The season from hell: San Francisco 49ers hobble to the finish of a bleak year
Santa Clara County announced Saturday yet another blow to the San Francisco 49ers’ season: The county was banning all practices and games for contact sports for three weeks.
It was just another day for the 49ers, whose 2020 campaign has become a hobbling punchline.
Earlier in the week, 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan’s Zoom conference call with reporters Friday summed up this terrible, no good, very bad season. He announced yet another starter would miss time with an injury.
This time, it was veteran offensive lineman Tom Compton, who has taken over the right guard spot in recent weeks. Compton reported concussion symptoms to the training staff following Thursday’s walkthrough practice and won’t play Sunday against the Los Angeles Rams.
Seriously.
The 49ers, who are having the worst injury season in recent memory, couldn’t have a light walkthrough on Thanksgiving, coming off a bye week, without a player going down. That would be a surprising development to anyone not paying attention to just how poorly everything has gone for San Francisco this season.
That news was accompanied by Shanahan indicating he’s not expecting any of the seven remaining players on the reserve/COVID-19 list to play Sunday in L.A.
Only left tackle Trent Williams has an outside chance at playing, Shanahan said, while receiver Brandon Aiyuk, defensive tackle D.J. Jones and others are likely to sit out. That means there’s a chance Sunday’s game against the Rams looks a lot like the team’s blowout loss to to the Packers earlier this month that felt more like a preseason game than rematch of last season’s NFC Championship game.
A season of 49ers miscues
This is the same team that had an MRI truck break down on its way to the Greenbrier in West Virginia after the team lost defensive linemen Nick Bosa and Solomon Thomas to season-ending knee injuries, quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo to a high ankle sprain and running back Raheem Mostert to a knee sprain. That was after the team plane was crashed into before the team could get in the air, causing a long delay, and around the time Shanahan was fined $100,000 for not wearing his mask properly on the sidelines.
Of course, that was a week after losing George Kittle (knee) and Richard Sherman (calf), though Sherman is expected to make his return Sunday in L.A. The 49ers also had a sink hole open up in the parking lot just yards from their practice field, where certain reporters parked regularly during training camp (ahem).
It all sounds made up, but it’s not.
The bad (and symbolic?) news has been unrelenting. The team during its bye, when it was supposed to get healthier for the stretch run (Sherman, Mostert and receiver Deebo Samuel are coming back Sunday), placed eight players on the reserve/COVID list and were only able to get three back. It led to San Francisco having to close its facility last week, canceling bye week workouts and forcing meetings this week to be done virtually.
The team only had one normal practice, on Wednesday, before lightening the load with walkthrough sessions on Thursday and Friday, which is hardly ideal ahead of a game against the 7-3 Rams, who are coming off wins over NFC powers Seattle and Tampa Bay. It was because so few players were available.
“It’s been a challenge,” Shanahan said Friday. “We were just too low on guys and if we would have gone full speed, it would have really hurt a certain group of players. So, we had a walk through for everyone, just to get us through it. We were able to have one full speed period a day of seven on seven. So, that’s been the challenge.”
Fred Warner was the the team’s only active linebacker on the practice field Friday because Dre Greenlaw and Azeez Al-Shaair were out with non-COVID-19 illnesses while Joe Walker remains on the reserve/COVID list since Nov. 19 and Demetrius Flannigan-Fowles works back from a hamstring strain.
Tight end Jordan Reed, who’s appeared in half the team’s games, was also out with an illness, leaving Ross Dwelley, rookie Charlie Woerner and practice squad member Chase Harrell as the only available players at the position.
49ers still have an outside shot at playoffs
The 49ers (4-6) maintain they’re clinging to their unlikely playoff hopes. They have an 11 percent chance at making the postseason, according to FiveThirtyEight, which would increase to 24 percent with a win Sunday, and decrease to 5 percent with a loss.
A list of the 10 most-important 49ers coming into this Super-Bowl-or-bust season would look something like this: Nick Bosa, George Kittle, Richard Sherman, Fred Warner, Jimmy Garoppolo, Trent Williams, Deebo Samuel, Dee Ford, Raheem Mostert and Brandon Aiyuk. Healthy seasons from those players would have put the 49ers among the favorites in a lackluster NFC.
But Warner is the only one of those players to appear in all 10 games. Bosa played in two. Kittle, six. Sherman, one. Garoppolo six. Williams, nine (and likely to miss Sunday). Samuel, four. Ford, one. Mostert, four. Aiyuk, eight (and likely to miss Sunday).
And while Nick Mullens will continue to serve as Shanahan’s starting quarterback, he’ll do so knowing the list of skill players to appear in all 10 games this season includes fullback Kyle Juszczyk, Dwelley, receiver Trent Taylor and running back Jerick McKinnon. Juszczyk is the only projected starter heading into the season among that group.
According to Spotrac, the 49ers have $86.1 million of their 2020 salary cap allotment on injured reserve, a staggering 42.6 percent of their spending. No other team has more than 27.6 percent (Dallas Cowboys).
San Francisco’s season is a microcosm of what’s happened throughout the world in this unforgettably rotten 2020. Any hint of good news for Shanahan has been overshadowed by bad news in the form of an offensive lineman suffering a concussion during a walkthrough, the team plane getting crashed into on the tarmac, an MRI truck breaking down on its way to test players or a sink hole coming close to enveloping part of the team’s practice field.
As the news piles up, it becomes more difficult to come away with any real conclusions about this season, other than the end not coming soon enough.
This story was originally published November 28, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
