There’s a video of Jimmy Garoppolo that the NFL’s official Twitter account posted at 4:15 Pacific Time on Sunday. The 30-year-old, now wearing a ball cap instead of his helmet, looks out at the crowd and glows before starting to skip his way into the Levi’s Stadium tunnel. And as he picks up speed, Garoppolo shouts at the top of his lungs.
The Niners are Garoppolo’s team again. It’s through a cruel twist of fate—Trey Lance broke his ankle in the first quarter of San Francisco’s Week 2 win over Seattle, and that’ll almost certainly end his season—that we got here. But we’re here nonetheless. And Garoppolo is ready for all the good, all the bad and everything else that comes with it.
So you can excuse Garoppolo if, less than an hour after the Niners easily dispatched the rival Seahawks 27–7, he took a question about when he started to feel like himself and went somewhere else entirely with it. He was still riding the high of having played (almost) four quarters of football and, at least on this day, it was hard to look past that.
“I think the touchdown to [Ross] Dwelley, obviously, gave me some confidence, like, ,” Garoppolo told me, as his day came to a close. “I don’t know, it’s really just a better appreciation for the fans and the atmosphere. I sound like an old guy saying this, but when I was young, I really didn’t appreciate that part of the game. I was so locked into football and what’s happening on the field.
“And you need to have that. But there is a sense of, you got to smell the roses a little bit and look around.”
On Sunday, inexplicably, we got to see again what Garoppolo is built for, and see it in San Francisco. We saw it less than a month after it seemed a certainty he’d taken his last real snap as a Niner and weeks after he agreed to stay on as a backup. There was a point in August, in fact, when it seemed more likely that he’d be in Santa Clara as the visiting quarterback in Week 2.
But Garoppolo blazed his own trail in taking a curious leap of faith, hoping things would work out for him. And they did, even if it was an ugly break that made it so.
