Jimmy Garoppolo’s next contract will be the real risk for the 49ers

The San Francisco 49ers took a big swing at solving their offensive woes by trading for quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo at the end of October.

Despite reports that the 49ers may consider Garoppolo a valuable piece who could be used as a potential trade piece, general manager John Lynch told KNBR that the teams sees the 26-year-old quarterback as their passer of the future.

“I think a lot of people throughout this league feels like we got a tremendous deal on a guy that has all the makings of a franchise quarterback,” Lynch said. “We’re thrilled to have him, and that’s what Jimmy Garoppolo is to us.”

He may even see the field soon with his new team, although that may be ill-advised considering the way C.J. Beathard is getting destroyed behind the San Francisco offensive line. But at some point, the 49ers — still searching for their first win of the season — will turn over the reins to Garoppolo.

The former New England Patriots quarterback was a 2014 second-round who spent more than three years learning from the best: Brady and Bill Belichick.

So acquiring such a promising, young quarterback for just a second-round pick — albeit a really early one — was a steal. But the real risk will come in the next four months, with Garoppolo’s rookie contract set to expire in March.

San Francisco will pay him and won’t let him leave. But the quarterback is the one with a lot of leverage and it won’t be cheap. So how much is it going to be and how can the 49ers avoid getting stuck with a bad deal?

This is the hard part to figure out, and it might not matter.

Garoppolo has thrown a grand total of 94 passes over more than three and a half seasons in the NFL. A majority of those — 63, to be exact — came in his only two career starts: Weeks 1 and 2 of the 2016 season while Brady was serving a suspension.

In those starts he completed 68.3 percent of his passes with four touchdowns and no interceptions, leading the Patriots to a 2-0 start with wins over the Cardinals and Dolphins.

His run as New England’s starter ended early due to a shoulder injury, which is another reason for the 49ers to have concerns about their commitment to Garoppolo.

But the marketplace of free agency ultimately decides how much a player is worth and if Garoppolo reached the open market, he’d fetch a huge amount. There are plenty of teams — like the Browns, Jaguars, Cardinals, and Jets — who’d be in the market for a young, starting quarterback, and be willing to part with gobs of money to get one.

That means Garoppolo has no reason to sign a below-market deal with the 49ers out of good faith.

Thanks to the franchise tag, the 49ers aren’t going to lose Garoppolo. Even if he spurns every contract offer from the team before free agency begins in March, the tag can be applied and that would guarantee he gets a one-year deal that will likely be worth about $22 million.

That’s expensive and a scenario San Francisco would prefer to avoid.

But it’s not going to be cheap to convince Garoppolo that he’s better off taking a long-term deal when saying no is such a lucrative option.

The 49ers’ best model to copy may be the four-year, $72 million deal the Houston Texans gave Brock Osweiler during the 2016 offseason. He, too, was an inexperienced quarterback who spent the beginning of his career behind a legend.

Ultimately, it didn’t work out at all for Houston. The front-loaded contract guaranteed Osweiler $37 million in the first two seasons, though. After that, the Texans were free to release the quarterback and absorb just $6 million in dead money in 2018 and $3 million in 2019.

Houston made him somebody else’s problem with a trade to the Cleveland Browns, but even that deal was made more possible by the Texans protecting themselves for the future in the event that Osweiler turned into a pumpkin.

It will likely take a similar deal with money up front to get Garoppolo to sign, but expect the 49ers to give themselves similar protections in the latter half of the deal. It’s a roll of the dice that will only really work out if the former Patriots quarterback is the future of the franchise, but hey, that’s what San Francisco signed up for.