Sports blog information from USA TODAY.
Ranking all 17 games on the San Francisco 49ers’ 2021 schedule.
The 49ers according to the Las Vegas preseason win totals hold one of the NFL’s easiest schedules. That doesn’t mean there aren’t a ton of fun games to look forward to though.
While we can’t judge exactly how good, bad or healthy each team will be, we can certainly speculate and make some educated guesses as to which games will be more fun than others.
Here is the 49ers’ 2021 schedule ranked in order of worst to best, with ‘fun’ factoring heavily into the order:
A week-by-week look at the best offensive player the 49ers will face on each team on their schedule.
It turns out the quarterbacks on the 49ers’ schedule aren’t an extremely high-quality group. They face some good ones, to be sure, but there are a number of signal callers they’ll face who aren’t the best offensive player on their team.
To get a better gauge of the top-end talent awaiting the 49ers defense and new defensive coordinator DeMeco Ryans, we ran through each team’s roster to find the best offensive player each week of San Francisco’s schedule.
Here’s what we came up with:
Every quarterback on the 49ers’ 2021 schedule, ranked from worst to best.
One way to judge the strength of a team’s schedule before the season starts is to look at the quality of quarterbacks they’ll be facing. It’s certainly not foolproof, but there’s no good way to go about evaluating teams before they’ve taken a snap.
San Francisco’s strength of schedule is not great following their last place finish in 2020, and that’s reflected in the quarterbacks they’re set to face.
A couple rookies are scattered across the board, Deshaun Watson and Aaron Rodgers’ immediate futures are both up in the air, and then a number of opposing QBs fall into the middle tier of NFL signal callers that could either win or lose their team a game depending on the day.
We took a look at the 49ers’ schedule and put the quarterbacks in order from worst to best, with a couple of backup QBs added in due to uncertain circumstances.
Behold, dear reader, science:
The San Francisco 49ers’ 2021 schedule features more travel miles than any other team.
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The 49ers’ 17-game 2021 schedule comes with the added hurdle of the most travel miles in the NFL. ESPN’s Brian Burke tweeted a chart that shows the 49ers will travel nearly 30,000 miles this year.
It’s not a huge surprise a West Coast team would lead the league in travel. The 49ers are followed by the Seahawks and Jaguars – both teams that are housed on opposite coasts. The Rams and Chargers, both West Coast teams that share a stadium in Los Angeles, are fourth and fifth, respectively.
Rounding out the top nine are the Dolphins, Cardinals, Raiders and Falcons. All of those teams are either on or near one of the United States’ coasts.
— Brian Burke (@bburkeESPN) May 13, 2021
San Francisco won’t likely wind up traveling all of those miles though. They have one back-to-back road trip to Detroit and Philadelphia to open the year. Chances are they’ll stay somewhere near the East Coast to cut down on some of the back-and-forth of flying from Detroit, back to Santa Clara, then all the way to Philadelphia.
The 49ers are likely to be near the top of the league in miles travelled every year because of their location, and finding ways to cut down on the impact of the inevitably long travel.
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The 2021 San Francisco 49ers week-by-week schedule complete with dates, times and TV broadcast channels.
The San Francisco 49ers officially know what their path back to the postseason looks like.
It will begin in Detroit against the Lions, and will wrap up with the Los Angeles Rams in Los Angeles.
Here’s a week-by-week look at the team’s schedule with dates, times and TV broadcast information:
The San Francisco 49ers’ 2021 schedule has been released.
The 49ers’ 2021 schedule is officially out.
The club will play five prime time games beginning in Week 3 against the Green Bay Packers at home. Their first division game will come in Week 4 against the Seattle Seahawks at home.
They’ll get a couple of their longer road trips out of the way early with back-to-back games in Detroit and Philadelphia to open the year. They’ll likely stay in Youngstown, Ohio between those two contests to avoid a pair of long cross-country trips.
Here’s the full schedule, prime time games are in bold:
Week 1: at DETROIT LIONS
Week 2: at PHILADELPHIA EAGLES
Week 3: vs. GREEN BAY PACKERS
Week 4: vs. SEATTLE SEAHAWKS
Week 5: at ARIZONA CARDINALS
Week 6: BYE
Week 7: vs. INDIANAPOLIS COLTS
Week 8: at CHICAGO BEARS
Week 9: vs. ARIZONA CARDINALS
Week 10: vs. LOS ANGELES RAMS
Week 11: at JACKSONVILLE JAGUARS
Week 12: vs. MINNESOTA VIKINGS
Week 13: at SEATTLE SEAHAWKS
Week 14: at CINCINNATI BENGALS
Week 15: vs. ATLANTA FALCONS
Week 16: vs. TENNESSEE TITANS
Week 17: vs. HOUSTON TEXANS
Week 18: at LOS ANGELES RAMS
Predictions for what the 49ers’ 2021 schedule might look like.
The NFL’s 2021 schedule is set to drop at 5:00pm Pacific Time on Wednesday, at which point we’ll get our first look at the 49ers’ slate.
While predicting an exact schedule is nigh impossible, we went through their list of opponents and came up with six predictions for some of the features of San Francisco’s schedule.
The San Francisco 49ers’ voluntary and mandatory in-person offseason workout dates are set.
The 49ers’ in-person offseason workout dates have been set while the NFL resumes a mostly-normal offseason schedule following a year of virtual work during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
There are three sections of workouts, the first two of which are voluntary. Rookies report first, followed by veterans for Organized Team Activities. Mandatory minicamp is the last offseason work before training camp begins in July.
Here’s the schedule:
Rookie minicamp: May 14-16
OTAs: May 24-25, May 27, June 1-2, June 4, June 7-8, June 10
Mandatory minicamp: June 15-17
It’s unknown how many players will show up for the voluntary portions of the in-person workouts given that COVID-19 is still present. They’ll be important days though, especially for No. 3 overall pick Trey Lance, who’ll begin his journey to becoming the team’s starting quarterback. Given that he played only one game last year, in-person reps will be crucial for his development.
There are three phases of the offseason program. Phase 1 runs from April 19 to May 14, and allows for strength and conditioning and virtual work only.
Phase 2 runs May 17-21, and includes the first permissible on-field work. That on-field stuff is limited to individual drills and walk-through style practices with offensive players lining up against offensive players and vice versa with no contact allowed.
The final phase goes from May 24 to June 18, and allows for in-person meetings as long as COVID-19 protocols are followed. Teams can do up to 11-on-11 drills with no live contact allowed per a release from the NFL.
Training camp dates have not been announced yet, and will come out sometime after the NFL’s schedule release which is set for May 12.
The San Francisco 49ers will face the Cincinnati Bengals as part of the NFL’s expanded 17-game schedule.
The NFL on Tuesday made their 18-week schedule official, adding a 17th game to the regular-season slate. It’s the first addition to the regular-season schedule since the league jumped from 14 games to 16 in the 1978 season.
The additional game will be added on a rotating basis against a team from the opposite conference. For the 49ers, they’ll face the Bengals in Cincinnati this season since the Bengals were the last-place finishers in the AFC North.
San Francisco last faced the Bengals in the 2019 season at Paul Brown Stadium. The 49ers blew out the home team 41-17 in a game Cincinnati entered as the favorites.
The league is expected to eliminate one preseason game to drop the exhibition slate to three games. There’ll be a one-week Bye between the third preseason game and the start of the regular season per NFL Media’s Tom Pelissero. They won’t add an additional Bye during the regular season despite tacking on an 18th week.
The date of the 49ers’ trip to Cincinnati hasn’t been set, and will come out once the full schedule is released sometime in April.
The San Francisco 49ers playoff chances will get a little help from a soft schedule.
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The 49ers’ playoff hopes took a massive hit Monday night when they lost to the Bills. While they’re not out of it yet, they need not only to win at least three of their next four, but they need a ton of help. The good news is their strength of schedule paints a picture that shows a realistic path to three or four victories over the final four weeks.
ESPN’s Mike Clay on Wednesday released his projected strength of schedule over the final quarter of the season. San Francisco’s final four opponents – Washington, Dallas, Arizona and Seattle – are among the easiest quartet of teams left on an NFL schedule.
The 49ers hold onto the seventh-easiest schedule strength per Clay:
NFL Rest-of-Season Strength of Schedule (green = easiest)#clayprojections pic.twitter.com/LnJ0dtWOPO
— Mike Clay (@MikeClayNFL) December 9, 2020
While Washington is playing its best football of the year, they’re not a juggernaut and they travel across the country. Dallas is struggling. So are the Cardinals, and the Seahawks offense has started to look something less than unstoppable over the last few weeks.
Games aren’t won on paper though and the 49ers are struggling over the last several weeks. Their lone victory since Week 8 came in Week 12 against the Rams, and even that required a last-second field goal in a game where they generated four turnovers.
If the hope is going to stay alive though, Clay’s projections provide perhaps the best possible silver lining heading into a tough Week 14 showdown with the Washington Football Team.
