Suggested to me by a die-hard Eagles fan (who professes to hate the Patriots):
The trade that sent Garoppolo to the 49ers is temporary. The Patriots and 49ers have a sneaky private agreement by which Garoppolo gets playing time and helps out the (previously rather hapless) 49ers. Brady continues as the Patriots QB for at least another year; when he decides to retire, the 49ers will trade Garoppolo back to the Patriots.
This sounds extremely far-fetched to me. Would such an arrangement conform to NFL rules? Could it be kept secret?
NFL teams aren’t fantasy football owners. That type of crazy conspiracy usually belongs on the overnight sports talk shows.
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The 49ers give the Patriots a second-round draft choice, and in return they get to be the Patriots farm team for a couple years, help Garoppolo get some experience, and when that experience starts paying off they give him back and end up right back where they started? I don’t buy it.
And what’s in it for Garappalo? He’s a winning starting QB who can establish himself independent of the Brady/Bellichick legacy. Why would he go back? He’s a free agent and can choose his own team.
The deal would be invalid by league rules, but also useless due to the fact that Garoppolo is an unrestricted free agent next year and can control where he plays. You can’t trade what you don’t control.
The only party I see getting a benefit from such an arrangement is New England. Both Jimmy and the Niners are better off with him staying in SF. New England already got a pretty good pick for the trade, I don’t see any reason to suspect there’d need to be more to it.
Right, the trade indeed is temporary in some sense, but that’s because Garappolo’s contract expires at the end of the year, and after that he’s no longer on the 49ers (unless they sign him to a new contract, but every other team has the same chance to sign him). So, everyone knew going in it was a short-term thing; there’s no kind of secret agreement possible.
But he’s not going back to the Patriots unless Brady has a career-ending injury in the playoffs. Jimmy’s going to get paid like a starting QB next year, and the Patriots don’t want to pay two starting QB salaries at the same time.
Assuming the 49ers re-sign Garappolo, they have every right to trade him back to New England. I think the only way the league would step in is if the trade was absurdly lopsided in value.
But yeah, the theory is a bad one because the Pats traded Garappolo in the first place so that they could get *some *value for him before he gets paid this offseason.
Until March 12, the 49ers are the only team that can negotiate a contract with him. But it won’t get even that far because GM John Lynch has already said they will use the franchise tag on him if a long term deal isn’t made. Given the team’s cap space and both sides’ apparent happiness with each other, Garoppolo isn’t going anywhere else soon.
As for a trade back to New England, the 49ers would have the right to trade him back, but I can’t imagine a secret agreement to do so in the original deal being within NFL rules. I also can’t imagine anyone agreeing to do such a stoopid thing.
In MLB, there exist the concept of trading someone for “a player to be named later,” and there have been several examples of a player effectively being traded for himself (i.e., he becomes the player named later).
But, that sort of trade isn’t legal in the NFL (i.e., terms of the trade have to be set at the time of the trade).
I can’t find my copy of the Sports Encyclopedia Football 1977 but in it they mention such a thing in the early days of the AFL. One team agreed to trade a player with the proviso they get him back in a couple of years. It seems to have been done in the open. However it was 55 years ago and the AFL was a new league fighting for survival (when you bend the rules). Such a thing may not be legal now and moot anyways with free agency.
If the Patriots were that sold on Garoppolo, it would make more sense logistically to just keep him while they already had him and give the 49ers 40-year-old, $14 million-a-year Tom Brady for a ridiculous haul of draft picks and players. But that is just as incredibly far-fetched as the OP’s plan.
Wickersham was either getting his info from a disaffected insider grinding an axe, or was making it up, or the guy he was listening to was making it up or at least misrepresenting it.
but it’s not at all surprising that young players call Brady “Sir”. He’s their dads’ age.
There’s a “lingering sadness” around the team? Yeah, that happens every time they clinch home field.
This from your extensive experience of the internal politics of the Patriots, likely the most secretive franchise in the history of professional sports?