Won’t Get Fooled Again (A 49ers Multimedia Experience)
{AUTHOR’S NOTE}
The Author politely suggests you listen to this song while reading this article
Jimmy G has lost my trust. Don’t get me wrong, in baffling fashion I still kinda like the guy. He is just so supremely affable. However I have come to realize I have let things go on too long.
When you are in a relationship with someone and they break your trust but you still keep the relationship going, it enters into a classical phase of human dynamics. The Lost-Trust becomes a sort of base-beat that is always in the background. The Base Beat of Lost Trust’s volume can go up and down depending on the given circumstances of the moment. Sometimes it gets so quiet you can barely remember it’s there while at other moments it can be deafening to the point of drowning out the present with echoes of the past.
While it’s easy to traipse back through Jim’s career with our beloved Franchise and find many different moments when he lost our trust, there are two that stand out the most to me. Both of them greatly impact why I am breaking up with him as a sports figure in my life.
The first time was when he tried to run out of bounds, changed his mind at the last second and, in a feeble attempt to squeeze out a few more un-needed-by-down-and-distance yards, blew out not only his ACL but the collective hope of 49ers fandom (whose season was instantly downgraded to the Dollar-store play of CJB and the Plucky-but-this-will-never-work Mr. Mullens.)
While this incident has been covered in great detail by many a better reporter and writer than myself, the reason I bring it up now is in the abovementioned context of trust. When Jimmy hurt HIMSELF with that action, it made me trust his judgement and his durability. Yes, it was a “freak accident,” and yes, he showed courage by trying to eek out some extra grass. However, those elements pale in how they revealed to me that this shining new Potential-God-of-Football clearly had a tragic flaw in the logic circuits and processing software of his melon.
This processing flaw would show up repeatedly in the rest of his time as a 49er, most glaringly in his interception rate. On top of the it’s-going-to-happen-any-moment-interceptions, not reading the defense correctly, not seeing the linebacker waiting to poach over the middle, missing open receivers and getting oft sacked all were rooted in this same deficiency. Each time one of those things would happen, they were amplified by the thrumming base beat left over from that first major breach of trust.
Fast backward to Super Bowl LIV, where, in spite of all the abovementioned hindrances, Jimmy G had (I want to say “taken the team to” but I honestly just can't) ridden in the front of the school bus next to the driver (Robert Saleh) and the teacher (Kyle Shanahan) all the way to The Big Game itself.
Even though I had watched the QB of my beloved team stumble through the playoffs behaving in his same old ways, knowing all along that he was probably not right for me, somehow the 49ers were about to go to The Super Bowl. All was forgiven I thought. That base beat of distrust was down at its lowest level and I was ready to have the fan~tragedy of Super Bowl XLVII’s final moments erased by a glorious victory that would rightfully usher in a new era of dominance by The Franchise.
Then came the crushing reality of Trust Loss #2. The 49ers had victory in its grasp and we fans were ready to party when Bad Jimmy overthrew Mr. Sanders on a missed open deep route that would have almost certainly sealed the game.
Yes, you can point to the deficiencies of Coach Kyle’s 4th quarter play calling (that’s another article entirely) as a reason why we lost. True, you can point to Mr. Sherman, bless his heart, being old, stiff and thus, slow. The pass rush was gone. Early Celebrations. Etc.
All of these elements played a part, but in the context of how I viewed Jimmy G, it was just another reason I knew I could not trust him to be what I and millions of other fans had so deeply hoped he could be, in spite of his past behaviors. We wanted so much to love him for being an actual champion versus a potential champion.
Thus these two elements: Poor Logic/Processing & Inability to be A Champion in The Big Moment, lost me my trust for Jimmy...and yet…
Just like a person who has accepted a cheater back into their arms, I was bound by the strange dynamic of a Sports Fan, to stay with Jimmy even after I had lost trust in him. While I no longer believed he could achieve what I had hoped for, I settled down into the drudgery of watching him play football in the bizzaro pandemic season of 2020. He promptly got injured again and it became this sort of numb place for me as a fan. Me and Jimmy were both just there, even though we both knew that there was no there there.
Thus we came to 2021 and we of course all know what happened with the draft and Trey Lance. It was discussed and streamed and tweeted about 'til all our eyes bled. Then, seemingly suddenly, after all the weeks of Jimmy just sitting in the skybox watching like me, just like that he was back on the field. I had, at this point, been hearing my base-beat-of-distrust for so long that it had woven itself into the numbness of how I viewed him. I thought, “Oh well...let’s see how it goes, you never know...”
I respected and understood the narrative that Trey was the future. After the franchise traded a fortune to get his replacement we fans were left wondering if Jimmy’s future would be as either a wholly disbelievable second coming of himself, or a Gucci back-up or at a minimum as a trade and cap-savings chess piece. So of course Jimmy was still on the team and though I didn’t trust in him, I, foolishly, allowed a flicker of hope to enter into my spirit.
“Maybe he HAS changed!” I said to myself. “Those times when he BROKE your trust were SOLONGAGO…”
Though he had let me down and showed me his true self, I still let myself believe he could be different. A cheater cheats and a Garoppolo...well...Garoppolos...which is to say gets your hopes up around football like Lucy, only to pull the ball and leave you like Charlie Brown. flailing through the air exclaiming “AAUGH!”
Then camp started and the reports of Jimmy’s play were not good. Things quickly degraded as I poured over both the daily “Jimmy vs Lance” reports and “The Good and The Not-so-Good” reports by SI publisher Grant Cohn. It didn’t take long for The Base Beat of Distrust to turn up as I processed the data provided and watched camp footage of a parade of INTs.
Feeling emotionally drained by it all, I joined heartily into the twitterfray to express my frustration. I made a GIF of race cars in a blowout race that showed Jimmy’s “Car” losing badly with the words “Le Sigh” above them and a COLTS logo on the bumper. (we cannot post the actual GIF due to copyright issues...so use your imagination and this handy copyright-fee image I made for you in lieu of the real thing)
Tweeple piled on in droves in both their shared ridicule and fervent enduring love for Jimmy G alike. Say what you will about his ability to throw downfield, the guy certainly Inspires Peeps to Feel All The Feels. Suffice to say, the content generated by Jimmy's performance in camp was enough to fill Levi’s stadium a few times over.
And yet…
NFL training camps are much truncated these days and the pre-season sprang quickly upon us. It was in the face of this last phase that I saddled up my hopes one final time for James Richard Garoppolo with the skewed logic of, “Well, maybe he just needs to be in an ‘Actual Game’ to finally shine.”
{Le Sigh}
We have all seen how it has gone. JG has shown us his worst self over two games thus far. It was like a smorgasbord of the things he does which demonstrate he is not deserving of our trust. I will not even stoop to enumerating them at this juncture. You all know what they are by now. Everyone does. Perhaps the most relevant groups being opposing defenses and their coordinators. As the saying goes, The Book is Out on Jimmy G and the story has been neither inspiring nor, truth be told, entertaining. The wasted games and dollars are strewn behind our franchise over a few-year period where frankly it would have been great to see him perform as advertised given the talent around him.
I have written in tweet form that I respect and understand if Jimmy G, a hyper-nice, super-handsome, ultra-millionaire is done with football. If he is, then who could ever blame him?
What rewards lie ahead for him by putting himself in the pathway of 285lb human wrecking balls with antelope speed and elephantine vengeance? He’s clearly not going to ascend to any record breaking heights. Does he need more millions? More adoration? Redemption for his mistakes? At what point is it all enough, especially to have escaped with such a great QB$R.
(QB$R is a little known metric that compares t=The Size of Bag Taken to The Number of Hits Taken)
So, while I do not trust Jimmy G anymore, and am for sure sports-breaking up with him, I do deeply admire him. He garners my esteem because weather he takes his poor-processing self to another franchise or sits on the bench with us this season or even starts in a few weeks and sets the world on fire, he has achieved far more than most humans on our Earth and done so while smiling and being a Nice Guy.
I’d like to think he tried his hardest and is just incapable, but in the end I would not blame him if he just gamed all of us for those millions and got out of NFL Dodge mostly unscathed.
As for this season and whatever role he ends up in with the 49ers, I know that no matter how well he plays for a given series or a game, I am not going to be Charlie Daze to his Lucyroppolo any more.
~Le Fin~
Denouement :
