Steve Smith has some pretty strong Jimmy Garoppolo opinions

Let’s be honest, as soon as you saw Steve Smith in the title, you knew there was no chance he wouldn’t be dealing anything but ghost-chili spicy hot takes, right?

All joking aside, Steve Smith is off to a great start in TV and is easily more effortlessly entertaining than anyone at the network we do not speak of could ever hope to be, and he hopped on Tuesday’s episode of NFL Network’s Good Morning Football for a bit. Of course, with the draft two days away, what better to talk about than the zombie Jimmy Garoppolo-to-the-Browns rumors that just refuse to die no matter how many times they’re shot down?

(Fair warning - at first, Smitty might make the hair on the back of your neck stand up a little bit. Told you the takes were spicy.)

(Also, you have to love it when Kay says “Browns quarterback situation” and Steve makes a face like he just bit into a sub with mayo when he asked for no mayo or something)

He starts off with a fair point - that being that Jimmy G wasn’t originally drafted as a first round pick - and then when Nate Burleson points out that Garoppolo went in the second round, Smith says he wasn’t impressed with the “couple games I watched”.

And really, that’s a fair criticism too. Jimmy played a great game against the Arizona Cardinals and was in the process of tearing the Dolphins a new one in Week 2 when Kiko Alonso took him to the ground so hard it sprained his shoulder, and that’s the last we saw of Garoppolo except for mop-up duty.

From there, they get into talking about starry-eyed football teams paying more for potential over proven production these days, and that’s where Smith points out that that’s a great way to roll the dice and quite possibly end up...exactly where the Browns already are.

“When you evaluate your team, though, you pay a guy off potential, and you find yourself two years later trying to figure it out again! I mean, you look at Houston, they’ve had, actually, I counted it, you have to count some guys that were on the roster, 10 guys actually, since 2014. Thaddeus Lewis and BJ Daniels, they have guys that never panned out, they thought they could, they didn’t. So you have all these guys that you think can, you throw them out there, they lose three or four games, everyone gets fired, or the team isn’t doing good and you find yourself in the top five for the next three, four years-”

Nate: “So you’re saying, plain and simple, pay for production over potential with quarterbacks?”

Steve: “Yes. The DRAFT is about potential, not free agency.”

Smith was also not impressed when someone tried to bring up that Jimmy G is (obviously) part of the Patriots and coached by Bill Belichick:

“OK, Matt Cassel was that guy too! And what happened? He was OK.”

“I’m not saying Matt Cassel was bad, but I’m just saying for the draft pick and what you thought you were getting, you did not get a return on your investment. He was a blue-chip stock, and you expect on your dividend every quarter you was getting that 7, 8% yield, which is great, but the problem is he was about a 1, 2, 1.2% on the return, which is nothing. Overpriced.”

“And he (a veteran) has to play immediately, where a rookie has to earn it. You also can develop him.”

“I’m not saying that he’s (Jimmy) not very good, I’m just questioning how good and does the value of the draft pick really pan out?”

Well, OK then, didn’t realize that Steve Smith was a regular Jimmy Johnson in his free time.

With the draft going down this weekend, though, the part of the Patriots that keeps rumors like this is that you can never quite put anything past them - especially when they’re on the clock.