The San Francisco 49ers avoided a catastrophe by bringing back quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo on a restructured one-year deal. Trey Lance's season ending in Week 2 is disappointing. The worst-case scenario for this season would have been not having a quarterback capable of stepping in and keeping the team competitive.
Holding onto Garoppolo once seemed like an unnecessary luxury. Now, some feel the team is better suited to make a deep playoff run than they were with the second-year quarterback. Garoppolo knows the offense and what is expected of him. He's been a part of the locker room since 2017.
According to one report, inside the building, some feel the team is better equipped to compete with Garoppolo at the helm of the offense.
"[T]his is the part no one wants to say publicly, but something several players and coaches enunciated privately in the wake of Sunday's game — the 49ers are a better team right now with Garoppolo at quarterback than they were with Lance," wrote Michael Silver of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Two of the sources preferred to remain anonymous but didn't mind if Silver shared their thoughts.
"For all of Lance's potential, coach Kyle Shanahan's plan to have the raw second-year player learn on the job while quarterbacking a team built to win now was not universally acclaimed inside the locker room," wrote Silver. "Garoppolo, 35-16 as a Niners starter, inspires more hope, at least in the short term.
"That's partly because Garoppolo quarterbacked the team to the brink of a championship three seasons ago, and very nearly helped get them back to the Super Bowl last January. He accomplished the latter despite painful injuries to his throwing shoulder and thumb, and with very little margin for error, earning a ton of locker-room capital along the way."
Silver notes that some believe Garoppolo is much more accurate than Lance on short and middle-of-the-field passes, at least at this point in their careers. Now, the 49ers' season rests on the shoulders—one of which was surgically repaired this offseason—of Garoppolo.
"You hate for it to happen that way," linebacker Fred Warner said. "But golly, we know what Jimmy's capable of. We're just gonna ride him going forward."