Jimmy Garoppolo, The 2024 Election, And How I Learned To Watch The Game

For a while there, the computers had tricked us into believing Jimmy Garoppolo was good. 

Not just good, but great. Elite, you might say. The computers told NFL analytics nerds every which way that Garoppolo, as the quarterback for the 49ers from 2017 to 2022, was as good or better than any other NFL quarterback. CPOE (completion percentage over expected) told us so. EPA (expected points added) told us so. AY/A (adjusted yards per attempt) told us so. The machine insisted with a clear voice: Jimmy G is elite. 

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A funny thing happened when one would pry one’s eyes from the data the machines were pumping out and actually watched Garoppolo play in the excellent, always-efficient Niners offense, as conducted by head coach Kyle Shanahan and his button-pushing offensive scheme. You’d watch a quarterback who never, ever completed a tough, tight-window throw, a guy who would fold like a broken lawn chair if he so much as smelled pressure in the pocket, a signal caller who could not create a single play outside the painstakingly-crafted Shanahan system’s structure.

If a play did not unfold exactly as Shanahan had scripted it, Garoppolo would instantly become the worst quarterback you’d ever seen. You’d watch a handful of drop backs from Garoppolo, and you’d look back at your spreadsheets and charts and graphs and whatnot and you’d call them a liar. This guy sucked. What the fuck was the computer talking about with this Elite Jimmy horseshit? 

I’m a football analytics enthusiast to my core. It excites me to know and learn about how offenses can hack the game I enjoy, how they can use math to manipulate and exploit opponents. I root for NFL teams most committed to analytics. I defend analytics-guided head coaches with a religious fervor that, in hindsight, is a touch embarrassing. So it hurts my heart to admit that there might be something to watching the game. How else would we have known that Jimmy Garoppolo, while incredibly handsome, was a hideously bad quarterback? The computers said he was Joe Montana. 

My priors were confirmed the second Garoppolo left San Fransisco for the Las Vegas Raiders in 2023. He instantly became one of the NFL's three or four worst quarterbacks. The computers have never known such a defeat.

Sometimes I’ll post online about how the computer says some clearly terrible quarterback is actually as good as Patrick Mahomes, perhaps the greatest QB to ever play the game. I do this because I find the measurement of quarterback success to be a fascinating if fickle thing, and as a reminder to myself that there is value in shutting the laptop, turning on the TV, and watching a guy play the most important position in sports. Daniel Jones is not Patrick Mahomes, I know that. The computer does not. 

I Am Begging You To Watch The Game

My friend and NBC Sports colleague Patrick Daugherty wrote last week about the overwhelming consensus that the 2024 presidential election is a so-called coinflip race. There’s no way to know if Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will be president. It’s destined, the election modelers say in one voice, to come down to 300 weirdo “swing” voters who start and end their electoral consideration by googling “Trump economy” and “Kamala abortion” 45 minutes before heading to their local polling place on Election Day. 

And yeah, it certainly seems that the computers – whirring away with all manner of modeling meant to drill down into What’s Really Happening in the U.S. electorate – say this thing will be tight, just as the 2020 election was tight. No matter what happens in this race – lopsided debates, assassination attempts, Harris getting the endorsement of the entire 1990s GOP, Trump calling for The Purge – it remains 48% to 47%, or some variation of it. 

Peel your eyes away from the computer screen showing a two-point swing toward Trump among men in Michigan with some college education who were born under a full moon between October and December and you might encounter a different reality -- one in which one candidate is behaving like the favorite and the other is thrashing around like me when I get a calf cramp in the middle of the night. 

One candidate, after securing and firing up the base with some of the best campaigning of my lifetime, seems to have pivoted toward undecided voters and possibly some Republicans who are so repulsed by Trump and his open embrace of fascism that they might consider the unthinkable: Casting a vote for a Democrat (I don’t love Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney but I can report the normies love the shit out of it). We get snippets of data showing a big old chunk of voters in swing states say they support Trump’s policies but can’t stand his demeanor, and are therefore undecided or wasting their vote on a third-party candidate.

Trump’s opponent this time is on pace to win among white voters with a college degree by margins never before seen by a Democratic presidential nominee – a trend that should ease the minds of those still (understandably) traumatized by election night 2016. 

The other candidate is returning to the site of his first assassination attempt in an effort to get people (young men specifically) excited about his reaction to the attempt in which he urged his followers to fight while blood trickled from his scraped ear. One candidate is campaigning with pro-democracy Republicans while the other is campaigning with one of the most nakedly evil men alive today – a man who fittingly claims to represent Dark MAGA – as a wink-wink promise of the blood to come. 

The American public now sees two distinct options: A sharp, determined, joyful woman who appeals to normies with a pledge to be president for everyone, and a rambling, deranged sociopathic game show host whose mental decline has become so noticeable that even The New York Times – which has done everything in its power to keep this race tight – was forced to give him the Biden treatment and finally ask if he is simply too old to be president. 

We have one candidate taking in obscene sums of money month after month from both megadonors – living blights on a functional democracy, no doubt – and regular folks chipping in to beat the Bad Man one more time. This candidate, the one swimming in oceans of cash and peppering the airwaves with ads reminding voters of how unrepentantly vile her opponent is, has a real-deal get out the vote apparatus operating in the most crucial parts of the nation’s seven true swing states. The other candidate has pulled the plug on get out the vote efforts and farmed it out to fellow grifters who are for some reason operating in the bluest states in the union. This candidate has instead chosen to challenge any and all election results in swing states, also known as stealing the election and overthrowing the United States government. 

There’s other data that’s slipping below the so-called coin flip polling from media outlets that need a razor-close contest for business purposes. In Florida, a state that should not even enter the Trump campaign’s collective mind at this stage in the race, is within two points. Florida, of course, is one of a handful of states with abortion rights on the ballot, and as we’ve seen time and again, voters turn out when it’s time to beat back inhumane abortion laws pushed by conservatives who think of little else but controlling women’s fertility. While I understand that many Republicans might say yes to the pro-choice ballot measure before casting a vote for Trump, there’s no question that the issue of abortion access is a boon for Harris in a state that is usually irretrievably red (And yes, I'm aware of Nate Cohn of The New York Times insisting Trump has a 13-point lead in Florida when every single poll over the past three weeks has shown the race between one and four points. Cohn, a big "red wave" guy in 2022, says his poll is an outlier because NYT is the only entity on earth that conducts polling correctly).

It goes well beyond Florida though. The race is within four points in Iowa after Trump led by 12 as recently as March. Harris has the edge in North Carolina, where the Republican gubernatorial candidate’s tough-to-explain-to-the-children past could be an anchor around Trump’s neck in a must-win state. Harris has stretched the lead to somewhere around eight points in Nebraska’s second district while an independent candidate is leading the incumbent Nebraska Republican senator. 

We have one candidate selling gold watches and cryptocurrency and sneakers and shit I’m sure I haven’t even seen in a last-ditch effort to squeeze the grift dry, to drain his frothing congregation of every last dime before the whole thing collapses on itself. The other candidate is doing her job as vice president while hustling to create a Coalition of Normies that can deliver the final blow to this particular form of the fascist menace. 

One candidate has packed stadiums full of cheering throngs; the other is conducting a gaslighting campaign about his sparse rallies, saying the people filing out of the venue in the middle of the rally aren't actually leaving the rally. But they are, because they are Americans, and they're bored in Season Nine of this fascist clown show.

Which of these candidates seems to be in command? Don’t ask the computer. Be honest with yourself about what you see. Watch the damn game. 

Watching the Game, However Begrudgingly

I published my first football article in July 2011. Since that time – a long time now – I have had roughly the population of Rhode Island tell me online to watch the fucking game, nerd.

I've gotten mad online more than a few times over this insistence to watch the game. Humans are such fallible creatures with unshakeable biases and predetermined notions of what is and what should be, making us unfit in some sense to evaluate who is playing a game right or wrong. I am endlessly intrigued by advanced statistics, as measured by football data companies, and what they say is really happening on the football field every Sunday. My humble human brain cannot determine the efficiency of a runner or the (true) accuracy of a quarterback or the speed of a receiver. Can say, oh hey, that quarterback throws a nice ball or that receivers is fucking fast as shit, but to quantify these things is endlessly fascinating and, I think, revealing.

So when a dude shouts me down and tells me to watch a game, I see hubris. Sometimes I see proud and aggressive ignorance – a person who does not know what they do not know. There's also the demeanor of the Watch The Game crowd: They are mostly belligerent men with the worst politics you've ever seen, they are dismissive of all intellectual pursuits, and they love more than anything to gatekeep the game they supposedly love. Any tool, any algorithm or measurement that could allow anyone to better understand football represents a threat to their gatekeeping. They need those gates to stay shut if they are to feel special. Only they can know what's really going on because, after all, they played two years of junior varsity football. This prodding from anti-analytics bros left me no choice but to create an ongoing bit in which I insist I've never watched a game.

Watch The Game types aren't exclusively cavepeople though. There are thoughtful, knowledgable, humble folks in the business of football analysis who also suggest unplugging from the spreadsheets and seeing what you see on the TV. It's these people – those who know that there are things about football that they do not know – who have shaken me from my formerly unbreakable stance that the only way to analyze football was through the filter of the omnipotent machine. It's these folks who often blend data with what they're seeing on the field, a reasonable concession to the computers, which pick up data points that no human ever could. What I've learned – through much consternation and stubbornness – is that the computers can steer you wrong if you make the choice to not trust what you are seeing with your own eyes.

Things could change drastically over the final weeks of the 2024 presidential race. Never-before-seen storms and overseas wars could throw one final wrench into an electoral season that has zigzagged more than any in living memory. Maybe the game will look worse for Harris in the closing days of her campaign; I'm not discounting that.

For now, I would urge folks to turn on the game and grind the film. Don't let the computer tell you Jimmy Garoppolo is elite.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social and on Threads at @CDCarter13.