More SF injuries — bad luck, bad management or something else?
It’s a cruel game, this bloodsport called football. So much so that success or failure in it is often defined by attrition.
That’s a truth that the 49ers are finding out the hard way this season.
Yes, another week, another round of season-altering injuries for the 49ers.
The Niners have the longest injury list in the NFL. Four of their five best players this season have been sidelined — one, Nick Bosa, will remain out for the rest of the season — and countless injuries behind those top stars have made this a season from hell for the 49ers.
And with 10 games remaining on the schedule, it’s hard to see this trend changing.
Anytime something is taken away without clear motivation, it’s easy to play the blame game. There was a two-week stretch earlier this season when themain topic of conversation around the Niners was artificial turf.
But what about bad luck? Yep, the Niners certainly have plenty of that this season. Is it karmic retribution for 2019? Something else? No one can say, but plenty will try.
Is there something more sinister going on with the 49ers, particularly with the team’s medical staff? It’s fair to wonder, but so far that department is not catching flack from folks inside the organization.
(Or maybe they’re not taking their badmouthing public yet.)
Are these kind of injuries simply inevitable? Injuries beget injuries, after all, and with the team reeling from tough blows at the start of the season, part-time players have been elevated to full-time status and are pushing their bodies during games in ways they have not done before.
Raheem Mostert is a prime example of this possible explanation, though it should be noted that no one factor is solely responsible. Mostert was a change- of-pace back for the Niners last year before
becoming the team’s de-facto starter roughly halfway through the campaign. He started this year as part of a three-man backfield rotation.
But after coming back from an MCL injury this season, Mostert became the bell- cow back for the Niners. This was evident on Sunday — the Niners were going to go as far as Mostert could carry them.
Mostert carried the ball 17 times Sunday before a high ankle sprain knocked him out of the contest early in the third quarter. Sixteen of his carries came in the first half.
Mostert had only carried the ball more than 16 times in a game twice: last year’s NFC Championship Game (29 carries) and Week 13 last year against the Ravens (19). In both of those games, he kept getting
the ball because he was receiving huge running lanes and was barely being touched — he averaged more than 7 yards per carry in both games.
Sunday, he averaged 3.82 yards per carry. A lot of handoffs without many big gains? Being a battering ram is not Mostert’s game — never has been. His body isn’t one that is trained to have the entire team riding on his back.
But that’s the role the Niners had him playing. I’m not saying his injury was inevitable, but given the circumstances, the likelihood of an injury was certainly increased.
In a way, Mostert was sacrificed so the Niners could win a Week 6 game. Might the Niners regret such usage? Sure. But what was the alternative? Sunday was effectively a must-win game
for San Francisco and if Mostert wasn’t given the ball early and often, that game would have rested in the hands of quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo.
The Niners were going to fend off such a fate for as long as possible.
That plan barely lasted one half of one football game.
Perhaps the 49ers can disprove the theory that attrition begets more attrition in the NFL. Perhaps the backups to the backups can play well and play often.
But we’re back to where we were at the beginning of the season — a truth that has only become more and more evident through the first third of the season: This team needs Garoppolo to be more than a game manager, because if this roster entered the season depleted compared to 2019, it’s entering 2018 levels of depletion now.
There’s only one way to counter such a fate: Have an elite quarterback.
Of course, Niners head coach Kyle Shanahan will try everything and anything to protect Garoppolo and that tells us everything we need to know about the quarterback.
Meanwhile, rookie running back JaMycal Hasty — who is quite good — will likely be the next sacrifice for the Niners’ ground attack.
He hasn’t carried the ball 20-plus times in a game since high school.