Naturally, the backup to Tom Terrific looks like he's straight out of quarterback common casting.
"He's a good-looking Italian cat," says Jimmy Garoppolo's college coach, Dino Babers.
But as with Tom Brady, there's an underdog mentality to the second-year passer out of Eastern Illinois.
"He's not a wimp," says Babers, who is now at Bowling Green. "Don't let the Superman look fool you. He's not Clark Kent."
Garoppolo will have to step into a phone booth over the summer, as his job is to keep the New England Patriots afloat until Brady returns from his suspension after Week 4 (assuming No. 12's appeal for his role in deflate-gate falters). The good news is that if he struggles, Patriots fans will blame NFL commissioner Roger Goodell for it. The bad news is that he's playing for the same head coach who benched Jonas Gray after a four-touchdown game, so Garoppolo had better impress some people.
He has already impressed the people who have seen him play in meaningful games.
"I met him three years ago, in 2012," Babers says. "They had won [four] games in two years. Everybody thought he was just OK. I was coming in for a new job, so I hadn't seen him. He threw the ball five times and I knew he was my starting quarterback."
Garoppolo isn't as tall as Brady, but other similarities are there. Babers says the quarterback's release is "one of the fastest I've ever seen," and his accuracy doesn't suffer for it.
Something clearly worked at Eastern Illinois, as Garoppolo led his team to seven wins and then 12 before moving on to the NFL. He even had a few reps as a rookie last year, after getting picked by the Pats in the second round of the 2014 draft. Garoppolo threw a touchdown against the Kansas City Chiefs in a blowout loss in Week 4, and threw for 90 yards in a meaningless Week 17 game against the Buffalo Bills. He won't be overwhelmed.
And it's hard to think of a better tutor than Brady, who is notoriously hard-working and surely will be coaching up the kid as a way to ensure the playoffs don't fade from view in the first month of the season. Even though he's from a family of Chicago Bears fans, Garoppolo looked up to Brady since watching the 2001 season's Super Bowl. "He's doing an understudy underneath his idol," Babers says.
Those looking for traces of entitlement probably won't find it. Garoppolo's the son of two working parents, an electrician and a chef, and his elementary school teacher thought he would grow up to be a priest. During the Patriots' Super Bowl run, Garoppolo could be seen leaving the locker room after wins carrying his Eastern Illinois backpack.
The biggest question won't be his attitude, though; it will be transitioning from throwing passes at Eastern Illinois (where he played in front of capacity home crowds of 10,000) to throwing passes against four teams eager to humble the defending champs. There's a reason Garoppolo is one of only two former EIU players in the NFL.
The complement to Garoppolo's quick release is his quick decision-making, which was honed by the spread offense he ran in college. That has its pitfalls, as Brady's genius has always been his ability to go to the third and fourth read rather than firing to the first target he sees. The Pats will likely simplify the offense for Garoppolo, but every opponent will look to confuse him in a way that they could not stump Brady. And those opponents will not be pushovers. Garoppolo's first game as a starter will be against the Pittsburgh Steelers on the league's opening night. And Week 5, the last game of Brady's suspension, brings the Dallas Cowboys and Tony Romo, the NFL's other Eastern Illinois product.
"He wants the pressure," Tony Garoppolo said of his son on the night he was drafted. "He wants to be expected to do a lot."
He'll get his wish.
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