» A DIFFERENT TAKE ON THE 49ERS’ INJURIES
In a weird, twisted way, the injuries to Jimmy Garoppolo and George Kittle — ones that will likely keep them out for the remainder of the season — are good news for the 49ers.
The Niners, with a 4-4 record at the midpoint of the season, were stuck in football purgatory. They were not bad enough to force wholesale changes. But they weren’t good enough to have anything more than an outside chance at the playoffs and a first-round exit if they made it.
It was going to be tough to fully explain what went wrong. How do you break down the strange confluence of injuries and regression, bad decisions and bad vibes that until Monday had defined the Niners’ post-Super Bowl hangover year?
But with Garoppolo’s aggravated high-ankle sprain and Kittle’s broken foot, there’s clarity with the 49ers. They’re no longer in football purgatory. Now they’re just plain bad.
Yes, the second half of the season is going to stink more than the first half. A top-10 draft pick for the fourth time in five years under coach Kyle Shanahan looks well within reach.
And, perhaps more importantly, the 49ers can now point to a single bogeyman and keep the team’s collective confidence intact for a bounceback 2021.The injuries are now the main, overwhelming ingredient in this unsavory stew,
When we look back on the Niners’ 2020 season, we won’t remember Garoppolo’s terrible interceptions, the defensive regression, or Shanahan’s strange offensive decisions.
No, we’ll just remember the injuries. After all, their quarterback and four of their five best players — Kittle, Bosa, Richard Sherman, and Raheem Mostert — will end up missing significant time this year. It’s impossible to oversell that as an excuse for this season.
It’s a clean excuse, too — the kind that is rarely offered in this complicated sport. It will allow 49ers fans to hold out hope that 2021 will be a return to glory. Revenge Tour, redux.
Of course, there’s a lot of time between now and the start of the 2021 season.
So what do the Niners do next?
Well, they pack it in, starting Thursday against the Packers.
And they should probably start looking for a new quarterback.
This 49ers roster is too talented to go winless down the stretch. The hopes of landing the No. 2 overall pick and a franchise-changing superstar, as they did two years ago with Bosa, are unfounded. But there’s every reason to believe that the 49ers will be drafting early next April.
In the meantime, Nick Mullens and CJ Beathard will likely take turns ineffectively running the offense. There will be a good game here or there, but it’ll be painfully obvious why both are backups. Neither is the future of this team. We’ll see plenty of Kendrick Bourne and Jerick McKinnon, Ross Dwelley and Trent Taylor. Little, if any of it, will inform the 49ers’ future either.
And that, in tandem with a defense that will certainly lose whatever juice it once had, will result in six wins, maybe seven. There are still some bad teams left on the 49ers’ schedule, teams more bad than them.
Of course, the 49ers should pursue more trades like the one they made Monday. They dispatched injury-riddled linebacker Kwon Alexander to the New Orleans Saints for a fifth-round pick ahead of Tuesday’s trade deadline.
Once the season is over, the 49ers will need to make a decision on Garoppolo, whose contract for 2021 is effectively a team option.
Do you start from scratch at quarterback or trust that Garoppolo can return to the form he showed in 2019?
Had the season played out with him at quarterback, the answer would have been clear. Garoppolo either would have played his way into the team’s future plans, or out of them.
But Shanahan and 49ers general manager John Lynch don’t have the luxury of a straightforward transition. This decision won’t be as clean as the excuse for 2020’s downturn; the 49ers will need to make a judgment call on Garoppolo.
To me, it’s clear. Dump him — or at least bring in someone who can seriously compete with him. Garoppolo’s play this season has proven that he’s not a player who can elevate his teammates, and every year it becomes more difficult to compete in the NFL with a quarterback like that. Be bold, move on. The downside to a change isn’t all that different. The upside is limitless.
But I’m not in charge. And remember, the folks that are in charge actively passed on signing Tom Brady last summer and barely considered drafting Deshaun Watson or Patrick Mahomes in 2017. When it comes to picking quarterbacks, that hardly inspires confidence.
But make no mistake: This quarterback decision, whatever they do, will set the direction of the franchise moving forward. It will define Shanahan and Lynch’s time in charge.
And we’ll all have some time to think about it.
The 49ers season is over. The product on the field will be forgettable, if not regrettable. But in a strange, twisted way, the fun is just getting started.