SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Since coach Kyle Shanahan arrived in 2017, the San Francisco 49ers’ night-before-the-game meetings have become a sacred space for established team leaders, former Niners greats, general manager John Lynch or Shanahan himself to deliver whatever message needed to get the team’s collective mind right.
For the better part of the past five-plus years, whatever was said in those gatherings seemed to work. Since 2019, only two NFL teams have won more games (including playoffs) than the 49ers.
But on the heels of two of the worst losses of the Shanahan era — blowouts to the Green Bay Packers and Buffalo Bills by a combined 53 points — the 49ers were barely hanging on to playoff hopes last week.
Shanahan found himself ready to try anything to give his team a spark.
He called on quarterback Brock Purdy and cornerback Deommodore Lenoir, two of the team’s core young leaders, to step into the motivational spotlight before Sunday’s game against the Chicago Bears.
Purdy reminded the team that if you want to win, you can never take your foot off the gas. Lenoir implored teammates to scratch and claw on every play no matter the score.
“The message was, we need to play with more of a sense of urgency and play desperate because you just haven’t really sensed that,” tight end George Kittle said. “When you’re playing desperate and you’re playing like, ‘Hey, if we don’t win this game, our season potentially is over,’ that desperation fuels guys.”
After Shanahan also challenged his team to show the grit that had come to define it over the past half-decade, the 49ers looked the part again in their 38-13 win against the hapless Bears. In the locker room, receiver Jauan Jennings said it felt like they “were our old selves again.”
Despite that victory, the 49ers enter Thursday’s game against the Los Angeles Rams (8:15 p.m., Prime Video) in an unusual spot, sitting last in the division and clinging to their playoff lives. In February, these 49ers lost to the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LVIII. Just 10 months later, an ever-growing mountain of injuries, personal tragedies and on-field struggles have left their chances of returning to the playoffs bleak.
At 6-7, the 49ers are two games behind the Seattle Seahawks and one behind the Rams in the NFC West. They can chip away at the latter with a win Thursday night but the climb back to postseason contention remains steep.
ESPN Analytics puts San Francisco’s chances of making the playoffs at 10.6% with an 8.4% chance to win the division. Their playoff chances improve to 17% with a win vs. the Rams but fall to 0.6% with a loss.
It’s a tall order for a team that doesn’t have a winning streak longer than two games in 2024.
“It’s been a rocky mountain,” receiver Deebo Samuel Sr. said. “We are not having the season that we want to have. Our record doesn’t show how really good we are as a team.”
THREE GAMES INTO the 2024 season, it became clear winning wouldn’t come easy for the 49ers.
San Francisco opened the season with a blowout win against the New York Jets. That was followed by a disappointing loss to the Minnesota Vikings and then a Week 3 road game against the Rams, where the cracks started to show.
As has often been the case in recent years, the 49ers controlled the game for the first three quarters. But instead of putting the Rams away, they fell apart. A dropped ball and a missed kick could have iced the game but didn’t, and the defense quickly allowed the Rams to drive for a game-winning field goal.
San Francisco’s previous stranglehold on the NFC West looked weakened, and the 49ers were left pondering how to close games. Those problems carried over into more divisional losses to the Arizona Cardinals and Seahawks in Weeks 5 and 6. In all three games, the 49ers held fourth-quarter leads.
Against divisional opponents, the 49ers had a record of 12-1 (including the playoffs) from 2022-23. This year, they’re 1-3.
“I’ve talked about those three games, which I feel we should have won that we let get away from us,” Shanahan said. “Right when we got to the toughest part where I was hoping we would have had some continuity and developed into the team that I thought could really make a run and push some things, that’s when we subtracted a lot of guys and we’re kind of at our toughest spot.”
The 49ers’ offense is scoring 5.2 points less and the defense is giving up 6.2 more points per game than a year ago.
Missing key players can explain some of San Francisco’s most pressing on-field struggles.
A red zone offense that was the best in the NFL in 2023 (67.2%) has dropped to 22nd with a touchdown rate of 52.9%. The 49ers have played zero snaps this season with running back Christian McCaffrey, wide receiver Brandon Aiyuk and Kittle — three of their four top touchdown scorers from 2023 — on the field together.
But injuries aren’t the only problem.
A team that built its reputation as the bullies of the NFC has regularly been pushed around on all sides of the ball.
The 49ers’ run defense gives up a success rate of 55.7% on designed runs, 25th in the NFL. And while the Niners maintain top-seven marks in rushing yards per game and yards per attempt on offense, the offensive line has been inconsistent, posting a run block win rate of 69.8%, 24th in the NFL. The Niners also have one of the worst special teams in the league.
What’s more is San Francisco has struggled to force turnovers and take care of the ball — hindering its ability to play complementary football. After finishing tied for fifth in turnover margin (plus-10) in 2023, the 49ers are minus-3 this year, which ranks 19th in the NFL.
It is, perhaps, no coincidence the 49ers are 4-0 this year when they win the turnover battle, 1-2 when it’s even and 1-5 when they lose it.
“This just isn’t the standard that we play with the last couple of years, of our mentality of coming out to games and being the enforcers and the dominators,” Purdy said.
IN WEEK 13, the 49ers faced the 9-2 Bills in snowy Buffalo and hit rock bottom.
Early in the second quarter, down 7-3, Kittle watched as McCaffrey hobbled to the sideline with a right knee injury four weeks after returning from an eight-game absence because of Achilles tendonitis. He was later diagnosed with a posterior cruciate ligament injury and placed on injured reserve.
Kittle then glanced to his left and saw linebacker Fred Warner jogging to the locker room. Warner was experiencing cramps in his forearms. A few days before the game, Warner revealed he had been playing with a fractured ankle since Week 4.
“When you lose two guys like that in back-to-back [series], it’s not a very fun thing,” Kittle said. “Especially because [Nick] Bosa and Trent Williams are not there either. It’s not a great feeling.”
Without some of their best players against a top-tier opponent in tough conditions, it was no longer a fair fight. The 38-10 Buffalo victory signaled a new low for San Francisco.
After the loss, Shanahan was asked if the 49ers have the same amount of “fight” that previous teams had.
“We’re not as good of a team as those past teams,” Shanahan said. “We’re not the same at all.”
While Shanahan has often refused to use injuries as an excuse for on-field performance, these 49ers are indeed not the same team simply because of who they have been without.
As early as the opening days of training camp, it was apparent that the injury luck the Niners enjoyed for most of 2023 had vanished. By Aug. 11, it was so bad that Shanahan canceled joint practices with the New Orleans Saints because the 49ers had 23 players not participating, mostly because of injury.
“Where we were in the moment, like that’s just what happened,” Purdy said. “And so, we were like alright, let’s be smart. We’ll cancel those, focus on our team and getting healthy, and obviously we’ve had a lot of guys get banged up and injured. … That’s just how it’s gone this year.”
The training camp injuries, especially to McCaffrey (calf strain and Achilles tendonitis), were a harbinger of things to come. They left Shanahan uncertain of what his team was going to be entering the season, a feeling that was exacerbated by the fact that the schedule to open the year was more favorable than what would come in the middle of the season.
“We weren’t where I wanted to be, which rarely you are exactly at the beginning of the year,” Shanahan said. “And that’s why you play and that’s why you get better as it goes and that’s what I was planning to do. That’s always the goal. We weren’t able to consistently do that. It seemed like every time we took a step forward, we took two steps back, and that was kind of how it went.”
On a top-heavy roster where the highly-paid stars — nine players are in the top 15 of their positions in annual average salary — are depended on to carry the load, the 49ers have played far too many snaps without them.
Of the 22 players who started in the Super Bowl, only fullback Kyle Juszczyk, center Jake Brendel, right tackle Colton McKivitz, Warner and safety Ji’Ayir Brown have not missed a game with an injury.
Six San Francisco Pro Bowlers from last season — McCaffrey, Williams, Charvarius Ward, Kittle, Bosa and defensive tackle Javon Hargrave — have missed multiple games, tied with the Dallas Cowboys for the most by any team this season.
That doesn’t account for Aiyuk, who has been out since Week 7 with a torn ACL and MCL in his right knee, linebacker Dre Greenlaw, who hasn’t played since tearing his left Achilles in the Super Bowl and Purdy, who missed the Week 12 loss to Green Bay with a right shoulder ailment.
“I don’t want to make excuses about the injuries, but it is very difficult playing without about half your team,” Lenoir said. “I feel like we still have got enough guys in this locker room to win.”
The 49ers have also dealt with personal tragedies amid the injuries, adding to the mental toll of a tough season. Rookie receiver Ricky Pearsall was shot in the chest in an attempted robbery days before the opening game; Ward’s 1-year-old daughter, Amani Joy, died in October; and Williams’ son, Trent Williams Jr., was stillborn in November. Each player took time away from the team.
IF THE 49ERS want to reach the postseason for a fourth consecutive year and fifth time in six seasons, they’ll need to string together wins — starting Thursday against the Rams. They’ll probably need help from elsewhere, though it’s too soon to start doing any detailed scenario studies.
“It can’t be ‘what is the end going to look like?'” Purdy said. “It’s just being in the moment and not looking too far ahead. And so, with that comes playing together as a team and playing desperate because we don’t have room to lose. That’s just where we’re at.”
After the Rams, the 49ers will have 10 days in between games that they hope will allow some of their currently injured stars to return. Williams (ankle) will miss his fourth game but there’s some hope Bosa (hip/oblique), who is listed as questionable, will return. Greenlaw is also listed as questionable as he looks to play for the first time this season. He was a full participant Wednesday, which means he has a real chance to be activated to the 53-man roster and debut against the Rams.
San Francisco then must travel to Miami, host the Detroit Lions and finish with a trip to Arizona to play the Cardinals. ESPN Analytics ranks that as the seventh-most difficult remaining schedule but still favors the 49ers to beat the Rams, Dolphins and Cardinals, but not the Lions.
For now, there’s no time to watch the scoreboard for any games but the one they’re playing, a point driven home in a Saturday night meeting with a message that might have been delivered too late.
“We treated it like a playoff game and that’s what they are going forward,” Warner said. “Every game means everything.”
