The San Francisco 49ers are in the worst spot an NFL team can be. They’re definitely not good, but they aren’t all the way bad. They’re decidedly … mediocre. And that is not a good place to be.
The 49ers are no longer realistically in the playoff hunt after a 23-15 loss to the Washington Football Team on Sunday. They’re on the outskirts, but winning their final three is a requirement and even that right now seems like more of a miracle than the necessary assistance they’ll need in terms of losses from the teams in front of them.
Most teams once they’re out of the playoff chase can set their sites on the draft. The unfortunate thing for San Francisco is looking toward the draft becomes less enticing when they already has five wins in a year with so many bad teams.
Following Sunday’s action the 49ers are slated to pick No. 12 overall. They could conceivably climb into the top 10, but they could also fall into the 15 range. Either way, they’re not in the hunt for a top 3 pick like they were at the end of the 2018 season. They’re just sort of existing.
It also feels silly for a team that played in the Super Bowl this calendar year to start fawning over draft picks in Week 15. But that’s sort of where the 49ers are. Only they’re not, because they’re sort of like a playoff team. Or rather they were supposed to be.
They had enough to play for that head coach Kyle Shanahan didn’t make a quarterback switch following Nick Mullens’ pick-six, citing a lack of warmup time for Mullens’ backup, CJ Beathard. Perhaps Beathard had additional warm-up time in Week 4, but he entered right after Mullens threw a backbreaking pick-six in that one and did fine. What changed between Week 4 and Week 14 is that the 49ers in Week 4 still had a shot to win the division and get healthy enough to be the No. 1 seed.
Sunday they had no such shot. They just weren’t going to be good enough, and that’s the story of the year for San Francisco.
Any analysis of the 49ers’ 2020 season has to come with the injury caveat. This dive into the abyss of the NFL’s middle ground hasn’t come because of defects at the top of the depth chart. Injuries have forced players who may have not even been practice squad guys in a normal year into starting spots.
However, the reality is they enter Week 15 as a team without a mission. They know this version of the team isn’t good enough to be in the postseason, but they also know the expectation before the year was to go back to the Super Bowl. In post-game pressers they talk about better execution and limiting turnovers and all the other stuff from Day 1 of football post-game presser 101.
In reality, coming out of Week 14, they’re just a mediocre team that’s going to look like they have opportunities to win most games and sometimes fall into a victory. It is unequivocally the worst place for an NFL team to be. Not good enough to quit, but not good enough to get behind a real postseason run.
It’s the sad truth of the 49ers’ 2020 campaign, and better injury luck in 2021 should have them back in a spot to be contenders in the NFC. For now they have to deal with hanging out with the rest of the NFL’s middling clubs with nowhere to go and nothing to do except wait around and hope they matter again next year.
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