Jimmy Garoppolo wasn’t awful, which means he was just fine
COMMENTARY
No Rob Gronkowski.
No Julian Edelman.
No Danny Amendola, or even Dion Lewis.
If Tom Brady went 11-of-18 for 168 yards and a 91.9 quarterback rating with the crew Jimmy Garoppolo was dealt Thursday night, the usual fawning would run its regular course.
Still, the reviews are in: A mixed bag. Average. Workmanlike. Mostly solid. Unspectacular.
Unspectacular.
If Brady had Aaron Dobson to throw to in lieu of Edelman, he might have been “unspectacular” as well.
“You never know who you’re going to get in the preseason, that’s just how it is around here,” Garoppolo said after the New England Patriots’ 34-22 win over the New Orleans Saints in the first preseason action of 2016 at Gillette Stadium. “But we do a great job at practice of mixing and matching all the guys. You get a little bit of experience with everybody and I think everybody came out to play today. It was a pretty good result.”
It was.
Garoppolo overcame a slow start and, really, had a solid exhibition debut for the Patriots, the team for whom he’ll start the first four games of the regular season with Brady sent to sit in the corner for some reason or another. He found new tight end Martellus Bennett three times for 33 yards. He had a good rhythm going with rookie Malcolm Mitchell before the wide receiver went down with a gruesome elbow injury toward the end of the first half. In his most impressive play, Garoppolo escaped a New Orleans rush long enough to laser a pass to running back James White, who used some solid blocking to scamper 56 yards to the one-yard line.
He didn’t throw a touchdown pass. More importantly, he didn’t turn the ball over.
No, he wasn’t spectacular. He was good though.
Better than he’s seemingly getting credit.
“I think I’m working in the right direction,” Garoppolo said. “I said earlier this week, there’s plenty of things I could work on, little things here and there. That’s just part of being a quarterback. There are a lot of little things here and there and you want to be the best at your craft.”
If it’s somewhat ludicrous to make any semblance of snap-judgement about a quarterback’s performance in the first game of the preseason, doing so on Garoppolo without the Patriots’ normal arsenal of weapons is just as foolish an exercise.
“I was just trying to get open as much as I could,” Bennett said. “I don’t know if he was looking for me or whatever, but I was just trying to get open, help make plays for him and do my job. He’s doing a great job with just finding whoever is open. I don’t know if it’s anything more than that.”
Does it have to be?
Garoppolo played the entire first half, knowing before the game that he’d be without Gronkowski, Edelman, and Amendola, all sitting out the first action of August. Brady wasn’t even in the building Thursday night, excused by the team to handle a death in the family. Garoppolo didn’t take over the game, nor was he expected to. He reacted well in escaping a handful of tight situations, most notably on the pass to White.
Head coach Bill Belichick, for one, sounded extremely impressed with the performance of the kid who will lead his team during the regular season’s first month.
“There are a lot of people out there,” Belichick said. “I don’t want to try and make an evaluation without really looking at it.”
Feel the love.
Garoppolo didn’t do anything to make the segment of Patriots fans who believe there’s a 4-0 start to the season any more ferocious in their beliefs. Likewise, he didn’t look inexperienced enough to earn the “Jimmy G, 1-3” nickname that New England detractors would love to stick on him. He helped drive the Patriots to a first-half lead over the Saints and their secondary defensive unit.
What more could he have done to have the masses saluting his every step? Or at least those for those out there who summed his performance up as “unspectacular.”
“We started a little slow which you never want to do, but it was just kind of everyone as a whole. I think we reacted well to the slow start,” Garoppolo said. “You’re not going to always start the right way and it’s just how you react to that. It was a good experience tonight just being put in a difficult situation and then just seeing how the guys responded, how everyone responded. I think we reacted in the right way.”
Nothing spectacular.
Nothing to complain about either.
Photos from the Patriots’ preseason opener
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