49ers’ Jimmy Garoppolo hopes he will be out ‘just weeks’ after leaving Week 4 with a calf injury

Trey Lance eventually replaced Jimmy Garoppolo on Sunday, but that wasn’t because Kyle Shanahan intended to insert the rookie quarterback. A calf injury forced Garoppolo out of action at halftime in their 28-21 loss to the Seahawks, with San Francisco deeming the veteran signal questionable to return after the break. However, all signs point to Lance remaining below center, with Garoppolo telling reporters after the game that he hopes he will be sidelined “just a few weeks”.

“I thought I could keep trying, keep trying to get in,” Garoppolo said, explaining that his calf initially tightened in the first quarter of Sunday’s loss. “And it just kept getting worse… I just felt something squeeze into my calf. I thought I could drain it, but it’s just hard, man.”

After lamenting the fact that this injury is only the latest to force Garoppolo out of action for an extended period (“It’s getting really old,” he told reporters), the quarterback was asked ‘he thought he could have torn his Achilles apart, which might end his season.

“I don’t think so, no,” he said. “I really hope not. It’s like a calf right now, but I hope it will only be a few weeks or something like that.”

He added that further tests on his calf, including an MRI scheduled for Monday, should dictate his recovery schedule.

In other words, it’s suddenly Lance’s spectacle for the foreseeable future. This, of course, is part of the reason the 49ers spent so much to put together and write Lance, as Shanahan has long said. Garoppolo hasn’t played a full season since 2019, missing 23 games combined due to injury in 2018 and 2020. And yet the forced change comes at a crucial time for San Francisco, who now lag behind both the Cardinals and the Rams in NFC West and is expected to visit the first in week 5.