Jimmy Garoppolo came just over six minutes away from leading the San Francisco 49ers to a win over the Kansas Chiefs in Super Bowl 54 a few months ago.
He didn’t, of course, as Patrick Mahomes pulled off a great comeback to lead Kansas City to its first ever title, but Jimmy G did come pretty darn close.
The 49ers star QB then had to spend a few weeks of the offseason hearing about Tom Brady rumors and hearing a lot of chatter about how Garoppolo isn’t the guy to lead the 49ers to championships.
George Kittle, who is one of Jimmy G’s favorite targets, is tired of hearing that noise and provided a perfect defense of his QB on Tuesday’s episode of “First Take” on ESPN.
Stephen A. Smith brought up something about how other players on the 49ers come up in his mind before the QB, to which Kittle said:
He said:
“How is that his fault? It’s not his fault he’s on a good team with really good football players and a great head coach. He got us to the Super Bowl, so that’s what I’m saying. It’s not his fault he has Nick Bosa, he has five first-round D-linemen, he has Richard Sherman in the secondary. That’s not his fault. He goes out there and he performs week in, week out. Like I said, leads the league in third-down percentage. He makes throws. He won us two games versus Arizona. He won us the Rams game at the end of the game. He won a shootout with Drew Brees, who, in my opinion, is one of the best quarterbacks to do it. I mean, he shows up every single week.”
That’s Kittle’s quarterback.
