For most of this offseason and preseason, the 49ers were set on trading Jimmy Garoppolo.
But nothing materialized. As they waited for teams to come in with offers and the phone stopped ringing, general manager John Lynch threw out a hypothetical to Kyle Shanahan. What about Jimmy?
Lynch said he discussed the idea with Shanahan about a month ago, and on Friday morning, he joined the Murph & Mac Show to detail how it all went down:
“We’re constantly talking, and at one point, we were talking about that entire [quarterback] room. Oddly enough, not about the starter, but just, do we have enough in that room?
And I remember I kind of looked at him and I said, ‘You know we could–‘
And he goes, ‘What?’
And I go, ‘You know, we could keep Jimmy.’
And he goes, ‘How? There’s no way. He won’t do that.’
And I said, ‘Well, we don’t know. I mean, I’m not getting any calls, which I’m shocked that I haven’t, and who knows? Let’s marinate on that.’
And he just thought it was crazy and the next day, kind of came back in and said, ‘You know what, why not?’
I said, ‘Well, you see Jimmy a lot, one of the next times — he’s part of our roster, so there’s no tampering or anything — why don’t you introduce it?’
And so I think he did at that point, and the initial reaction from Jimmy was, look, I think we’ve taken the approach that we’re going to wait and see this thing through to see if any perfect scenario opens up, but if not, that’s not a bad idea.”
Lynch said Garoppolo and his agents, Don Yee and Carter Chow, were intent on making sure they saw the process through to the end, following the conclusion of the third preseason game, before they entered specific discussions on a contract in a backup role.
But once that last game came and went without any major quarterback injuries, Lynch said the discussions on a reworked deal happened very quickly.
Listen to the full interview below. You can listen to every KNBR interview on our podcast page at knbr.com/podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Catch Murph & Mac weekdays from 6 a.m. – 10 a.m. on KNBR 104.5 / 680 and streaming live on KNBR.com.
