Heading into last season’s bye week, the San Francisco 49ers were slipping. Their offense had scored seventeen points in each of three straight games – all losses – and something felt out. The euphoria of battering the Dallas Cowboys 42-10 was long gone and some fear was starting to set in. The run defense has been flat for several games, quarterback Brock Purdy committed ugly turnovers and there has been a lack of continuity across the board.
The focus at the time was on defensive coordinator Steve Wilks. And Shanahan’s response to that was to move him from the booth to the sideline so he could better communicate with his players. The next game, the 49ers held the Jacksonville Jaguars to three points. It was the first of six straight 49er wins and San Francisco finished the season 7-2 before reaching the Super Bowl.
It is a memory with several benefits. Some might see it as Shanahan scapegoating his defensive coordinator — whom he later fired after a Super Bowl loss to the Kansas City Chiefs — at a time when Shanahan’s own offense was a big part of the problem. Others might see it as Shanahan shaking up his staff’s routine and trying to spark a different dynamic and energize the team.
Whatever it was, it feels relevant to the 2024 version of the 49ers. They’re off balance again, this time fumbling in a fairly critical 20-17 home loss to the Seattle Seahawks, dropping San Francisco to 5-5 and the bottom of an extremely tight NFC West, thanks to a woeful 1-3 record in the division. Sunday’s loss hurt in more ways than one, from star forward Nick Bosa suffering his second oblique injury of the season, to Purdy failing under pressure on a key third-down hot read (which could have spelled a win for San Francisco), until the 49ers’ defense seemed half asleep as the Seahawks mounted an astonishing 12-play, 80-yard touchdown drive in the final minutes of the fourth quarter.
With that drive, the Seahawks put themselves back in the running to win the NFC West — which could only produce one playoff team — and deal a crucial blow to the 49ers’ attempts to move to the top of the division. The complication for San Francisco this year? There is no Wilks to blame. There is no bye week to get everything right. And now the focus is starting to shift to Shanahan’s offensive play-calling. This comes on the heels of a testy tone he struck with a 49ers beat reporter on Friday, following a question about the number of plays Purdy has available when he steps to the line of scrimmage.
Oh, and let’s not forget: The 49ers’ next two games are on the road and across the country – first against the 7-3 Green Bay Packers next Sunday, and then against the 9-2 muscle-bound Buffalo Bills the match. Sunday evening prime-time slot on December 1. That should be a pretty amazing horizon for a San Francisco franchise that is 3-3 in its past six games, has seen Purdy throw six interceptions in that span and is suddenly in the midst of streamlining the offense through running back Christian McCaffrey, who has played his first two games of the season in the past two weeks.
Take a step back and what you see is a 49ers season that may hinge on the outcome of the next two weeks. San Francisco’s coaching staff had to know that as they hosted Seattle. For a mid-November game, it was a must-win situation – if only to prevent the 49ers from resurrecting virtually the entire NFC West and ramping up the pressure to steal games in very tough spots to secure the upcoming two weeks to win.
“Just extremely disappointed,” Shanahan said of Sunday’s loss. “I thought we had a chance to put them away a number of times throughout the game. I thought the fines we got for some of the trips would only get us killed. I thought we had good momentum and then had a penalty that ended the ride on two big drives – that cost us points on both. We still should have put it away there on that last drive and had every opportunity to do so, and we missed a few opportunities to do that. … If you let people hang around, that’s what happens.”
For Shanahan – who has occasionally (or often) been criticized for his struggles to win tight games late in the fourth quarter – it will only reinforce views on his game management. Even if he doesn’t call plays for the defense, it still reflects on the head coach if his team can’t close out close games. Especially when those games are instead grabbed by an opposing offense and a late quarterback. In addition to the Seahawks’ Geno Smith, the 49ers also gave up crucial drives to Matthew Stafford and the Los Angeles Rams and Kyler Murray and the Arizona Cardinals in two losses earlier this season.
It’s not that the 49ers aren’t capable of winning. It is that too often they do not have the opportunity to do so near. And losing close games only makes the margin for error even smaller in light of the injuries plaguing the 49ers, including the loss of wideout Brandon Aiyuk for the season, the in-and-out health of tight end George Kittle, the always tense medical status of Deebo Samuel Sr. and McCaffrey, and now the indirect problems with Bosa.
All of that now weighs on what Shanahan has described as the “second-half surge” that good teams have to put together in NFL schedules. An increase that he cannot yet evaluate at the moment, despite having arrived at a crucial point of the season.
“I’m not going to talk about the whole second half [of the season] – the second half of the season just started,” Shanahan said on Sunday. “We won last week and lost this week. And I thought we had every chance to win this game, but we couldn’t. We have to make sure we find a way to win next week.”
For now, the 49ers are what they are: the defending NFC champions who lost in the Super Bowl and have fallen to a mediocre record of 5-5. Now they head into the part of the season that could determine their fate for 2024 and shape the conversation about who is most responsible. Last year it was up to defensive coordinator Steve Wilks. This year it will be more difficult for Shanahan to pin the fall elsewhere.
