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If Jimmy Garoppolo Were a Car, What Kind Would He Be?

The great Matt Maiocco got me thinking about quarterbacks and cars.

Grant Cohn

The great Matt Maiocco got me thinking about quarterbacks and cars.

On Twitter, Maiocco compared 49ers quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo to "a sports car with no spare tire" when explaining why the 49ers might want to invest in a better backup quarterback.

I love Maiocco's analogy, so I'd like to use it, too. Thanks for the idea, Matty. 

I agree with his general point -- Garoppolo is an expensive quarterback who breaks down, so the backup is important. 

But I wouldn't call Garoppolo a sports car. He's one of the slowest quarterbacks in the league and he rarely throws downfield -- nothing about him screams, "Horsepower." He's not a McLaren, not a Ferrari, not even a 2018 Kia Stinger GT2, a surprisingly nice car by the way. The Justin Herbert of cars.

Garoppolo is a luxury car, not a performance car. A luxury car that's nice to look at. People stare at it when it cruises by or when it's parked outside a nice restaurant. But it's not particularly fun to drive. Doesn't handle well. Doesn't have power. Uses lots of gas.

And Garoppolo would be an expensive luxury car. The kind of car you really can't justify owning. Like a Rolls Royce or a Bentley. Something that's more than $100,000.

Garoppolo was a used Rolls Royce when the 49ers got him. A used Rolls Royce with very little tread on its tires -- let's say less than 10,000 miles -- but it had had a major accident (Garoppolo broke his collarbone in New England). He already had gotten fixed up once. And the 49ers still forked over almost full price for him, because that's how much they wanted a Rolls Royce.

And then its engine blew out almost immediately after the Niners bought it, and they had to rebuild that from scratch. And now the car is in the shop more than it's on the road. But it still looks good.

So the 49ers want to trade it in. But the used-car dealer won't offer more than $30,000 for it because it's beat up and broken down. And the 49ers are holding out for a better offer, because they don't want to admit they shouldn't have purchased the Rolls Royce in the first place.

You're not getting a better offer. Sell the Rolls Royce. Get what you can for it now before it loses any more value.

Garoppolo is a luxury the 49ers can't afford.

Published
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.

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