Has Jimmy Garoppolo Improved?

So far this season, Garoppolo has appeared in nine games, completed 179 of 267 passes (67 percent), and thrown for 2,159 yards, 15 touchdowns and four interceptions. Good numbers.
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It feels like déjà vu.

We're halfway through the 49ers season, and Jimmy Garoppolo is playing the best football of his career -- at least, that's the narrative. Analysts say he turned a corner, figured something out, finally improved and now he's going to lead the 49ers to a Super Bowl victory.

Didn't everyone say that last season, too?

Doesn't Garoppolo always build up expectations only to disappoint you?

So far this season, Garoppolo has appeared in nine games, completed 179 of 267 passes (67 percent), and thrown for 2,159 yards, 15 touchdowns and four interceptions. Good numbers.

Last season in Garoppolo's first nine games, he completed 170 of 254 passes (66.9 percent), and threw for 2,112 yards, 12 touchdowns and five interceptions. Those are almost the same exact numbers he has posted through nine games this season. So no, Garoppolo has not improved -- he's back to performing the way he did last season. And we know how that ended. He injured his thumb and his shoulder in December and struggled in the playoffs and the 49ers fell short of the Super Bowl.

Garoppolo has proven that he can play well for stretches. He has not proven he can play consistently or stay healthy for an entire season. The only time he made it through a full season was 2019, and yet he still played poorly in the playoffs that year even though he was completely healthy.

For Garoppolo to truly improve, he'll have to stay healthy and finish strong for the first time in his career.

Let's see how he plays in late December and January.


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Grant Cohn
GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.