For a hot minute this offseason it looked like Jimmy Garoppolo was going to ride off quietly. No press conference, no farewell tour, just a 34-year-old quarterback with a Super Bowl start on his resume deciding he was done. Then, just as fast, the door cracked back open.
The report that reset the entire Garoppolo storyline in one tweet.
Per Mike Garafolo, Garoppolo is open to playing this season in the right situation after briefly considering hanging it up. That's a meaningful walk-back. Retirement talk from a guy with 82 career games and a Super Bowl appearance doesn't get floated casually, and neither does un-retirement talk. Somewhere between those two headlines, Jimmy clearly did some soul-searching and landed on "not yet."
Context matters here. Garoppolo spent the last two seasons as Matthew Stafford's backup with the Rams, a role he was reportedly the top option to reprise for 2026 before the retirement chatter surfaced. He's no stranger to that division rivalry either — during his 2017-22 run with the 49ers, he went a perfect 8-0 as a starter against Los Angeles, which made his pivot to holding a clipboard for the Rams one of the stranger late-career turns in recent memory.
It's easy to forget how good peak Garoppolo actually was. He won 38 games as a starter, took San Francisco to a Super Bowl and two NFC title games, and for a stretch was considered a top-10 quarterback when healthy. The injuries and the Trey Lance experiment ended that chapter, and a rough one-year stop in Las Vegas didn't help his stock either. Still, a guy with his track record being 'open' rather than fully retired is enough to put him back on teams' radars.
The Rams, for their part, have been in no rush to push him out the door. They've made clear they'd welcome a reunion but aren't going to force a decision on a guy who might genuinely be ready to move on. That's the situation as it stands: no signed deal, no firm commitment, just a veteran quarterback who briefly stared down the exit and decided to leave it cracked open instead.