San Francisco 49ers quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo is very rich and famous. It must be nice. And yet it was not so long ago Garoppolo was neither rich nor famous, but instead a member of a second-tier college team in small-town Illinois. Things weren’t as nice for Jimmy G in those days.
David Lombardi of The Athletic published a long oral history of Garoppolo’s rise to… above-average-ness, and the whole story is stacked with entertaining anecdotes from the quarterback’s upbringing in suburban Chicago to a hilarious ploy at the NFL Draft. But Garoppolo’s housing situation while attending Eastern Illinois University deserves particular attention.