For the second week in a row, 49ers quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo is making headlines.
This time it comes courtesy of an excellent profile by Joon Lee of Bleacher Report. The piece dives deep into a number of aspects of Garoppolo’s life: his initial unwillingness to play quarterback as a kid, how he has become one of the most recognizable NFL players seemingly overnight, and, perhaps most notably, his time in New England, and his relationship with Tom Brady.
Regarding the latter, Garoppolo is surprisingly candid about his confidence while playing alongside arguably the game’s greatest ever quarterback.
“I’ve always had that mindset,” Jimmy says. “I knew that [Brady] was better than me in my first day in the NFL. Naturally, you’re the rookie and he’s the veteran, but you have to have that mindset, that you want to be the starter.”
“Even when I was a little kid, my brothers, whenever we would play, I would literally always think I was going to win. I wouldn’t, but I would always think that. It’s like when I go to New England, when I first got there, I thought in my head, ‘I’m better than this dude.’”
“But in your head, you believe you’re better than Tom Brady?” I ask.
“It was always a quiet confidence,” Jimmy says. “I would never speak that.”
I ask again: “But you believed that you were the best dude there?”
“Yeah, you believe in yourself,” Jimmy says. “That’s the best way to put it.”
I check his confidence one more time: “So you’re going up to Tom Brady and saying, ‘I’m better than you’?”
“I’m not stupid. You have to pick your battles, but I had belief in myself that I could do certain things, and it’s always worked out pretty well. It will always be in me, that drive that comes from my dad telling me that someone is always working harder, that I’m always in last place and I need to catch up to someone else.”
After being drafted by the Patriots in the second round in 2014, Garoppolo played behind Brady for three and a half years before he was traded to the 49ers midway through the 2017 season. During his tenure in New England, Garoppolo started just two games, winning both.