Jimmy Garoppolo is the Wrong Quarterback for the 2021 49ers

Jimmy Garoppolo was supposed to win now and keep Trey Lance on the backburner to prepare for the future. With his injuries and play, can he do either?

Kyle Shanahan dug his heels in this week and will continue to start Jimmy Garoppolo.

It is clear that Garoppolo is the starter until the team outright fails.

Here were some of Kyle's responses on the Monday after the 49ers lost to Indianapolis:

“In terms of deciding who's going at quarterback, that has to do with Jimmy’s health. I wanted to see how his calf was, it's good today and so he'll be starting. I definitely thought he could've played better. But that was not a game where, if Jimmy has one bad game, he's losing his job.”

When pushed on when he would play Trey Lance, here was his response:

"I think you're asking, when do you start playing people just for experience? And when you're playing people just to get them experience, you start to do that when you're completely eliminated from playoffs." 

The easy way out for Shanahan would be to start Lance because even if you are not winning (they aren't already), showing promise in a young quarterback would salvage the season for the 49ers. 

Garoppolo is not the long term answer for the 49ers -- that's clear. But if that's the case, is he the short term answer, and why has he been and will continue to be the present?

In their infamous March press conference that occurred after the big trade, Shanahan was adamant that Garoppolo's problem was his injury history and that they couldn't rely on him. 

"It's very hard to succeed when your starting quarterback doesn't stay healthy or if you don't have one of those true starting quarterbacks." Shanahan said "It's been tough, the two years he's missed. It's been hard to compete the same way, so we knew we had to look into that this year, I think, as everyone expected."

Then John Lynch talked about their reasoning behind the move and why they traded up a month before the draft:

"We went to ownership and said, 'Hey, things are looking good. We'd like to make this move, but we also don't want to say goodbye to Jimmy. We think with Jimmy, we've shown we can get to a Super Bowl. We can play at a high level and we don't think those two things have to be mutually exclusive."

The 49ers have told us all offseason that they still believe in Jimmy and think that he is the present of the team. Now with the team at 2-4 and him missing a start due to injury, he hasn't accomplished any of what the team expected for him.

This team tried to build for 2022 and beyond as well as 2021 -- just look at what John Lynch said and read between the lines. They attempted to take the organization in two different directions and are failing in both.

The issue becomes that they signed and brought back many veterans and those players have experience winning with Garoppolo. If you give up on him (just based on their own words), it could be viewed by the rest of the team as giving up on the season.

It seems from the team's actions that Lance is not ready and will only get experience if the team is out of the playoff race. If he has always been a year away and that was the team's assessment, then Garoppolo is the wrong quarterback to start for this team.

This regime has had five seasons to get the quarterback position right and they still have yet to solve the problem, or at least commit to Lance. 

Considering they traded up so much for him and he is the future of this franchise, you would think they would want to protect him and prepare him.

Well, he didn't get protected, as he got hurt in his first start and he wasn't prepared as the team was running an offense that wasn't conducive to to his under-center success in college. 

This team needs to commit to the kid they traded up for and get him playing experience rather than putting him on ice. They desperatley need a spark and he needs in-game experience.