For the Niners, a most unusual season

By Art Spander

So similar. And so different. The final game, and the 49ers had the lead going into the final quarter.

They couldn’t hold it a year ago in the Super Bowl, which was notably painful. Or on Sunday, in what ended a season that was as notably unusual, if only a trifle less painful.

A season with the loss of so many key players and, in a day or two, probably a key coach.

A season when a seemingly unstoppable virus, Covid-19, forced the Niners to abandon their training complex in Santa Clara, and forced the players and coaches to leave their homes and families.

A season that created as many questions — the essential one, who will be the starting quarterback in 2021? — as answers.

A season that, with a concluding 26-23 defeat by the Seattle Seahawks at State Farm Stadium near Phoenix, was both distressing, because it ended with a record of 6-10, and encouraging, because players said they gained new respect for teammates.

For the fans, the incidentals become, well, incidental. To them, it’s all about results, and if the Niners had to be transplanted, lock, stock and game plans, from Silicon Valley to the Valley of the Sun for more than a month, well, hey, it isn’t as if they were living in tents.

But sport, like so much in life, is a matter of routine. These weren’t college kids off for a fall break. They were grown men with wives and children and mortgages.

They knew there would be discipline. They knew there would be broken bones and twisted ankles. What they didn’t know until November was they would banned from practicing or playing where the Niners are headquartered — and forced to flee.

It would have been easier to say, this isn’t our year — which it wasn’t — yet in the final game, with a third-string quarterback (C.J. Beathard) with nothing at stake except pride, with thoughts that within minutes they’d be on a flight home, the Niners had a 16-6 lead in the fourth quarter over the playoff-bound Seahawks.

That should count for something, and it counted considerably with head coach Kyle Shanahan.

“I was real proud of the guys today,” Shanahan said. “I thought those guys competed their asses off in all aspects. I told them to hold their heads high. I didn’t think it was a moral victory or anything because I feel we should have won the game.” 

Almost certainly Shanahan and the Niners will lose coordinator Robert Saleh, who designed the defense that held the Seahawks to only two field goals through the first three quarters. “I hope everyone is not very smart and doesn’t hire him,” quipped Shanahan.

The coach wouldn’t offer a comment about the quarterback situation, although he has said as of now Jimmy Garoppolo would be back in charge. Garoppolo only made six games because of an injury. He was replaced by Nick Mullens, who then was hurt himself and replaced by Beathard.

There basically was no replacement for Nick Bosa, the 2019 defensive rookie of the year, who tore up a knee (ACL) in the Niners’ second game of the season. The same thing happened in the same game to another defensive line standout, Solomon Thomas.

Every subsequent game, there would be a graphic on TV showing how many different 49ers were out at one time or another, running backs, quarterbacks, defensive backs — you name them.

“I’m very happy,” said Shanahan, when asked if the end brought relief, if not a championship. “Very excited. It’s the first time I’ve packed two days in advance for anything … Being stuck in the hotel for over 30 days, it does wear on you a little bit. Not just me. The players. The cooks. The equipment guys. Everybody involved with us is ready to get back home.”

And, he pointed out, working for improvement.

“Once we were eliminated from the playoffs, we were ready to move on a little bit and get to next year. But we had to finish it.”

Before it finished them.

Niners’ Trent Williams: ‘Without the ball, it’s impossible to win’

By Art Spander

They tell us good teams find a way to win. This season, the 49ers are finding ways to lose. Therefore, the Niners must not be a very good football team. But you didn’t need any deductive reasoning to know that.

Not after the last two games, one against the Buffalo Bills when they were ineffective on defense, the other on Sunday against the Washington Football Team, when they were, well, terrible on offense.

Terrible, not that they didn’t run or pass — the Niners had 344 yards total to 193 for Washington. Terrible that a pass by Nick Mullens was intercepted and run back 76 yards for a touchdown — the infamous “pick six” — and a fumble by Mullens when he was sacked was returned 47 yards for a touchdown.

Small wonder, then, in their second straight Covid-19-forced home away from home, State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., the Niners were defeated, 23-15, by a team only slightly less worse than they have become. But one that, unlike San Francisco, is going to the playoffs.

Three turnovers Sunday, the two that proved destructive and another lost fumble. There have been a ton of them since Mullens replaced the injured Jimmy Garoppolo — some Mullens’ fault, some not — and they are a primary reason the Niners are 5-8 in a season going nowhere.

As Trent Williams, the offensive tackle who joined the Niners this season after years in Washington, pointed out, “The ball is everything. Without the ball, it’s impossible to win.”

Cycles. We go through them. So do teams. When things are going fine, well, there are lyrics to remind us that all too soon they won’t go well. “Riding high in April,” Frank Sinatra sang, “shot down in May.”

Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. That’s Murphy’s Law. A season after so much went right, until the second half of the Super Bowl, the Niners have been beset by injuries, errors and bad breaks. That’s a blend guaranteed to ruin the hopes of any sporting franchise.

The Niners have been patching and matching and hanging on. Or had been. Was it appropriate that on the first offensive play of the game Sunday, receiver Deebo Samuel reinjured his hamstring and was finished?

Whatever, if you don’t lose fumbles and throw interceptions, you might have a chance.

Last year when he was at Ohio State, Chase Young was making the case why he should be the No. 1 overall pick in this year’s NFL draft. That turned out to be Joe Burrow, the quarterback from LSU. Young went second, to Washington. His claim to be first has some validity.

He tore through the Niners in the second quarter (Williams was out of the game temporarily), knocked the ball from Mullens’ hand and ran it the 47 yards for the score that put Washington in front, 13-7.

That came at the end of the first half. The hit may have been intimidating. On the final play of the third quarter, Mullens was intercepted by Kamren Curl and run back 76 yards for a touchdown.

“We had a bad day,” said Niners coach Kyle Shanahan. “We missed a few opportunities early on offense. You don’t keep getting those again; Nick missed a few open throws. We struggled with some big penalties, I thought we had more drops than we usually have.

“Regardless we could have found a way, if it weren’t for the turnovers.”

Shanahan said after Mullens’ big interception, he thought about replacing him with C.J. Beathard. But as Beathard warmed up, Mullens passed to Kyle Juszczyk for a touchdown.

Mullens said on the fateful pick he was trying to find an outlet.

“You have to protect the ball,” Mullens agreed. “You can’t make that mistake. That changed the game.”

Nothing, unfortunately, is going to change the Niners’ record. “I expect us to play better than we did Sunday,” Shanahan said.

But in this season, expectations are thrown or fumbled away.

Will Shanahan find retribution in this Super Bowl?

By Art Spander
For Maven Sports

MIAMI — Our major sporting events are both a blessing and a curse. We choose to remember the victories. We can’t forget the losses.

For Kyle Shanahan, one defeat in particular stands out. So does one play.

Read the full story here.

Copyright 2020, The Maven 

For Niners, another opening — another backpack question

By Art Spander

MIAMI — Of course there was a question about the backpack. But by Deion Sanders.

Who better to exploit the silliness and salesmanship of the Super Bowl’s media function — relabled Opening Night — than a man who played in the game and now works for the NFL Network, Deion Sanders, old Prime Time himself?

Either Deion has been out of touch or the guys behind the telecast goaded him into asking Kyle Shanahan about the incident, but there was Deion standing next to Shanahan. Network types get individual access, which ordinary journalists do not.

So there is Sanders, who helped the 49ers win Super Bowl XXIX, right where No. LIV will be played Sunday — it’s now called Hard Rock Stadium, formerly Joe Robbie Stadium.

Let’s just say Deion was more impressive with a football in his hands than a microphone. But that doesn’t seem to matter.

Opening Night (sounds like an opera, not a media show) on Monday was at Marlins Park, the baseball stadium, appropriate perhaps because the one that was held three years ago, prior to Super Bowl LI, was at Minute Maid Park, where the Astros play home games.

Shanahan was offensive coordinator for the Atlanta Falcons, who would blow a big lead and lose to New England. But more significantly everyone knew he was about to be named the Niners' new coach.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but I came late, put down my backpack with my laptop and joined the group around Shanahan. Then, I picked up my backpack and went to write. Only, when someone tracked me down, it wasn’t my backpack, it was Shanahan’s.

Hey, it was dark and both packs were green. Both of us ended up with the proper backpacks. We’re three years on. But Shanahan has returned to a Super Bowl.

After Shanahan on Monday night tells Sanders there will be a different approach to this Super Bowl than the one three years ago, Deion casually mentions the backpack.

“I was pretty upset,” said Shanahan. “One minute I have it, the next minute it’s gone.” He wasn’t worried about the Patriots learning his game plan — “That was on an iPad and could be deleted” — but about the $15,000 in tickets he had acquired an hour earlier.

I never opened the pack. But I opened a wound. The story became huge. It’s still large. When half-jokingly a week ago, I asked Shanahan if for nostalgia’s sake he would bring the backpack to this Super Bowl, he said, “If I do, I’m going to keep it locked up to my arm so you can’t get it.”

Sanders, as if he had been on the moon, asked, “Wasn’t there an incident with a backpack? “

“Someone picked it up,” said the coach, cleverly using no names.

The issue now is not the backpack but quarterbacks and running backs. Can the Niners move the ball with the effectiveness they did against Green Bay in the NFC Championship game? San Francisco did it almost entirely on the ground.

Pack that up.

Shanahan, the fan, knows how uplifting a win can be

By Art Spander

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — It was a television reporter who asked Kyle Shanahan, the 49ers coach, the question nobody who regularly covers the team would have asked, to wit:

Did Shanahan get a sense of regional uplifting that a win such as the one over the Vikings can do for the Bay Area?

There are football people who would have dismissed the idea out of hand, telling us their job is about what happens on the field, not in the stands. But that’s not Shanahan.

“That stuff does it for me too,” Shanahan said Monday at Niners headquarters, responding to the question. “Not just as a coach, but as a fan. I love sport.

“When I watched the Warriors do good here for the two years I was here prior to this year, that uplifts me, and I love what sports does for people.”

What the 49ers have done this season is call down some recent echoes. They are in the NFC Championship game Sunday night against Green Bay at Levi’s Stadium. Suddenly, it’s the 1980s once again.

This isn’t Charlotte where, when a major golf tournament, the PGA Championship, was played there, a local reporter asked the golfers what they thought of the city. Not the course, the city, the restaurants, the stores.

We know what people think of San Francisco, of Oakland, of San Jose. Who cares if the Niners play in Santa Clara? Not TV, which during games offers shots of the Bay Bridge, when it isn’t showing us the Golden Gate.

Kyle Shanahan has been around and part of winners: offensive coordinator on the Falcons, who went to the Super Bowl three years ago; an intern with his dad’s Broncos, Super Bowl champions in 1997 and 1998.

“Anytime you have a team that has a chance to be in the situation we’re in,” Kyle Shanahan said, “where the Warriors have been a lot, sports are great. It gives everyone a break from stuff. You always want to support your home team, and I’m glad we’re giving something to be proud of this year.”

True, Northern Cal has had its share of titles, every pro team other than the Sharks taking a championship. When the Niners finally won, in the 1981 season, it was, dare we use the word, a virtual earthquake — the team that was here first, after seasons of disappointment, coming in first last.

The Bay Area, California, the entire west, had only college sports and minor league baseball until 1946. Then the Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles. Then the 49ers were formed in San Francisco.

No Giants until 1958. No Raiders until 1960. No Warriors until 1962. No A’s until 1968. No Sharks until 1991 (although the California Golden Seals were around from 1967-76).

The Niners were the original, the attraction and, for 35 years without any sort of playoff win, eternal frustration. So when Dwight Clark made “The Catch” in January 1982 against Dallas (after a divisional victory over the New York Giants), the elation was understandable. And, for a long while, unstoppable.

Bill Walsh was the coach who broke the spell. “You can stop writing we can’t win the big one,” he told me maybe an hour after Clark’s catch. Since then, there have been numerous big ones.

Another is Sunday. Will this be a return to greatness, to the Super Bowl, a game that in the 1980s and early ‘90s almost seemed part of the Niners’ regular schedule? Or will this be only a letdown?

In the glory years, the Niners won their championships while playing at deteriorating Candlestick Park — then-owner Eddie DeBartolo called the stadium “a dump.” But it was full and loud. But now the home games, as this coming Sunday's game will be, are at Levi’s, which was mostly empty and very quiet. Until last weekend.

“The fan noise,” said Shanahan of the last game, “is as big of a difference as probably our team is. They’ve gotten a lot louder as we’ve gotten better. It was just unbelievable Saturday.

“All I saw in the stands were red jerseys. It gave us a special feeling.”   

Just as winning teams invariably give their communities.