Forty Niners Forever

Is KC that good, or are we that bad? I think the answer is yes. This season is unfolding (unravelling?) a lot like last year’s season. High expectations smacked down into the dirt as the team flails around stumbling, bumbling, and fumbling victories away like farts in a hurricane. Injuries are a problem yet again, and since we are back under the shakey hand of Jimmy Garoppolo, we are the gang that can’t shoot straight, or play good football for more than a span of, oh, two games?

Funny thing is, the rest of the league appears to be suffering the same malaise. Not that I give a fuck about a lot of other teams, but half the teams in the league are at 4-3 or 3-4. Parity? Mediocrity? I don’t know. Carolina fires its head coach, trades away their 2 best offensive players and then beat the living shit out of the Brady-led Bucs. Green bay gets beat by the Heinekie muffler guy and the Washington Generals. The New York football Fucking Giants are 6-1? The Jets are winning?

What in the wide wide world of sports is going on here? The Niners were riding high 2 weeks ago. 3-2 and in sole possession of 1st place in the division. 2 week later? A disastrous loss to the fucking Falcons, and yesterday’s humbling and we are in last.

I guess the point here, in the immortal words of Matt Groening, “Keep your expectations tiny, you‘ll go through life not so whiney.”

I have considerably lowered any expectations for this team as currently constituted. Mainly because I’ve come to the realization Jimmy Garoppolo is not very smart, and Kyle Shanahan doesn’t know what to do about that fact. Every game follows the same script. Fast starts followed by offensive struggles, a big turnover, and a bunch of penalties. The only game the Niners didn’t have a lead in was the Falcons game.

Yeah, I’ll watch. I may even go to a game. But I’m not expecting anything less than fair to poor football at this point. I mean, they are their own worst enemy. Shanahan is 5 years in, and we still make stupid mistakes over and over. False start to get out of FG range? Yep. Have too many WRs in the same place at the same time? Sure. This team is undisciplined and inconsistent to say the least. As is Jimmy. Crucial drops are a forte.

We are too full of talent to be terrible, but at this point I would be surprised to see us make the playoffs. I think we are a 9 win team. Our schedule isn’t even all that hard. I just don’t have hope this team can play consistently enough to matter. I can’t believe Shanahan still has the team behind him. rThen again, I can’t believe Jimmy G is still looked at as the answer. Lose to the Rams and we might as well hit the Brock Purty era.

But boy, it would really suck to fall to the top of the draft and not have any picks. Thanks, Kyle!!!

Jesus. Sure, the defense was terrible. Losing Dre Greenlaw was the death knell for the defense in the 2nd half, but Jesus fucking Christ, Shanahan comes up with the most garbage plays in the red zone. On the pick, which was absolutely God-awful, the 49ers had 3 WRs grouped together on the goal line. It happened later in the game and nearly resulted in another pick.

And, beyond that, on the motherfucking 3rd down pick, CMC was on the sideline.

Such brilliant coaching. Once again, stupid fucking penalties ruled the day. False starts, offsides, illegal formations. These pre-snap penalties are ALL on the coaching staff not getting the players prepared. 10 fucking penalties, and they all seemed to be killers.

People will point to the defense sucking, but losing Greenlaw was the reason so many screens and sweeps worked. And Reid of course adjusted the offense after their relative struggles in the 1st half.

Jimmy and Kyle both comported themselves badly in this game. Jennings had 2 huge stupid penalties, the special teams failed spectacularly on the KO return. The defense gave up a 3rd and 20, 3rd and 11, 3rd and 6, and plenty of other big plays. No pass rush. Not sure why we didn’t scheme up any way to get pressure on Mahomes. He didn’t have to run at all. Just pitch and catch all over the field.

Reid schooled Shanahan big time. Shanahan is absolutely clueless in the red zone. Outcoached and outplayed. Their offense crushed out defense.

Is this a wake-up call? Jimmy had decent numbers, but fucked this game up. The line was OK till it wasn’t. McGlinchey is a glaring piece of shit in pass coverage at RT. The safety? Please. Williams whiffed on his block, and Jimmy just doesn’t know how to throw a ball away. He took 3 needless sacks and fumbled because he’s fucking clueless on how to just get rid of the ball when the pocket is collapsing.

This may be a 6-11 team at this rate. Good teams are killing us. Bad teams are beating us. I have absolutely no confidence in Shanahan or Garoppolo at this point.

Who the fuck are we? We are a team with a new toy. One that will play tomorrow in some form or fashion. The excitement in getting McCaffery will hopefully get this offense out of 2nd gear. But this offense goes as well as Jimmy G directs it, and Kyle Shanahan calls it. Turn the ball over a couple times and we lose. It’s automatic. Call stupid fucking plays in crunch time, and we lose. Wilson’s fumbles haven’t helped, and I’m sure this played into the decision to GET CMC, but here we are. An offensive team that is struggling wildly on offense. 23rd in 1st downs is catastrophic.

We are also a team with some injured players coming back. Good news is Williams, Bosa, C Ward, McGlinchey, and Ebukam are all off the injury report. Bad news? C ward is questionable, but he was practicing. Talanoa Hufanga is questionable as well, but he’s on the concussion protocol. If he passes the last test he’ll play.

Will we be better with all these players coming back? I hope so. I’m at a loss again as to who we are and what we can do. KC isn’t as strong as they were but they aren’t slouches. They can score, but their defense is not so good. They give up 25 points a game. But they score 30 a game.

Our problem? We only score 20 a game. We once again will live and die by Shanahan’s play calling and Jimmy’s QB play. The D should hold up provided Bosa and Ward are (hopefully fully) back, and the O comes through. We need to score early and keep the pressure on all game. Something this team and this coaching staff struggles with.

Is this the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?

I have no goddamn clue at this point. I just can’t WAIT to see all the fucking ‘highlights’ from the Super Bowl from a couple years ago. FUUUUUUUUUCK!

Well, after going through a flock of injured running backs these past 5 years of the Shanahan era, the 49ers went and got a usually-injured running back in Christian McCaffrey. When healthy he’s been a versatile weapon, gaining a combined 2300 yards in 2019. But his last 2 seasons he’s missed 23 games.

We gave up a 2, 3, and 4 in next year’s draft, along with a 5 in the 2024 draft, so I guess we are taking a bye year for 2023 draft. We might have a couple comp picks and a 7th rounder. You know. Our wheelhouse. But whatevs. Their draft record is, like every aspect of this goddamn fucking team, wildly inconsistent.

I guess Shanahan is desperate for points, as our offensive guru, or Vanilla Ice Cream as I call him, is 18th in yards, 20th in scoring, and 23rd in 1st downs. Not a very stellar set of numbers for our resident genius. I mean, he single-handedly ruined Lance, and is now stuck with Garoppolo again. Mr. Inconsistent. And it shows. Jimmy is 2-2. The team is 3-3. The offense is stagnant. And we don’t move the ball with ANY sense of urgency when needed.

The good news about the CMC acquisition is this is likely the end of the Deebo-as RB scheme that was another injury in the making. McCaffery, when healthy is a stud. But to me this is yet another guy who will simply run up the middle, and catch 5 yard swing passes as this is all Kyle seems to trust Jimmy Gee-I-threw-another-pick-olo to throw. And he’ll likely get hurt.

To me, this move smacks of desperation. Kyle is spinning his wheels with a team that should be dominating, at least 5-1, but they can’t get out of their own way. Penalties, turnovers, and major inconsistency offensively points squarely at Shanahan and his game mismanagement.

We have lost 3 games to shitty teams. Our wins were decent enough, but the NFL these days is mediocrity in motion. Most everyone is 3-3 and any team can beat any other team. but we should NOT be this bad.

Again, this is one of those games where I think we get slaughtered. So, naturally we will win. Who the fuck knows?

Once again the 49ers are the drama-queens of the NFL. Will Jimmy revert to form? Will Trey Lance ever get to throw a pass? Will the injuries continue to mount? Will Kyle draft another worthless 3rd round running back? Will this be yet another lost season due to injuries and an ineffective offense? Will the entire defense go on IR? Will I stop caring about this team until they get rid of Vanilla Ice Cream?

Will Kyle Shanahan hire an offensive coordinator? Saw this floated in the Chronicle a couple days ago and I’m all for it. Kyle is very good at designing plays. What he is not good at is putting them in the right order. He needs to hire someone who has a better feel for in-game decisions. Kyle gets very vanilla when he is going on a short yardage play. And he fucking flails late in games. See Super bowl XVIVIXC. Whatever the fuck. See the NFCCG. See the Bears game. See the Denver game.

The 49ers were down 14 points with the ball and 10 minutes on the clock. So of course Kyle plays it like he has a 7 point LEAD. The 49ers burned 8 minutes crawling down the field getting to the 22 and Kyle promptly gagged away the game with two stupid calls on 3rd and 4th downs.

Watching Bill Walsh all those years saw him do things like play action on 3rd and 1. Misdirection. Not run up the middle. A play that we run so fucking badly that it fails prolly 85% of the time. So, naturally, Kyle goes for the bad play. THEn to make shit worse, he runs a play very much like the Raider game the other day, and had 2 WRs run the same route, and Jimmy naturally threw it into the crowd. Game over.

No up-tempo. No no-huddle. Just a plodding slow-ass drive to essentially end the game for us. Even if we DO score the TD.

And Jimmy? Mr. I-never-set-my-feet-for-ANY-fucking-throw-in-my life? His basic throwing stance is one where both feet are pointing to the end zone parallel to the goal line and he arms it somewhere. Flat-footed and no leg drive. Say the line sucks. Whatever. Burrow plays behind the worst line in the NFL and still gets passes off that go more than 5 yards and DON’T clang off WRs hands becuase they are too high/off target.

The ONE FUCKING TIME he hits a WR on a deep route, Dennis Weaver McCloud drops it. And of course Dean Woermer had to follow suit. And a BS holding call. 3 plays that equalled about 120 yards of passing.

I’m so fucking tired of this shit over and over and over. This looks like a 7-9 team right now. Right when I feel good about this team, they lay a stinking turd on the plastic grass. Maybe playing on real grass will give them some hope. Right. And I have acreage on Mars to sell you.

In injuries, Yay. Once again this team has shot to the top of the league as the most injured team to play any sport on Earth. And it has been for quite a while. Yeah, football is inherently injury-prone, but at what point do the 49ers evaluate their conditioning staff? Year in and year out they are the most injured team in the league. Javon Kinlaw, yet another 1st round pick who looks to be forever injured, is injured. The guy he replaced is a stalwart on defense, and our resident super-genius Kyle Shanahan didn’t even bother to talk to him before shipping him off to Indiana.

Charvarius Ward got hurt. Sampson Ebukam was on and off the field numerous times with cramps. McGlinchey strained a calf. Not to mention the D line which was previously decimated by strains and muscle pulls in last week’s game in Carolina.

Field grass, or whatever they call that shit, really needs to be addressed by the league. The end of yesterday’s game, and countless others across the NFL landscape, saw guys cramping up left and right, and every other play saw an injury. These owners are worth billions, but can’t water a fucking field? The New Jersey field turf took out the whole 2020 season with games 2 and 3 being played there vs the Jets and Giants. Carolina? Same thing. Sofi? Yep. Atlanta, Minnesota, Indianapolis, on and on. You’d think that all the attention being paid to player safety, this would be a no-brainer. AZ and Vegas have grass fields in their domes. It can be done.

The injury rate on fake grass compared to grass is pretty obvious. Most markedly on non-contact leg injuries.

https://nflpa.com/posts/only-natural-grass-can-level-the-nfls-playing-field

The gist of the article is:

The data supports the anecdotes you’ll hear from me and other players: artificial turf is significantly harder on the body than grass. Based on NFL injury data collected from 2012 to 2018, not only was the contact injury rate for lower extremities higher during practices and games held on artificial turf, NFL players consistently experienced a much higher rate of non-contact lower extremity injuries on turf compared to natural surfaces. Specifically, players have a 28% higher rate of non-contact lower extremity injuries when playing on artificial turf. Of those non-contact injuries, players have a 32% higher rate of non-contact knee injuries on turf and a staggering 69% higher rate of non-contact foot/ankle injuries on turf compared to grass.

Duh. Let’s not protect our players with a better playing surface. I know the 49ers have a turf field to practice on. Does that mean our guys are getting hurt before games practicing on that shit? Fuck, I don’t know, but yesterday’s game showed that it is hard to win games with your backup defensive line in the game. Now we are down our best corner and yet another offensive lineman.

Most of the attention on yesterday’s loss went to the inept offense, and a lot of it is warranted, but the defense could not stop Marcus fucking Mariota from going 12-13 for 130 yards and running through our depleted defensive line all game.

Another desultory loss that looked like a Shanahan special. The team was slow off the bat giving up a long TD drive, and immediately shot themselves in the foot with the scoop and score fumble by Jeff Wilson. The offense did get clicking with 2 nice TD drives capped by Brandon Aiyuk TDs, but that was it for the O.

Jimmy hit what should have been 2 big plays but a deep pass to Woerner was dropped for what would have been a 35 yard catch, and I don’t fucking remember who dropped another 20 yard pass. Instead of 2 big plays, we got 2 drive-killing drops. Why isn’t Kittle on that route? I don’t know. Blocking?

By the end of the 3rd quarter, the D was getting hurt more and more, and they just couldn’t stop Mariota and the Atl run game. As much as the end of the game turned into the usual Shanahan panic show, and Jimmy throwing a pick into tight coverage, and a complete lack of clock management down the stretch of the 4th quarter, a lot of the blame simply goes to the defense being wiped out by injuries. The wonderful turf saw players going down nearly every play from the 3rd quarter to the end.

But Jimmy did throw the obligatory pick late in the 3rd to quash any hope we had by throwing into double coverage. Our lone good drive late was a travesty of penalties and wasted time until the horrible plays on 3rd and 1 and 4th and 1. The kiss of death for Shanny.

If you think you are gonna go for it on 4th down, you try something more than the run up the fucking middle. Play action? Nope. Let’s lose half a yard and then, much like the Raiders in Monday night, crash 2 WRs into each other and throw the 4th down pass into the scrum. Brilliant. Shanahan continues to look like a deer in the headlights during crunch time. And Jimmy obliges by throwing into coverage too much late.

Fuck me. The team looked lazy, unprepared, and were outplayed on both sides of the ball.

Monday night at home and then a cross-country game in Carolina? Thanks schedulers. But, camp week in Virginia is over and we face the . Kinlaw is likely done-zo again, and the team is fairly beat-up heading into another dreaded field turf game. Let’s hope they aren’t looking too far ahead to the KC game, and they go injury-free. Atl is 2-3, like most of the league. They run well, so we have to be ready for that. Mariota is not doing great, so we should be able to take this.

Busy morning, so here’s the thread.

Timing is kinda weird as I was just talking about this, and I didn’t catch this when it happened during the game, but announcer Ian Eagle (?) said during the game that when he talked to Jimmy G during the week, he dropped this grenade:

“We asked Jimmy about his relationship with Kyle Shanahan. He said, ‘The relationship has actually taken big steps.’ They’re now talking the same language.

We asked Kyle about it, he said, ‘We’re in a really good place. He knows how I feel about him, and he knows that I believe in him.’

Whaaaaaaat? Here we are, entering season 5 of this pairing, and they now see eye-to-eye? This plays directly into what I was saying yesterday regarding the ways other QBs under Shanahan have grown (Matty Ice, Shaub, RG III for ex) while Jimmy seems to be not catching on. Yeah, Jimmy’s tenure has been fraught with injuries (a recent 49er tradition) but, these last two games anyway have been marked by no stupid turnovers or bungled plays.

Granted, the Denver game was a debacle. The fumble and pick lost the game for the 49ers. And we’ve been down this road a few times before. The only thing consistent about Jimmy is his maddening inconsistency. But even this early, Jimmy has hit some decent plays downfield, and has stopped with the dumb mistakes. For now.

But this all begs questions. Was there a ton of friction behind the scenes regarding the Trey Lance draft? Did Jimmy simply pull his usual disappearing act? Has Kyle gone out of his way to ridicule Jimmy in private? Did they finally air out their differences on wanting to trade/cut him? More drama for the grist mill, but for now, there appears to be some sort of change in the relationship between Kyle and Jimmy.

Let’s hope it results in a bunch of wins and some offensive consistency. As we’ve seen, this team doesn’t need to be scoring 35 points a game, just something around 27. Do that and we will win most games.

Just when you think it’s safe to call the Carolina game a rousing success the medical news comes back as bad. Kyle Shanahan actually kept his foot near the accelerator as the team finally scored consistently in the 2nd half of yesterday’s game. Granted, the last TD was the result of ‘hey-I’m-about-to-be-fired’ lizard-man Matt Rule going for in on 4th and 10 on his own 10 yard line. Derp. Still and all, the offense scored 20 points in the 2nd half. Prolly all of last season’s worth of 2nd half points scored.

Jimmy spread the ball around to 7 WRs with a solid 18-30 253, 2 TDs and NO PICKS. Aiyuk had a strong game, George Kittle had some nice grabs, and Jauan Jennings had the catches of the day, breaking tackles and getting much-needed 1st downs down the stretch. Jeff Wilson had 120 yards on the ground, and Tevin Coleman came back to the fold and contributed a couple outstanding catches and a rushing TD to go along with nice catch and run for the first score.

The defense was great, contributing 6 sacks, another defensive TD, and they neutralized Carolina’s big weapon, Christian McCaffery. he had a 50 on the ground/50 catching and a TD, but he was not a big factor.

Sure, there were a couple early penalties that extended a couple drives, but overall a strong game by the O and D. Special teams? Well, they had 2 lapses on kickoffs that resulted in Robbie Gould having to make tackles. The first one he seemed to hurt his shoulder. The 2nd one he appeared to hurt his knee.

Speaking of injuries, we lost Emmanuel Moseley for the season. Another victim of the fucking fake grass some of these cheap-fucking-skate fucking owners subject players to. Jimmie Ward returned to his broken ways, coming back for a grand total of one play where he broke his hand. Whether he tries to play with that remains to be seen, but I saw Jimmy Johnson intercept a pass back in 1970 with casts on BOTH hands. More recently, Patrick Willis played with casts on both hands at one point.

Also, Nick Bosa went out early in the 3rd quarter. Don’t know the extent of his groin injury, but I’m sure the news will be out there soon enough. So, we are down AA, Bosa, J Ward, Gould, Kinlaw, Williams, McKivitz, Moseley, Jason (everything hurts and I’m dying) Verrett, and Al-Shaair. Yet the defense continues to do well.

We are staying in Virginia for the week for the upcoming Atlanta game, hopefully some of these guys get healthy and this team stops losing players every fucking weekend.

At some point, Jed has to look at this training staff and say WHAT THE FUCK, GUYS?!?!? DO YOUR FUCKING JOB!!