Kurtenbach: The 49ers failed their way into the right Jimmy Garoppolo decision

Call it a marriage of inconvenience.

But also call it the right decision for the 49ers and Jimmy Garoppolo.

The 49ers didn’t want Garoppolo to be on the team for this season. Head coach Kyle Shanahan and general manager John Lynch have made that abundantly clear over the last 18 months.

Garoppolo didn’t want to be new starting quarterback Trey Lance’s backup, either. That’s why he and his agent went searching for a trade and a team to make him their starting quarterback this past offseason.

But neither party was able to make happen what they wanted. No one wanted Garoppolo, and the 49ers didn’t want to lose him and receive nothing in return.

With both parties left empty-handed and lacking good options, they decided the best move was to stay together for one more year. Garoppolo and the 49ers agreed to a restructured contract that will keep the quarterback on the team’s roster — as Trey Lance’s backup — for one more season on Monday.

Yes, the 49ers botched their way into the prudent play — one that neither party likes.

The best kind of deals are the ones that everyone hates but the columnist loves, right?

The 49ers’ brass believes they have a Super Bowl-caliber team. I can’t disagree with them. That’s why keeping Garoppolo — now the best backup quarterback in the NFL — is a good move. It serves as quality insurance for this team’s potential, albeit with a hefty premium.

The role of overqualified backup is one that Lance held last season — one that Shanahan puzzlingly said he was drafted to fulfill this time last year. But having Lance on the roster, even as a backup, proved vital, as San Francisco would not have made the playoffs last year had the then-rookie not started and beaten Houston in Week 17.

I have my qualms with Garoppolo’s play. I still believe the Niners are justified in transitioning away from him to Lance as their starting quarterback. But if Lance — a running quarterback who picked up two different significant injuries last year — injures himself again in 2022, the 49ers need a quarterback who can be reasonably expected to lead them to victory, lest they torpedo this promising season.

Garoppolo can win games. I’ve been told as much a million times over by his fans.

Meanwhile, the 49ers’ first-pick alternatives at backup quarterback — Nate Sudfeld and Brock Purdy — do not have what it takes to save the 49ers’ season.

Put the money and the politics and the buffet tray’s worth of eggs on the face to the side. The 49ers are a better team because Garoppolo is still on the roster today.

Ok, now let’s get into the money and the politics and the embarrassment, because it’s hilarious that we’re here, in this situation, today.

Let’s start with the fact that neither you nor I should care about the money involved. Garoppolo will make less than his originally prescribed $20-something million this season, but even if he were on his original contract, keeping him would be the right move. The 49ers are flush with cash — enough to buy city council members and a whole Premier League soccer team — thanks to the NFL’s booming revenues and their effectively free stadium. Cutting Garoppolo wasn’t going to make beer at Levi’s Stadium reasonably priced. It was just saving billionaires a bit of cash and making the 49ers worse. The team can afford to pay him, and there are no salary cap issues. This was always a non-issue.

I don’t see a massive political issue, either. The notion that Lance might be “looking over his shoulder” this season will be perpetuated ad nauseam now that Garoppolo is officially the backup. Apparently, Garoppolo can singlehandedly ruin Lance’s promising career with his mere presence. It’s laughable. but even if Garoppolo was on another team, Lance would be compared to him after every game. In fact, by keeping Garoppolo on the 49ers roster and bench, the team makes it all the more difficult to compare the two quarterbacks — no one can say “well, Jimmy did X, Y, and Z this week”.

Lance has his head on straight. He’s smart enough to know he doesn’t need to worry about fans clamoring for a quarterback who had no suitors on the trade market and presumably as many on the open market (hence the hefty pay cut to stay with the Niners — he couldn’t get that kind of cash anywhere else). But San Francisco traded three first-round picks to land Lance. They’re all in on him. Garoppolo is only around because no one would take him off the 49ers’ hands and the team deemed the only thing worse than cutting him would be to keep Nate Sudfeld as the team’s backup quarterback this season.

And Garoppolo knows he needs to continue to be a good teammate to Lance this season — as he was last season, albeit in reversed roles — lest he pick up a bad reputation before he hits the open market next offseason.

If Garoppolo ever wants to be a clear-cut starter again, he certainly can’t afford to be known as a bad teammate.

But just because the 49ers made the right decision to keep Garoppolo doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be embarrassed by his saga.

They can try to spin it as “this was the plan all along,” now, but they have said the opposite frequently and publicly for months. Garoppolo himself said “it’s been a hell of a ride” in February.

Garoppolo hasn’t practiced or been in meetings with the team since the end of last season, despite him being cleared to play weeks ago. As of last week, he didn’t even have the 49ers’ playbook.

That’s not how you treat your backup quarterback.

No, the Niners believed until the very end that someone would trade for Garoppolo, despite the fact that their one firm trade offer for him came in April 2021 and was considered a lowball at the time.

By keeping Garoppolo all these months later, the Niners are still holding out hope that they can trade him. In part, this new contract is the Niners biding their time until the NFL’s trade deadline. Maybe they can move him by then. Worst-case scenario, they land a compensatory draft pick.

It’s a far cry from that first-round pick they wanted for him until his shoulder surgery in March.

And that’s why this saga is so embarrassing to the 49ers. It’s not in keeping Garoppolo as the backup. No, had that been the plan all along, that would only have affected Garoppolo’s ego.

No, it was in telling everyone their plan, being rebuffed by the market, and then not softening their stance at all. It undercuts their credibility as an organization, even though the end product of this fiasco improved their team for this season.

The Niners might have a more-than-capable backup quarterback now — something they needed but effectively lacked a day ago — but their inability to move on from Garoppolo begs the question:

They can botch this portion of their grand quarterback plan, what’s to say they won’t botch the portion that involves turning Lance into the star quarterback they envisioned him to be?

Sports columnist Dieter Kurtenbach analyzes the amazing and roasts the absurd in the world of sports for the Bay Area News Group. He was previously a national sports columnist for Fox Sports and a staff writer at the South Florida Sun Sentinel. He can also be heard on KNBR (104.5-FM, 680-AM).