What Joe Montana Thinks of Jimmy Garoppolo

I got a one-on-one with Joe Montana this morning.

Grant Cohn | Mar 3, 2021

All you All49ers readers -- I got a one-on-one with Joe Montana this morning. Big topic was his opinion of Jimmy Garoppolo. Here's Joe.

Q: How do you evaluate Jimmy Garoppolo?

MONTANA: "I think it's hard right now. While he's been in there, he has played well. It's just that you have to keep him on the field somehow. And I think that's what their dilemma is right now. Do we try to take somebody young right now again? Because you can get somebody for a fairly decent salary as a rookie and not have a big cap number, because Jimmy's cap number is pretty big. I think that's where they made their first mistake, really, was to pay so much money for someone who hasn't played a lot. What did he play in five games? I tried to get them to look at the success rate of quarterbacks who left from behind great quarterbacks. It's zero. There is not one who has been successful. To pay somebody that much money to do that I think was a little overzealous, because he would have gone there for a lot less money than that."

Q: What do you think the 49ers need to do to solidify their quarterback situation as Kyle Shanahan enters Year 5 of his tenure with the 49ers?

MONTANA: "They have to find out whether Garoppolo is going to be healthy and stay healthy. And then, if they don't believe that then they have to bring somebody in. Do you want to bring in a veteran for a couple years and pay a lot more money to? I don't know, I think you just have to...My dream was go find somebody young and vivacious that's got something good going for him and try to build him from there.

Thus spoke Joe Montana.

Published Mar 3, 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.