There was a moment in the third quarter on Sunday that, for Jimmy Garoppolo, kind of signified where he is now—in his eighth NFL season and fifth playing for Kyle Shanahan.
The significance of the play itself really wasn’t much. It came on a second-and-9 with 3:40 on the clock and the 49ers up 38–17. The call was a drift route concept off play-action, and Garoppolo hit Deebo Samuel, his best receiver on this afternoon, for 16 yards and a first down. And sure, it moved the Niners out of the depths of their own territory, and to the Lions’ 37. Still, they wound up punting four snaps later.
But to focus on just that would be missing the point of what Garoppolo was trying to distill for me during our conversation as he and his teammates made toward the buses for the long flight back to the West Coast. This was more about feel, command and everything a quarterback is looking to become within an offensive scheme.
“I don’t know if you know what a drift is; it’s like a slant route, kinda, with Deebo from the slot,” Garoppolo explained. “And [Lions linebacker] Jamie Collins is on him, and he was guarding him but pushing through at the same time to get outside of him. And it just all happened so slow. And I don’t know, in the past, I think I would’ve hesitated, but today I just ripped it. We got a big play out of it.
“It’s just plays like that that kind of go unnoticed. But as a quarterback, you notice them.”
Indeed, if you look back at the play, you can see it: Collins played Samuel outside, turned his back to the ball, and before Samuel made his break, the ball was out and spinning fast to the left of the linebacker, eventually landing right in Samuel’s hands as he cleared Collins in the coverage.
Forget the result of the play. This sort of thing, to a quarterback, can always be read as a sign that the coaches’ offense is becoming his offense.
And yet, just three snaps later, third pick Trey Lance was back in the lineup as the team’s short-yardage quarterback to try to convert a third-and-1, which was another reminder that even as the offense has become more and more Garoppolo’s as he enters his fifth year as a Niner, it will, sooner or later, be someone else. Namely, it’ll be Lance’s.
Now, the good news for San Francisco: The Niners held off a feisty Lions team on the road on Sunday, scoring a 41–33 win, after leading 38–10 at one point, to open their season 1–0. The unorthodox quarterback plan worked, too, as the Niners averaged an NFC-best 8.0 yards per play. San Francisco rushed for 131 yards. Garoppolo posted a 124.2 passer rating. Lance threw a touchdown pass. The defense survived an injury to star corner Jason Verrett.
But underneath all that is how we got here in the first place. And why it’s taken, and will continue to take, the right kinds of people to make it work.
