Kyle Shanahan is not the type who tries to sweeten a bitter situation: The 49ers coach acknowledged Monday it was difficult waking up knowing his team would be without the quarterback around whom his offense revolves and on whom the 49ers’ lofty 2018 expectations were built.
A late-morning MRI confirmed what he and the 49ers feared a day earlier, that Jimmy Garoppolo tore his ACL in the fourth quarter in Kansas City and that the $137.5 million passer wouldn’t be back in uniform again until some time during the 2019 offseason.
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“We were down, disappointed about it,” Shanahan said. “Because we were looking forward — a lot — to playing with Jimmy this year and going through the good and the bad that would happen. We would benefit from all of it. Now we don’t get to do that.”
There was, at least, one measure of good news in that it appears that only Garoppolo’s ACL was impacted.
Shanahan said that, as far as doctors can tell now, Jimmy Garoppolo’s knee injury is limited to his ACL. He said the surgery may reveal something else, but as of now it looks like the ACL only.
— Matt Barrows (@mattbarrows) September 24, 2018
In the NFL, however, there’s no time to feel bad about your rotten fortunes. Shanahan and the 49ers on Monday also began preparing for life without Garoppolo, including readying backup C.J. Beathard to be the starter and bulking up the team’s quarterback corps.
He said Nick Mullens would be brought up from the practice squad to serve as the No. 2 quarterback for Sunday’s game against the Los Angeles Chargers. The team also will host a number of older, backup-type passers in Santa Clara on Tuesday, a group that includes Tom Savage, Kellen Clemens, T.J. Yates and perhaps Matt Moore, 34, who has started 30 games over the last decade for the Carolina Panthers and Miami Dolphins. Shanahan said Moore had been invited to workout; He was not certain as of Monday afternoon where he had accepted.
Shanahan also was asked about former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who has not been on an NFL roster since Shanahan and general manager John Lynch informed him in March of 2017 that they planned to release him. Kaepernick has filed a grievance against the league — one alleging that teams have colluded to keep him from playing — that is ongoing.
“I made that decision (last year) because of the style of offense we wanted to go with,” Shanahan said. “That’s kind of what I said last year. It’s the same situation now. I always look into what style of offense I want to do, what style of offense we’ve been doing for the last two years.
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“… C.J.’s our guy and we have Nick Mullens backing him up,” he said. “When you get into a third or fourth guy, whoever that is, you’d like to bring in guys who you felt you didn’t have to change much of your offense for.”
The 49ers used a third-round pick last year on Beathard, who gave the offense a kick when he replaced veteran Brian Hoyer in Week 6. A few weeks later, however, it was Beathard who was being supplanted — by Garoppolo — and it was immediately apparent that the newcomer’s quick decision making and improvisational skills were superior to the rookie’s.
Beathard completed 54.9 percent of his passes during his five starts while absorbing 19 sacks and countless other hits in the process. That drew admiration from coaches and teammates — “C.J.’s as tough and fearless as any quarterback I’ve been around,” Shanahan said Monday — but also a realization that he had to process information faster and let go of the ball more quickly than he did in 2017.
He looked sharper in practices during his second offseason but was merely ordinary in the preseason when he completed 27 of 45 passes with one interception and two sacks.
“We’ll see,” Shanahan said when asked how Beathard has progressed in getting the ball out of his hands. “I think he’s done a pretty good job in practice. I kind of think he always has. … (But) you don’t get hit or sacked in practice, so we’ll see as things go. But I think that experience, everything he went through last year, when it was good and bad, he learned from it.”
As for Garoppolo, Shanahan said the quarterback was as downcast as one would expect given his diagnosis.
He suffered the injury at the end of a 13-yard scramble in the fourth quarter Sunday as the 49ers were trying to mount a second-half comeback. Instead of running out of bounds on a third-and-20 play, he decided to drive upfield for more yards and take on Chiefs cornerback Steven Nelson. When the quarterback planted his left foot to make the move to stay in bounds, however, his knee buckled and he had no power when, a split-second later, he encountered Nelson.
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Garoppolo was a linebacker as a youth player, and during an interview last month he said the reversed role — becoming the one who gets hit instead of the other way around — was one of the hardest things to accept when he switched to quarterback midway through high school.
“It’s different because you don’t hit anybody,” he said. “You just take hits. Whereas on defense, you can hit or be hit. And quarterback’s really the only position where you’re like that. I don’t know, that was a weird thing for me to accept at first, I guess.”
Garoppolo was attempting an exception to that rule when he got hurt Sunday, and his teammates seemed to have no issue with the decision.
“Jimmy was just being a ballplayer and trying to make a play,” tackle Joe Staley said. “He wasn’t running out of bounds. He was trying to get some extra yards for his team. It’s just one of those things.”
Shanahan, of course, had a different take and noted there’s a reason coaches harp on quarterbacks to safely run out of bounds.
“I think that’s something that Jimmy will probably look at differently going forward because I know he’ll remember it for the rest of his life,” Shanahan said. “And nothing against him. It happens to everyone. Like I said, you see it every Sunday. And it’s just a reminder to everyone why it is such an obvious coaching point and why you need to stick with it.”
He said that Garoppolo will continue to make progress this season by sitting in meetings and watching games from the sideline but that the gains won’t be as great as if he were on the field.
“I think it will make us that more hungry next year,” he said. “And there’s not a doubt in my mind that he’ll come back and be the exact same guy.”
— Reported from Santa Clara
(Top photo: Peter Aiken/Getty Images)