This is the last thing 49ers fans want to see.
Jimmy Garoppolo had his first outing on the field Monday night since his ACL injury 11 months ago when he faced off against the Denver Broncos and it was not all good.
The 49ers star QB completed just one of his six pass attempts for zero yards and an interception. It earned him a 0.0 passer rating.
ESPN’s Chris Mortensen jumped onto the Russillo Show podcast with Ryen Russillo two days later and stated that the relationship between Jimmy G and the head coach isn’t all well as it may seem on the outside.
Mortensen also commented on the podcast that he could envision the 49ers moving on from Garoppolo and proceeded to drop this take:
“Obviously, he tore his ACL early in the season last year, but I think there’s been some other things that I don’t think Kyle Shanahan likes what he sees,” Mortensen said. “I’m not sure if it’s prep or — Kyle, I think he’s one of the top three offensive coordinators in football […] Mentally, you’d better be able to keep up with Kyle. Kyle, I’m not sure he’s a patient, patient guy, especially when it comes to quarterbacks.
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“They’re at the point where they want to win. John Lynch and Kyle Shanahan are kind of tied at the hip there. I’m anxious to see what happens at the start of the season with Garoppolo if they don’t think he’s ready.”
Mort even quaestions whether Jimmy G would even be the starter for the 49ers’ game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on September 8.
“I heard it hasn’t been pretty,” Mortensen adds. “I heard what we’ve seen in preseason is kind of what we were seeing in practice a bit.”
On Friday, head coach Kyle Shanahan joined KNBR and responded back to those damning comments from Mort.
“I think learning the playbook is done,” Shanahan said on the “Murph and Mac” show. “You can learn the playbook pretty fast. It’s not like we’re doing brain surgery here. You learn the playbook pretty fast. It’s about performing it consistently. The way that happens is you play in games, you get a lot of playing time, you go through some ups and downs.
“Jimmy has had 10 career games. That was one of the most disappointing things for me personally. What I was looking forward to last year was knowing, alright, this is going to be the first season Jimmy gets to go in as a starter and gets to play a season as a true NFL quarterback.
“He only got to play two-and-a-half games. That was the most frustrating part. Not that he doesn’t get to learn the offense of anything, that he doesn’t get to go rep the offense. And now you get to take a whole year off and miss pretty much all of OTAs — he was only allowed to do 7-on-7, which is not real football — and then you throw him into training camp full-go.
“He’s had some real good weeks; he’s had some real good practices. But as (with) everyone, it is up and down. It’s very well-documented that he had one very bad practice, the five-interception practice. Unfortunately, that was followed by not a great outing from our whole starting offense and the 12 plays they got.
“I think it’s pretty normal this time of year for people to blow that up, but it is what it is. I think it’s pretty obvious; the guy is coming back from an ACL, he hasn’t played in a lot of games, and he needs to get out there and play football.”
History has told us that athletes coming back from an ACL injury need up to a year to get back to the high level they were playing at before the injury. That means the 2019 NFL season might be lost because of it.
