If at first you don’t succeed, as the old saying goes try again.
If at first you don’t succeed, as the old saying goes try again.
Well, the 49ers tried and tried again but still were rebuffed in attempts to trade for quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo before last season began.
In fact, trading for Garoppolo was one of the first things coach Kyle Shanahan tried to do when he was hired last April, according to CBSSports.com.
Shanahan met up with Bill Belichick at the NFL Combine in Indianapolis and asked the Patriots’ head coach face-to-face what it might take to get Garoppolo.
“At that time, the only guys we thought were franchise quarterbacks that were being mentioned were Kirk (Cousins) and Jimmy,” Shanahan told MMQB.com, according to CBSSports.com. “And I knew Kirk wasn’t going to be a possibility. And I remember asking Bill personally down at the combine about Jimmy, and very quickly he told me that wasn’t a possibility. So, we moved on from that. He told me he wasn’t going to trade him.”
San Francisco general manager John Lynch also made a pitch during the offseason, with the same results.
Lynch and Shanahan moved on and were surprised when the call came from New England at the trade deadline with the Patriots suddenly ready to deal the coveted quarterback.
“We were 0-8. We’d just gotten our (butts) kicked by Philly,” Shanahan told MMQB. “I came in on a Monday and that was the last thing I was thinking about. And that ended up popping up.”
It took less than 10 minutes for the 49ers and Patriots to work out a deal that involved San Francisco’s second round pick in the 2018 NFL Draft. And now, Garoppolo is the highest paid player in the league after signing a deal worth $137.5 million.
At $27.5 million a year, Garoppolo’s deal is the largest per-year average salary on a long-term contract in NFL history.
The 26-year-old Garoppolo has started only seven NFL games — two with the Patriots in 2016 and five with the 49ers in 2017, and he has a perfect record in those starts, having won all seven.
