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The 49ers Should Have a Starting Quarterback Competition

The Niners shouldn't simply hand the starting quarterback job to Jimmy Garoppolo. They should make him earn it.
Grant Cohn|
The 49ers Should Have a Starting Quarterback Competition
The 49ers Should Have a Starting Quarterback Competition

Dear Kyle Shanahan,

We all can see you're not that into Jimmy Garoppolo. It's freaking obvious. Now it's time to do something about him.

It doesn't seem you're willing to cut him, and it sure doesn't look like he has a trade market, so he probably will return to the 49ers for at least another season. But that doesn't mean you simply should hand him the starting quarterback job. 

You should make him earn it. You should have a quarterback competition.

Garoppolo never has earned a starting job in his professional career. He was Tom Brady's understudy for three seasons in New England, and all that time Garoppolo expected the Patriots eventually to anoint him the franchise guy and ditch Brady. They never did. 

They traded Garoppolo to the 49ers instead, and the 49ers anointed him their franchise quarterback after five meaningless wins at the end of a lost season. Made him the highest-paid player in the NFL at the time. And they've never seriously challenged his place on the depth chart. Never made him sweat for his job.

They coddled him.

Garoppolo has been coddled ever since he entered the NFL. And now he has at least $85 million and an extensive injury history. What's driving him to improve? How much does he still want to play football?

Make him show you, Kyle. Make him compete head to head during training camp for the starting job with Josh Rosen, the 10th pick of the 2018 draft. Rosen is only 24. He's younger, hungrier, healthier, more mobile and has a stronger arm than Garoppolo. Rosen is a real talent. If Garoppolo beats him out, good for him.

But he won't. Rosen will win the competition, because he's better than Garoppolo.

Let Rosen prove it.

Here's why he was the 10th pick in the draft, if you need a refresher:

Published
Grant Cohn
GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.

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