Tag: 49ers record

49ers found new way to lose in Week 11 vs. Seahawks

Good news: Special teams didn’t lose the 49ers a game on Sunday. Bad news: They have a new thing that did lose them the game.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the San Francisco 49ers 2024 season is that all five of their losses seem to come down to something different.

There’s not one discernible thing they have to fix, but rather a smattering of issues that vary each week in how much damage they inflict on the club’s chances to get a victory.

In a damaging Week 11 loss to the Seattle Seahawks, it appeared the offense was a major problem. That unit turned the ball over once and averaged only 4.9 yards per play in their least efficient outing of the year. They were also unable to hold onto the football for 3:56 at the end of the game, giving Seattle a chance to win.

Despite the offensive struggles, head coach Kyle Shanahan wasn’t necessarily displeased with the play from that unit in their latest loss. Instead, he pointed to penalties as the reason for their season-low output.

“Yeah, that was a huge thing. I thought that was one of the biggest problems for the offense on the day,” Shanahan said of the penalties. “And I actually thought we played a better game offensively than we did on that Thursday night game. We didn’t get, you know, on that Thursday night game we got the busted coverage on [WR] Deebo’s [Samuel] 70-yarder and we got those two explosive runs which really helped. But we played better football this game. We just didn’t at all with the penalties and you know, we had one 14-play drive where, I don’t know how many 14-play drives that I’ve been a part of that don’t end with points or a missed field goal or turnover. To go 14 plays and then punt it, we had eight plays inside the 50 after that turnover for the field goal having to overcome it a couple times and get them again. So, that was our biggest problem on the day I felt offensively.”

The 49ers had one drive just before the first half where they had a second-and-3 turn into a second-and-8 because of a false start. Two plays later on a third-and-1 they had a five-yard carry called back because of a hold, putting San Francisco into a third-and-10.

They overcame those penalties to get a first-and-10 at Seattle’s 34 after the two-minute warning. Another false start pushed them to a first-and-15, and then quarterback Brock Purdy took a sack that knocked them out of field goal range. Two incompletions later they punted. Instead of going ahead 10-6 or 14-6 before halftime, the 49ers led 7-6.

In the second half the 49ers defense came up with an interception that set the offense up at Seattle’s 27. They eventually got to first-and-10 at the Seahawks 16. An eight-yard scramble by Brock Purdy on that down was called back for a hold, giving the 49ers a first-and-20 at Seattle’s 26. Running back Christian McCaffrey immediately got the 49ers back inside the 15 with a 14-yard run, but that was negated by an illegal formation flag.

San Francisco went from first-and-10 at the Seattle 16 to first-and-25 at the Seattle 31. They settled for a field goal on that series and instead of leading 14-6, led 10-6 and allowed the next Seattle touchdown to give them a lead.

The good news is it wasn’t special teams that killed the 49ers this time. The bad news is we have a new thing to add to the list of reasons a team that was supposed to contend for a Super Bowl is fighting for its playoff life after 10 games.

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49ers head coach denies impact of ‘Super Bowl hangover’ in rocky start

Super Bowl hangover? Kyle Shanahan isn’t buying it.

It’s easy to pick out reasons the San Francisco 49ers have stumbled through the first 10 weeks of the NFL season. What’s more difficult is pinpointing the why behind those reasons.

After all, the 49ers were a couple plays away from a Super Bowl victory in February, and now they’re 5-5 overall, last in the NFC West and No. 10 overall in the NFC.

One of the explanations commonly tossed out for the team’s issues this season is the dreaded ‘Super Bowl hangover’ teams experience after falling short at the league’s highest stage. Head coach Kyle Shanahan isn’t buying that big-picture explanation.

In a conference call with reporters Monday after the team’s Week 11 loss to the Seattle Seahawks, Shanahan instead pointed to controllable on-field issues the team had in their most recent defeat.

I don’t think there is an answer about a journey or Super Bowl hangover. I think it’s about what’s happening in that exact game. The week before was almost the same game. I think we went down 13 to 10 or something in the third. I think they came back and tied it up and we went down and won it on the last play. So, I don’t think that means we had a killer instinct in that game and not in this game. They took a lead 13 to 10 in the fourth quarter. We went on a 14-play drive and scored a touchdown and overcame a bunch of negative stuff on that drive and still took a 17 to 13 lead. Our defense held them on a fourth-and-one, I think with three and a half minutes to go. So I saw the killer instinct on both of those drives. And then we got to run out the clock on offense and we run three plays, get it down there in second-and-11. We missed a throw and catch, which I think would’ve got us in the red zone and allowed us to run out more clock, possibly the clock, but we didn’t make it and then they got us on the last drive. So we’ve got to play better on those two last drives. And it usually comes down to that in football. If you don’t want it to come down to that before that you’ve got to play pretty flawlessly to get up a couple scores before the end. But that’s why most games in this league do come down to the end and we got that done versus Tampa, but we didn’t get it done this week.

There’s some merit to this. There have been multiple times this season where better execution on one or two plays in a game would have flipped the outcome and had the 49ers sitting at something like 8-2 or 7-3 after 10 games.

However, through 11 weeks they’ve been plagued by different problems that have resulted in five losses. The spate of issues could be explained by the mental and physical fatigue that typically defines a ‘Super Bowl hangover.’

Perhaps Shanahan is correct and the team simply starts executing more effectively down the stretch and they make a run to the postseason. Until they do that though, we’ll be left looking for explanations in what’s been a subpar first 10 games.

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49ers schedule: Calendar change is the good news for San Francisco

The 49ers have won 10 November games in a row.

No team in the league is happier to see October end than the San Francisco 49ers.

October has been by far their least successful month under head coach Kyle Shanahan. Since he took over in 2017, the 49ers are 15-21 in the month. It’s the only month they have a losing record in that stretch. They’re still sub-.500 in October even if we remove 2017 and 2018 where they were a combined 0-9.

The calendar is officially turned to November though where the 49ers tend to turn things around.

In November they’re 14-9 under Shanahan, including 10 consecutive victories dating back to Week 10 of the 2021 season.

Oddly enough, they started 3-5 in that 2021 campaign before rallying back to make a run to the NFC championship game. This season they’re 4-4, but they’re in need of a similar run if they want to win the NFC West and put themselves in position to make the NFC championship game.

While their play in October wasn’t great, there were signs of progress as the month ended. In their final three games, they converted 66.7 percent of their red zone trips into touchdowns after being near 40 percent for the season before that. Their win over the Dallas Cowboys in Week 8 also saw the 49ers get back to some of the fundamental strengths of their offense with short throws and yards-after-catch.

If those trends are a sign of things to come, we should see another strong November showing for the 49ers. History says this is the time Shanahan teams start playing their best football. San Francisco needs another year of that in 2024, because another rough October means they don’t have the margin for error to overcome a lackluster November.

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Kyle Shanahan: Past slow starts won’t help 49ers in 2024

Can the 49ers past experience with slow starts help them climb out of this year’s early-season rut? Head coach Kyle Shanahan says no.

The San Francisco 49ers through five weeks find themselves in unfavorable, familiar territory.

Slow starts were a hallmark of Kyle Shanahan’s 49ers for a few seasons following an 8-0 start in the 2019 campaign. In 2020 they were 4-4 through eight games. The next year they fell to 3-5 before putting together a late-season run and finishing 10-7. It was more of the same in 2022 when they started 3-4 before ripping off 10 in a row to finish the year.

In 2023 things changed, but they still dropped three in a row after a 5-0 start before finishing 12-5.

This season is another slow start with the 49ers sitting at 2-3 through five weeks. Logic says this group, many of which have been part of the teams that struggled to start 2021 and 2022, would be calloused to the adversity this year’s team is facing. Head coach Kyle Shanahan doesn’t believe previous experience will play a role in whether the 49ers can climb out of the rut they dug for themselves in 2024.

“No, I don’t think it pertains to anything,” Shanahan said on a conference call. “I think everybody goes off their life experiences and we have some people who have been here can always resort to that and just know how things work. I’ve been through a number of them in my whole coaching career, not just here.

“So, you always know going through this that you can never count yourself out until you’re actually eliminated from something. I’ve seen teams start 0-4 and get there before. So, there’s lots of things that go into it. But I think every year’s different and we’ve got to write our own story this year and it has nothing to do with other years.”

For this year’s 49ers there are a handful of significant changes from past years that will require perhaps a different formula for San Francisco.

Their defense hasn’t been as good as in year’s past, but they have better quarterback play which gives some optimism that there’s a better version of the 49ers on the horizon.

The real issue, which supports what Shanahan said, is that the 49ers will need to rely on a slew of young players to help buoy the club after a rocky start to this year. Those players haven’t been in this spot before. The experience of some of the team’s leaders will help the 49ers, but they won’t automatically make the playoffs just because they’ve been here before.

San Francisco needs to be better, and if they don’t get better, no amount of experience is going to save them from the mediocrity they’re careening toward at the end of Week 5.

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Jimmy Garoppolo didn’t get the 49ers to the top, but he helped pull them out of the mud

Jimmy Garoppolo didn’t get the #49ers to the NFL’s pinnacle, but he played a key role in pulling them from the dregs of the NFL’s basement.

The Jimmy Garoppolo era didn’t end with the 49ers hoisting their sixth Lombardi Trophy. That combined with some of the on-field tumult throughout his 4.5 years in the Bay Area makes it easy to point out the negatives of his tenure. However, considering where the 49ers were when he arrived, the trade to acquire Garoppolo and the ensuing years that followed it have to be marked as a success.

A complicated 4.5 years renders useless the scale of success that starts and ends with a Super Bowl.

When Garoppolo made his first start for San Francisco in Week 13 of the 2017 season they were sitting at 1-10 with no real direction. His five consecutive wins kickstarted the 49ers’ rebuild. Suddenly they were playoff contenders going into 2018 instead of toiling in mediocrity as they searched for a franchise signal caller.

His 2018 campaign was cut short by a knee injury he sustained fighting for extra yards while trailing 38-24 late in the fourth quarter of a game against the Chiefs. Toughness in the face adversity became a theme for Garoppolo and the 49ers during his tenure.

San Francisco’s 4-12 finish that year highlighted just how important Garoppolo was to their success as long as CJ Beathard and Nick Mullens were going to be the backups. That became another theme that ultimately defined his time in red and gold.

The 2019 season is where things ultimately turned because the 49ers’ rebuild was virtually complete thanks to draft picks like George Kittle, Fred Warner and Nick Bosa. Their dominance that year and their run to the Super Bowl in Garoppolo’s first full season seemed to show the 5-0 run to close 2017 wasn’t a fluke.

However, that was the same year the cracks in the foundation began. His characteristically bad interception to end the first half against the Vikings in the divisional playoffs started a stretch of six quarters where he attempted only 14 passes. The idea that Garoppolo was a key cog in the team’s winning formula started to lose some of its luster then, and the shine really came off in the Super Bowl when the Garoppolo-led offense fell apart late and allowed the Chiefs to rattle off 21 unanswered points.

Those cracks turned into full-blown chasms in 2020 when two injuries limited Garoppolo to just six starts. He won half of them and didn’t play particularly well. A regression on top of another injury-riddled season officially pushed the 49ers to trade a pair of future first-round picks to move up and select Trey Lance No. 3 overall to eventually replace Garoppolo.

Had the Garoppolo era ended after 2020 it would’ve been difficult to assign him a ton of credit for where the team was going into 2021. However, the way he handled the Lance situation off the field while continuing to battle adversity on the field to quarterback the team in another NFC championship game while dealing with a shoulder sprain and torn UCL in his thumb that will require offseason surgery was undeniably impressive.

How much credit is assigned to him for that deep playoff run is up to the viewer. Some will give him all the credit as the starting QB of a team in the NFC championship game. Others will not give him any, saying he rode coattails of other great players. Ultimately it doesn’t matter.

The 49ers will enter 2022 in the conversation as contenders thanks in part to Garoppolo and what he did in the early days of his tenure. If Trey Lance hits the ground running, Garoppolo will earn some credit for that as well.

San Francisco never reached the NFL’s pinnacle under the guidance of Jimmy Garoppolo, but he’ll exit the Bay Area with the team in a much better place than it was in when he arrived. He may not have been a Pro Bowler or one of their best players, but the story of the 49ers’ rise from 2-14 in 2016 and 1-9 to begin 2017 to Super Bowl contenders cannot be accurately told without Garoppolo.

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