What Bill Walsh would Think of Jimmy Garoppolo
No sports writer knew Bill Walsh better than my dad, former San Francisco Chronicle sports columnist Lowell Cohn. He wrote about about Walsh called Rough Magic.
So I asked my dad what he thinks Walsh would make of Jimmy Garoppolo. Here's what my dad said.
LC: "Context: Bill had perhaps the greatest quarterback who ever lived. You could argue Tom Brady is better, but Joe Montana was pretty good. Not only was he great -- he was a winner. And he was a very good athlete. And Bill developed him.
"Then Bill had Steve Young, who was a running quarterback. And Bill said to him if you want to be a quarterback on my team, you have to throw the ball. I don't want you running so much. And Steve worked so hard to become a throwing quarterback, won a Super Bowl, was an MVP and is also in the Hall of Fame. One of the greatest of all time, and also a great athlete, maybe even better than Joe.
"So the standard Bill had was the best. He used to say to me, 'The quarterback is the limit of my offense.' And what he meant was, 'My imagination is endless. With the greatest quarterback who ever lived -- let's say better than Joe -- I could even do better.' So Bill saw Joe and Steve, as great as they were, as limits. Joe didn't have a strong arm and Steve was emotional. Sometimes in games, he lost his cool, unlike Joe who was dispassionate like a surgeon.
"Garoppolo is a good quarterback. One former coach used the adjective "serviceable" to describe him. Serviceable sounds like a 'C' grade. I'd say 'B.' If Joe Montana was a limit, Garoppolo is more of a limit. He throws lots of picks. Walsh got rid of Steve DeBerg because he threw picks. It's important what a quarterback does well, but it's more important that a quarterback not do bad things.
"I think Bill would be impatient with the interceptions. And the way I knew Bill -- he was ruthless -- he would have been looking all the time to upgrade the limit."
For more on this topic, watch the segment below from the latest episode The Cohn Zohn.
