The Reason The 49ers Must Release Jimmy Garoppolo

This has nothing to do with Jimmy Garoppolo's play.

Grant Cohn | Jan 11, 2021

This has nothing to do with Jimmy Garoppolo's play.

Garoppolo is a solid quarterback. And if he has the best running game and the best defense in the league and he's healthy, he probably can win a Super Bowl unless he has to face the Chiefs, as we learned last year.

This is all about Garoppolo's contract. The 49ers will have to pay him $26.9 million in 2021, or 15.1 percent of the expected $176 million salary cap.

Paying Garoppolo that much money almost certainly would prevent the 49ers from winning a Super Bowl.

The 49ers paid Garoppolo only 8.6 percent of their cap when he led them to the Super Bowl in 2019. He was cheaper back then. And since the NFL created the cap in 1994, no quarterback has won a Super Bowl while making more than 13.1 percent of his team's cap space. That quarterback was Steve Young in 1994. Every season since then, the Super-Bowl winning-QB has taken up less than 13 percent of his team's cap.

For Garoppolo to take up less than 13 percent of the 49ers cap space in 2021, the cap would have to rise to $210 million. And it almost certainly will not.

So the 49ers need to cut Garoppolo. Call him a cap casualty. Then, they can sign veteran Andy Dalton to a one-year, $1 million contract, draft a quarterback and spend the rest of their cap space on offensive linemen and defensive backs.

Going with Dalton and a rookie actually would give the 49ers a better chance to win the Super Bowl next season than Garoppolo would, because there's no way in hell the 49ers would win a Super Bowl with Garoppolo making all that dough.

See ya, Jimmy.

Published Jan 11, 2021

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.