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It’s not often that you can ask an array of players on a 53-man football team to sum up the state of that team’s season, and they all come back to the same word. But for the 49ers, the state of play here in 2024 seems to be straightforward: Things are weird.
Coming off a 12-5 season and a trip to the Super Bowl in February, San Francisco revamped the defense, withstood a pair of high-profile holdouts from star tackle Trent Williams and star receiver Brandon Aiyuk, and came into the 2024 season looking poised to retain control of the NFC.
But other than a pair of home wins against the lowly Jets and Patriots, the 49ers have suffered losses to the Vikings, Rams and Cardinals to get to 2-3. Worse, they held 10-point fourth-quarter leads in both games.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Michael Silver prodded some of the 49ers for their thoughts on the season. Said star corner Charvarius Ward, “This year, for sure, it feels weird. It feels real, real weird.
“I mean, hopefully, it’ll turn around, but it’s just real peculiar. We’ve got a lot of talent, and we’re losing games we’re supposed to win.”
‘It Does Feel Weird’
Ward was not alone in that assessment of the state of the 49ers. Fellow cornerback Deommodore Lenoir told Silver much the same thing following the loss to the Cardinals.
“Yeah, losing to Arizona — it does feel weird,” Lenoir said. “In my four years here, we don’t do that (often). So, I can agree with that.”
Indeed, the 49ers had beaten the Cardinals in four straight matchups before Sunday.
Silver also quoted fullback Kyle Juszczyk about the 49ers’ downturn. As Juszczyk pointed out, the 49ers are not—and should not be—in panic mode, but there has been something difficult to name when it comes to the team’s inability to finish games and beat teams they should beat.
It is … you guessed it, weird.
“I mean, it’s weird. It’s not like everything’s fine, but it’s also not like the world’s crumbling,” Juszczyk said.
49ers Injuries, 4th-Quarter Woes Can Be Fixed
The 49ers can take comfort in two realities that could make this season feel less and less weird as it progresses. One is that they’ve been dealing with a raft of injuries. Most important has been the absence of Christian McCaffrey, who has been on injured reserve and has not played yet this season. While Jordan Mason has been effective in his place, so much of what the 49ers do revolves around McCaffrey’s versatility and playmaking ability.
But the 49ers have had to fight through injuries on the offensive and defensive lines, too, and now will be without kicker Jake Moody for at least a few weeks, because of a high ankle sprain. No doubt, an injured kicker qualifies as weirdness.
Coach Kyle Shanahan, though, does not really see all this as weirdness. As you’d expect from a coach, he sees very specific examples of a lack of execution, adding up to a couple of bad losses.
“It comes down to specifics,” Shanahan told reporters on Monday. “So, it’s hard to give a generic answer. But in these two games, these two division games that we believe we should have won with the lead we had in the second half, I thought this one was worse than the Rams one in terms of we got sloppier in terms of our turnovers and things like that, not scoring in the second half.
“When you have a lead on people you need to finish them. The way you finish people is you continue to score and if you aren’t doing that, you can’t turn it over and you’ve got to stop people at the end.”
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