National Football League

Jimmy Garoppolo’s health, Aidan O’Connell’s upside has Raiders’ QB room looking up

Published Aug. 21, 2023 3:30 p.m. ET

A major concern this summer, the Las Vegas Raiders' quarterback situation looks surprisingly solid with one exhibition game to play. Jimmy Garoppolo, coming off offseason left foot surgery, has performed as Josh McDaniels thought he would when the Raiders signed him to a lucrative contract in free agency.

Cleared at the start of training camp, Garoppolo took a few days to ramp up his activity. But once joining the starters on the field, he has played well in two joint practices — one against his former team, the San Francisco 49ers, and the other against the team he beat on a regular basis while playing in the NFC West, the Los Angeles Rams.

And in one preseason series against the Rams over the weekend, Garoppolo finished 4-of-4 for 39 yards in leading the Raiders to a touchdown on the opening drive of a 34-17 Las Vegas victory.

"I thought he did a great job of commanding the huddle, controlling the line of scrimmage and getting us in and out of the right stuff," McDaniels told reporters.

It was Garoppolo's first game action since suffering a broken foot in Week 13 last season against the Miami Dolphins.

"It felt good to knock some of the rust off, get in the game flow with some of the guys," he told reporters after the game.

Garoppolo signed a three-year, $72.75 million contract with Las Vegas during free agency in March. However, the Raiders discovered the lingering left foot injury during his physical. Because of the uncertainty regarding Garoppolo's availability, Las Vegas converted a $22.5 million signing bonus to base salary to protect the team after his failed physical.

The clause, titled Addendum G, specified that Garoppolo wouldn't have been able to sign his deal without a waiver because of the injury he suffered with San Francisco in December. However, Garoppolo passed his physical at the start of training camp and has stayed healthy.

He did take a decent hit on Saturday from Los Angeles defensive tackle Jonah Williams while delivering a quick throw to receiver Jakobi Meyers. The veteran QB got up fine.

"Every quarterback or player that touches the football knows once the regular season comes that they're live bait," McDaniels said. "They're going to get hit. It's always good to kind of get that out of the way and some of that anxiety about how it feels because you haven't done it in a long time — seven, eight months at minimum. So he wanted to be out there."

While Garoppolo has been everything the Raiders have expected from a 31-year-old veteran familiar with McDaniels' offense, fourth-round pick Aidan O'Connell has been a revelation playing with the reserves.

Raiders find something special with rookie QB Aidan O'Connell?

"I was blessed as a young guy to be around Tom [Brady] and some other great quarterbacks, just kind of showing me the ropes," Garoppolo said when asked about O'Connell. "It's kind of that trickle-down effect. When you put good people together — Aiden's a good dude, Chicago guy obviously — but when you put good people together, we work well together."

For a second straight week O'Connell played lights out, finishing 11-of-18 for 163 yards and two touchdowns. While first-round selections Bryce Young, C.J. Stroud and Anthony Richardson have struggled to get much going offensively during exhibition play, O'Connell has been decisive, creating big plays for the Las Vegas offense.

"It takes preparation," O'Connell. "And when you get in the huddle, have confidence that you know what you're going to do, and what everybody else's job is. It takes preparation to have confidence. So I try to prepare as best I can and work as hard as I can. Just keep my head down and do what I've got to do."

Of course, those high-profile signal-callers have played against starting defenses, while O'Connell has faced mostly reserves fighting to make final rosters. Still, the former walk-on at Purdue has caught the attention of McDaniels as he competes for the No. 2 job behind veteran journeyman Brian Hoyer.

Through two games, O'Connell has completed 72.2% of his passes for 304 yards, with three touchdowns and no interceptions. He has been sacked just once, posting a 125.4 passer rating.

Do Raiders start Jimmy Garoppolo or Aidan O'Connell moving forward?

During the offseason, when the Raiders moved on from Pro Bowl quarterback Derek Carr in favor of an injury prone Garoppolo and did not draft a QB of the future in the first round, NFL observers rightly wondered what McDaniels was doing at the most important position on the field. Now that Garoppolo has (so far) proved healthy and O'Connell is playing well, maybe McDaniels knew what he was doing?

But things can change quickly in a marathon NFL season.

"He played the whole game basically last week," McDaniels said when asked about O'Connell's status. "We'll figure out exactly what we need to do based on some of the competition that we're looking at and some of the things we really want to see prior to the regular season beginning.

"We've got three practices this week, we've got a preseason game, got three practices the following week, so kind of looking at it in totality. There's a lot of decisions and conversations to be had internally about what we're going do and how we're going to use this final preseason game coming up in Dallas."

Eric D. Williams has reported on the NFL for more than a decade, covering the Los Angeles Rams for Sports Illustrated, the Los Angeles Chargers for ESPN and the Seattle Seahawks for the Tacoma News Tribune. Follow him on Twitter at @eric_d_williams.

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