This offseason, we could've seen a San Francisco 49er leave for the TV booth. Instead, we're seeing someone leave the TV booth to become a San Francisco 49er.
ESPN reported Friday night that Brian Griese is leaving, uh, ESPN to coach quarterbacks for the 49ers.
Adam Schefter's tweet below was telling. ESPN never came out and told us Griese's 2-year run in the Monday Night Football booth was complete, but when there's only room for one QB on the depth chart and your employer spends $90 million on a new QB1, you don't exactly need to sit around and wait for the press release.
Former Monday Night Football analyst Brian Griese is leaving ESPN to become the Quarterbacks Coach for the 49ers, sources tell @SethWickersham and me. Griese and Kyle Shanahan have known each other for years; Griese played QB in Tampa when Shanahan was on the Bucs coaching staff.
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) March 5, 2022
The quarterbacks coaching job in San Francisco will be Griese's first, though he's just about the most qualified rookie-coach-jumping-in-at-the-NFL-level you can find. The son of Pro and College Football Hall of Famer Bob Griese, Brian won a national championship at Michigan, then won a Super Bowl as a rookie as a reserve quarterback on the Denver Broncos.
When John Elway retired in 1998, Griese replaced him in 1999. Though he was never a star, Griese lasted 11 seasons in the league, appearing in 93 games for four teams. He retired in 2008, then went to work for ESPN in 2009. He called college football games until the promotion to Monday Night in 2020.
Rather than wait around for an inevitable demotion with ESPN, Griese instead packs his bags and embarks on an entirely new career, two weeks shy of his 47th birthday.
He'll join a Niners franchise in the midst of Super Bowl contention, where quarterback play was likely the only difference between watching the hated Rams win the Lombardi Trophy and hoisting it themselves. Griese's first job in coaching will either be to get something out of Jimmy Garoppolo that no other coach has, or to mold Trey Lance -- the No. 3 pick in 2021 who has thrown all of 71 live passes since the 2019 season -- into a Super Bowl-level passer. Arguably, the San Francisco quarterback room will be the most pressure packed in the entire NFL.
And Brian Griese will coach it.