Time to get hot? 49ers hope to use Rams win to get on a roll, make playoffs

The San Francisco 49ers entered last week’s game as a team with a serious stagger.

Their defense is ravaged by injuries, their quarterback was coming off one of the worst performances of his career that was ended by getting benched at halftime and the offensive line and had been pushed around to the tune of 10 sacks allowed over two weeks.

So what changed for quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo and San Francisco’s offense Week 6 against the Rams?

“It just kinda felt like the huddle on Sunday night just had this one heartbeat to it,” star tight end George Kittle said on the Candlestick Chronicles podcast this week. “Everyone was locked in.”

If the 49ers are going to make a playoff run in 2020, beating L.A. is shaping up to be a turning point. The gap between 2-4 and 3-3 is the delta between staying in the postseason mix the rest of the year and a fan base hoping the team would start losing every game to get the best draft pick possible.

San Francisco rebounded from the bad start to the season by getting back to its roots of running the ball, testing the defense horizontally and getting the ball out of Jimmy Garoppolo’s hands quickly. It led to a game that looked a lot more like the team that went 13-3 in 2019 and played in the Super Bowl. Not like a bumbling team that would lose to sizable underdogs and begin a season 0-3 on its home field.

Perhaps that feeling the 49ers players had Sunday night can be channeled again into more wins as the schedule toughens, starting with road games against New England and Seattle followed by a Thursday night home game against the Packers and a trip back to New Orleans.

First drive TD set the tone

It started with a strong week of practice, including the Thursday session in which Kittle called the best of the season to date. It led to coming out hot in the first drive possession Sunday as Deebo Samuel scored his first touchdown of the year.

It was an emphatic sequence for a team that badly needed it.

“I think my favorite thing about it really was halfway through the first drive and even going into the second, like you could just feel the confidence of the huddle. And that’s something you could feel every snap last year,” Kittle said. “I wouldn’t say that we were missing it (this year), but we weren’t all locked in to the same thing at the same time.”

Part of getting to that point was getting kicked in the teeth the two weeks prior. The 49ers made a slew of mistakes and failed to hold their fourth quarter lead to the Eagles on Oct. 4, and then got blown out for the first time since the 2018 season a week later against a Dolphins team that entered the game as underdogs by more than a touchdown.

“I was hoping that the Miami game would spring us forward and really say a lot about our team and went out and got completely embarrassed as we all know,” head coach Kyle Shanahan said Wednesday. “I also think that did something to us, even though it was obviously a negative with losing that and hurting our record, especially the way we did it, but I think it affected us in a good way going forward.”

Shanahan’s point was everything a team experiences impacts how it moves through a season. And as difficult as getting their brakes beat off by the Dolphins was, the 49ers might not have thumped the Rams, 21-6, in the first half without it before finishing the win with Samuel’s running play that forcefully converted a third-and-7.

“The energy we came out with, the confidence we came out with, the game plan that we came out with,” said right tackle Mike McGlinchey, “I think the only way that you can materialize that is through hard work and (going through) tough s---.”

‘The last two weeks have been really, really hard’

McGlinchey continued: “The last two weeks have been really, really hard. We got our asses kicked by Miami. We didn’t close against Philly. And we should have done that. And for us to go through that hard stuff had us leading into that moment on Sunday. And it was building, and you have to experience adversity, you have to experience tough times in order for those kind of moments to rise and for those kind of confident, for everybody to grow together.”

The NFL is a week-to-week league, of course, and it’s going to take another hard week of practice to get to that same level Sunday against coach Bill Belichick and the Patriots, who are coming off a bad loss of their own on Sunday to the Denver Broncos. Surely Belichick’s team is feeling something similar to the way San Francisco felt after losing the Eagles and Dolphins, which should have Shanahan’s team on high alert for a tough game.

“We had a lot more success this week versus the Rams and so I don’t look at it as, ‘Oh, that’s going to be better and we’re going to play even better because of it,’” Shanahan said. “It’s a new week. You’re going against a new team. It’s more X’s and O’s and execution and giving it your all. If you don’t give it your all, it doesn’t matter and if you don’t have a good plan, it really doesn’t matter. So I think our guys, the more they realize that, it’s trying as hard as you can every week and blocking out everything else and just getting better as the year goes.”

This story was originally published October 22, 2020 at 7:08 AM.