Green stink lines

Four seconds for the last four: 49ers and Jimmy G in a play-off smell test

Written by: Moxcowhite • Daniel Chapman
Artwork by: Eamonn Dalton
Some guys in pads and helmets with their special egg, no idea what they're doing

I keep pointing to Leeds United’s stressful relationship with play-offs as a guide to how post-season is going in Santa Clara, California, the near-enough home of our near-enough owners’ other club, San Francisco 49ers. The one crucial difference is that the Nine Guys keep winning and that’s not been the Peacocks’ experience.

There has been quite a turnaround in California. Just a couple of months ago that big bowl in the sun, Levi’s Stadium, was rolling into the record books with one of the worst statistical home records of any gridiron team ever. The 49ers couldn’t ever win there, except against the Los Angeles Rams, and fans and pundits were done. The 49ers had drafted a new quarterback, cool young Trey Lance, to replace boring old Jimmy Garoppolo, but head coach Kyle Shanahan kept backing his loser, and General Manager John Lynch kept backing him, and so far as many were concerned the whole lot, from Jed York in the CEO suite on down, could walk out into the Santa Clara desert and not come back. Or go run Leeds, much the same. That all changed as last minute heroics took the Niners into the post-season wildcard play-off match, and more of the same got them through that into last weekend’s divisional play-off with top seeds Green Bay Packers.

After years of hearing the club’s name and thinking, maybe Green Bay is just a generic place they’ve made up for the football team because I’ve never heard of anything else from there, today I have looked at Wikipedia and can confirm it is a real place. Green Bay is in Wisconsin up in the north-east near Canada, named by French settlers who originally called it La Baie des Puants, or the Bay of Stinking Waters, later shortened to Green Bay because that was the colour of those same honking pools. It’s the county seat of Brown County and I’m not going to look up why that is so named.

Meanwhile in American rugby, once a neggy narrative sets in, even good results have to work overtime to shift it. The misery of Garoppolo was inescapable through the first three quarters of the game, because if he wasn’t letting himself be tackled, he was dodging away from attempts to bring him down and then throwing stupid passes straight to the Packers anyway. If Garoppolo has one thing going for him, it’s that he’s very handsome, with teeth you could mint as NFTs and dimples that would disrupt a post-yoga brunch, but his pretty face only makes him look more pathetic when he’s flailing sadly on the ground beneath a pile of Packers. While his Green Bay counterpart, potential most valuable player of the season Aaron Rodgers, zinged the ball into his receivers’ paws and put his side 7-0 up, you might have wondered if the 49ers could benefit from the lairy confidence of this grungier guy, until you read about how Rodgers claimed to be ‘immunised’ from Covid-19 at the start of the season, was eventually forced to admit that this was not the same as being vaccinated and he’d been breaking NFL regulations all year, and claimed his stance — something he hadn’t told anyone about until he was caught — was his way of standing up (silently) for ordinary people who don’t want to take the vaccine. He said he’d spoken to a lot of doctors about it, citing Joe Rogan. Maybe let’s stick with Garoppolo.

That started to look a better idea in the fourth quarter. Shanahan remained blissfully unaware of the ‘get Joffy on!’ style campaigning for cool young Trey Lance on Twitter. The Packers’ special team — the guys who come on and do set-plays and go away again, which is apparently a real job — started doing stupid stuff like letting field goal attempts be blocked. And, crucially, it started snowing. It was time for some good old fashioned pathetic fallacy and while Rodgers went naked on the heath, it was Jimmy Garoppolo dragging a sled of brandy like a rescue husky through the blizzard. The teams had got a field goal each in the third quarter, so the Algae All-Stars now led 10-3, and Jimmy G kept pushing his Cali Daisies slowly up the ice-patch pitch, my fave Deebo Samuel getting involved by carrying the ball up the yards on his gap-exploiting runs. They were persisting but not succeeding in scoring. With just under five minutes left, the Niners defence had done some pushing back of the Packers, forcing their special team to come on and punt, and after being blocked on a field goal these one-job dopes did it again. Their attempted kick downfield smacked the hand of a Niner, Jordan Willis, who sent the ball high up in the air where it could have been anywhere. All these guys were wearing helmets, and it was snowing, so it was no wonder it took a while for anyone to work out where the ball had gone. But when it occurred to Talanoa Hufanga, the 49ers’ no.29, he picked it up off the ground and ran it over the line for a touchdown. The conversion was good, the score was 10-10!

Stinkers had the ball with four-and-a-half minutes left, and in a minute Rodgers failed with a long throw up the middle, ran out of tries, and the ball was kicked back to the San Franshiverers. Garoppolo wasn’t trying any of that spectacular Rodgers stuff: he’d turned as ugly as his genes would allow, directing a team that was tuning in with him and his chaotic harmonics. Jimmy G’s mistakes, all season, all career, all through this game, are now so commonplace that his teammates just go with the flow when his errors send the game against them. Half the squad, Garoppolo included, was playing injured and against expectations, and they say now that their rotten start to the season was the making of the late winning plays taking them through these play-off games. “The shit that he takes, excuse my language,” teammate George Kittle politely says about Garoppolo, “Just consistently people try to pull him down and all he does is try to deliver. And he leads this team. He’s the sense of calm in the huddle, he’s the sense of calm in the storm.”

The wind whooshed, the snow whirled! Did Jimmy’s hazel eyes turn a frosted blue? Garoppolo didn’t get a scoring play, and that’s what his detractors always point to: in this post-season run he has only managed one touchdown pass amid many more interceptions and sacks. But he did, over three-and-a-half minutes, get four first downs, keeping the ball and moving it forward until the Niners were near enough to kick for goal, with four seconds on the clock.

This was itself a risk, because all year the 49ers’ own special team has been as bad as the Packers’ was in this game. But with four seconds left of a play-off you don’t have much choice but relying on the players you’ve got. There was one final mess up from the Smell Boy Specials — they only put ten players on the pitch to block the goal instead of eleven — and one final boot for glory from Robbie Gould, a 39 year old who is paid to kick the football through the posts and did just that as the clock struck none. The commentary on Green Bay Packers’ radio was exquisitely sad, the sound of Super Bowl favourites losing their whole season to one kick:

Does all this mean the San Francisco 49ers will be the ones winning everything, instead? They’re away again in this weekend’s National Football Conference championship game, playing the Los Angeles Rams, the one team they could reliably beat even back when they were horrible losers who couldn’t beat anybody. Win that and they take the NFC title and can play one more game, the Super Bowl. Apparently that is a big deal! ⬢

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