SF 49ers: What if Patriots never traded Jimmy Garoppolo

With SF 49ers quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo returning to New England for the first time since being traded, Niner Noise asks what if the trade didn’t happen?

In sports, it’s fun to play the what-if game, something that fans of the SF 49ers are probably doing a lot of these days, starting on a dark day in Miami this past February.

For this particular exercise, the way-back machine will be put to even more prominent use, San Francisco’s trip to New England for a contest with the Patriots on Sunday has the talk turning to SF 49ers’ quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo, whom the team acquired from New England back in 2017.

Garoppolo was traded on Oct. 31, 2017 for a 2018 second-round draft pick, and SF 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan recently recalled working with Patriots head coach Bill Belichick on the trade was a “really fun” experience.

The quarterback would end up starting the Niners’ final five games of the season, closing out the year with a winning streak that pushed their final record to 6-10 and building up the hype machine heading into the 2018 season.

That year, of course, was almost immediately derailed by Garoppolo’s ACL tear.

The SF 49ers would eventually get to the Super Bowl and be contenders, but that would come the next year, with Garoppolo finishing his first full season as a starter. And while that year did not end how the Niners and their fans would have hoped, it was one of the better seasons in recent years for the franchise.

But the question at hand is what would have happened if Garoppolo had never been traded, which leaves a lot of dominoes to fall that didn’t and a whole new set to be set in place to topple over.