New England Patriots: Do Not Trade Jimmy Garoppolo

The New England Patriots extended Tom Brady’s contract, and everyone wants to trade Jimmy Garoppolo to stock up on draft picks. Here’s why they need to keep Garoppolo instead.

Leave it to the salary-cap-crunched Patriots extending Tom Brady till 2019 to free up cap space to kick the “Is it time to trade Jimmy Garoppolo?” sled down the black diamond slope at Sugarloaf at full speed.

In 2014, it was “Trade Brady, sell high!”, now it’s “Trade Jimmy, we got Brady locked up and no first-rounder, get more picks!”. It never ends.

Jimmy’s been on the Patriots for two years now, and immediately after Brady’s extension got announced, sports talk universe blew up into a Flaming Dr. Pepper of TRADE JIMMY G:

Boston Herald: “So, what do the Patriots do with Jimmy Garoppolo now?”

NESN: “Jimmy Garoppolo Trade Should Be Explored”

NFL.com: “Should first-round-pick-less Pats trade Garoppolo?”

(Some jagoff at NFL HQ had to be laughing to himself writing that one. “Ha ha ha, the Patriots don’t have a first round pick, I’m so clever. Oh, there’s the microwave timer, my Hot Pockets are done!”)

NFL Spin Zone: “What Can the Patriots Expect in a Jimmy Garoppolo Trade?”

ESPN: “Jimmy Garoppolo’s future on the mind after Tom Brady extension”

The TL;DR version of all of these Flaming Cheetos hot takes is that the Patriots could probably get a second or third-round pick for Jimmy, or potentially a combo of late-round picks like a fifth and a seventh, or a third this year and a fifth next year, or pretty much any Chex-mix combination of picks your heart desires. The specifics aren’t that important because the point in every scenario is the exact same – get as much for Jimmy Garoppolo in a trade as possible, because his contract runs out before Brady’s does and he’ll want to start somewhere else anyway by then.

This is a stupid idea.

For several reasons.

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First of all, everyone remembers what the Patriots had to spend to draft Garoppolo in the first place – a second-round pick in 2014. Flipping him for picks would make sense if the Patriots had, say, Titan-sized holes in their roster and needed to spin the Roullette wheel that is the draft as many times as possible and hopefully get lucky.

But they don’t. Quite the opposite, actually. The Patriots are so stacked that their BIG NAME free agents are LeGarrette Blount and defensive tackle Akiem Hicks. Last year, they franchise-tagged their kicker. New England is the last team that should be making a desperation move to get more late-round picks in hopes that they get a game-changing starter after the third or fourth round. Cause THAT happens all the time. Sure, plenty of great football players get drafted late, but hoping you hit a royal flush on a fifth-rounder isn’t exactly a sustainable strategy.

Second: put simply, Tom Brady got the tar knocked out of him this year. Yes, the offensive line was a dumpster fire. Yes, Julian Edelman and Danny Amendola both got hurt. Yes, Sebastian Vollmer had to play left tackle. Make whatever excuse you want.

Tom Brady got sacked 38 times in 2015, and that was just in the regular season. That also doesn’t count quarterback hits and knockdowns. In the AFC Championship game alone, Brady got hit 23 times, according to ESPN Stats & Info.

You’re not going to want to hear this, but the offensive line ain’t going to fix itself in one offseason, even with Dante Scarnecchia coming back as an o-line coach.

Brady’s toughness and pain tolerance are almost as legendary as his arm – in his Burn the World Down 2007 season, he spent nights in an air cast and suited up the next weekend anyway – but good grief, with all the shots he’s taking lately, staying healthy through the regular season and his annual playoff runs aren’t a guarantee, they’re a freaking blessing. And, god forbid, something should happen to him – like it did in the first quarter of the first game of 2008 – if Jimmy’s not on the roster, who is?

Ryan Lindley, last year’s backup-backup quarterback who might hold the record for worst playoff game ever with the Arizona Cardinals? Matt Cassell? Matt Flynn? Ryan Mallett?

Tim F’ing Tebow??

Please. Not only did Jimmy Garoppolo tear it up in the preseason this year, but according to Bill Belichick, he’s also gotten way better since then. No, really. Here’s what he told WEEI in January 2016:

"“I think Jimmy has made great strides for us this season,” Belichick said on Tuesday’s conference call. “The reps that he’s gotten on the field in preseason games and in practice, I think he’s shown a lot of development — better understanding, quicker recognition and reading of the defenses, more awareness of what’s happening on the defensive side of the ball, better communication, better understanding of the offense, better understanding of the defense — really everything.“I think we see it on a daily basis from Jimmy. He’s a hard-working kid who’s always prepared. It’s a tough position to be in when you don’t know if you’re going to play or not, but he prepares hard to play, we push him hard to be ready to play, and he’s made a lot of progress this year. As a football player I think everybody has a lot of confidence in him based on the opportunities that he’s had to show what he can do and how he’s working.”"

Hmmmm. It’s almost as if Jimbo has all the tools he needs to be a great quarterback, and the development time he’s getting is resulting in him taking his raw college abilities and getting better and better at the X’s and O’s part of the game at the pro level. Crazy, right?

The last reason a Jimmy G trade is silly is a bit more nebulous, a bit more intangible (football guys LOVE intangibles, right?), and a bit more, well, mostly guessing:

The Patriots know things about Garoppolo that we don’t. Good things, presumably.

Stick with me here. What did everyone say when the Patriots took him in the 2014 draft with the 62^nd overall pick?

It was a reach, right? CBS’s Pete Prisco, the Guy Fieri of HOT SPORTZ TAKES, called it a “weird choice by the Patriots”. SB Nation called the pick was a “potential bust” and said the Patriots had “plenty of needs to address other than quarterback”, and, to throw a habenero in your burrito, concluded that “New England would still be looking for Tom Brady’s successor in a few years”. ESPN Boston’s Mike Reiss, who normally assumes Belichick is playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers, asked “Is it too early to be thinking quarterback in the draft?”

We already know Garoppolo’s quick release time, pocket movement, and tight mechanics – which were good enough that USA Today compared him to Dan Marino – were his calling cards in the draft.

Pump the brakes. A quick release, ability to move around in the pocket, keeping his feet lined up with his throwing motion…that sounds a bit familiar, doesn’t it? If we were playing “Guess that quarterback”, that’s a dead ringer for Tom Brady, right? Of course it is. Those skills are what makes the Pats offense crank out touchdowns like everyone has “How many touchdowns is enough? MORE!” written in their lockers.

So given that we, the Joe Blows of the world, know all that, and if Bill Belichick liked the kid enough to draft him way before anyone thought he should’ve been picked, and says Jimmy’s making great progress compared to where he was last year, what does that tell you?

It seems weird to say that Jimmy G’s body of work speaks for itself, but we’ve literally never heard a single bad thing about him since he was drafted. He gets all kinds of compliments on his scout team work, Belichick and McDaniels are always talking about what a hard worker he is, and, well, there’s the whole part where the Patriots trust him to run the ship if the four-time Super Bowl champ TB12 goes down.

You know what happens when you don’t have a capable backup QB? You become the 2015 Baltimore Ravens, the 2015 Dallas Cowboys, or the Cleveland Browns for the past 20 years.

Ok, that was a low blow, but you get the idea.

And people – smart people – legitimately want to trade Jimmy for a second or third-round pick so the Patriots can roll the dice in the draft and maybe – MAYBE – get another starting-caliber player out of it.

Next: On the flip side, should the Pats trade Jimmy G?

Unless someone comes in with a shut-up-and-take-my-money trade offer that just blows Robert Kraft’s doors off, whether it’s a player, multiple players, multiple early-round picks, or some combination of all of those, the Pats need to keep Jimmy Garoppolo in New England.

Plus, we’ve barely even learned how to spell Jimmy’s last name right yet.

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