams are only paying him $3 million.
An NFL twitter aggregator shared a post by a 49ers fan account—yes,
the aggregators are stooping that low now—that claimed “Jimmy G is struggling at camp... and that’s putting it kindly” based on a source. Which, could be, I don’t know, any random fan who went to one Rams training camp open to the public?
View: https://x.com/jasrifootball/status/1820867260518384061
It does not take much searching to find that the cited Twitter account with the “source”, aka @49ersSportsTalk, a person credible to the aggregator because they pay for Twitter Blue, I guess, would have a long history of not only defending Jimmy Garoppolo when he was on the 49ers. But also defending Garoppolo because people were “overreacting” to a few bad throws, or a few bad games, or a few bad seasons, all of which we could agree are more telling situations than whatever is happening in the first two weeks of training camp.
View: https://x.com/49ersSportsTalk/status/1178437411422031875
View: https://x.com/49ersSportsTalk/status/1599087890906349568
View: https://x.com/49ersSportsTalk/status/1594898308492836865
View: https://x.com/49ersSportsTalk/status/1584608913248649217
And I would be remiss to not mention that two years ago, this same account “reported” that Garoppolo was “done” with the 49ers and that it was only a matter of time before the two sides split so that Trey Lance could be the franchise quarterback because that’s all they needed.
View: https://x.com/49ersSportsTalk/status/1551894401395326978
Only a month before the 49ers and Garoppolo
agreed to a contract to keep him in San Francisco for the 2022 season.
The Rams paid Garoppolo a one-year contract worth a fully-guaranteed $3.18 million salary. Cutting Garoppolo saves zero cap room and would mean that Stetson Bennett, who hasn’t played in a game since last preseason and essentially missed all practices and meetings during the 2023 season and also wasn’t very good in his exhibition appearances last year, would be Matthew Stafford’s backup for the year.
L.A. signed Garoppolo because they wanted to avoid the backup QB problems that they had in 2022 and 2023 between John Wolford, Bryce Perkins, Baker Mayfield, and Brett Rypien, when Stafford was hurt, and cutting Garoppolo for no cap savings so that the backup is Bennett and Dresser Winn would be the polar opposite move of that intention.
There are no “rumblings” of a Garoppolo cut at Rams camp other than the ones that get aggregated for attention. And look—I don’t have nearly as big of a problem with the aggregators as others in the media do, especially because others in the media on Twitter all the time have some responsibility for
creatingthose aggregators—but a 49ers fan account is not a source, and a “source” of a 49ers fan account is even less of a source.
Jimmy Garoppolo
could be a bad option to start for the Rams if he had to, nobody here is out to defend a quarterback who couldn’t get into a competition this year.
But he’s probably no worse than he was on the 49ers.