The phone call from Kyle Shanahan came March 26. The coach told Jimmy Garoppolo the 49ers were trading up in the draft to take a quarterback -- Garoppolo’s replacement.
Garoppolo didn’t know what to think, he said Tuesday. He hints he briefly thought of requesting a trade.
“When it initially happened, there’s a million emotions that go on throughout your head, and you think of all the possible scenarios and things like that,” Garoppolo said, via Matt Maiocco of NBCSportsBayArea.com. “But at the end of the day, I want to play football. I want to go out there and win games. That’s what I do. And so it wasn’t anything too crazy. It took a little while to process everything. But once I did, it was just, ‘Go out there and ball.’ You got to go out and attack it. The NFL is a crazy business. Things happen, but you have to attack it day by day and make the best of it.”
High-ankle sprains limited Garoppolo to six games last season. He has missed 23 games since the 49ers made him their full-time starter.
Now, for the first time since the 49ers traded for him, Garoppolo isn’t the man. The 49ers didn’t draft Trey Lance third overall to sit him for long.
Despite the uncertainty about his future, Garoppolo vows to “keep pushing.” He took all the first-team reps in the team’s organized team activities Tuesday.
“Being in the NFL for as long as I have, you kind of get used to it,” Garoppolo said of criticism. “It kind of comes with the job. It’s one of those things that it keeps pushing you, though.
“When you hear those critiques and you hear those little things out there, it pushes you to take your game to the next level. We’re all competitors out there. We all want to go [play] the perfect game, and at the end of the day, that’s what we’re trying to do. I’ll keep pushing myself.”
