© San Francisco 49ers | 2020 Sep 2
For a guy who is careful to never say anything close to polarizing off the field, Jimmy Garoppolo has become one of the most polarizing players on it.
Such is the life of an NFL quarterback, especially one on a great team that has yet to win it all, and especially one wearing the same uniform that Steve Young and Joe Montana once donned.
But by nearly every metric, Garoppolo was at least an above average quarterback last season. He passed the eye test too, at least according to NFL Films Executive Producer Greg Cosell, who watched every dropback Jimmy G took.
“After watching Garoppolo I was really impressed,” Cosell told Tolbert, Krueger & Brooks on Wednesday. “I think it’s a very scheme-dependent passing game, but there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t think that’s a negative when you say that. I think that’s the goal of a coach.
“He’s a timing player, yet there’s a late in the down element to him. He’s not a guy who’s going to make a lot of plays running around, but he stays in the pocket, he delivers the football, he’s very rhythmic. For the most part he’s accurate — he’ll miss a few here and there, everybody does — but for the most part I was really impressed with him.
“He was efficient on third down, I thought his decision making overall was good. After watching 300+ drop backs, I was really impressed with Jimmy Garoppolo.”
Not only was Garoppolo efficient on third down, he was the best in the league at converting them to first downs in 2019, at 45 percent. Over the past three years, he’s third in the league at 44 percent behind only Andrew Luck (48%) and Patrick Mahomes (45%).
That’s with only one full year under his belt. It seems like a safe bet that Garoppolo will look even better in his second full year in Kyle Shanahan’s system.
Listen to the full interview below.