Should we believe the hype?

Well, yes and no. Jimmy G is great and all, but a playoff-caliber NFL squad will need more than just a handsome, strong-armed QB to get ’er done

There’s a lot of hype surrounding the 49ers heading into the 2018 season. That’s to be expected when one of North America’s great franchises rediscovers its relevance behind the talismanic play of a young, handsome quarterback.

Given the way the 49ers ended last season — 5-0 with Jimmy Garoppolo at the helm of the offense — it would be strange if there wasn’t hype around this team.

At the beginning of August — well after training camps started — the sports betting media company Action Network listed the 49ers with 16-1 odds to win the Super Bowl.

Just for reference, those are better odds than the Atlanta Falcons, New Orleans Saints, Jacksonville Jaguars and Los Angeles Chargers.

The hype is real, but hype doesn’t win football games.

So even as excitement reaches a fever pitch for the 49ers in 2018, it still begs the question: Is Kyle Shanahan’s team a contender?

The answer: a resounding maybe.

There are reasons to believe in this team — the excitement around it is not baseless — but the hype does need to be toned down a bit as we head into the 2018 season.

For instance: I wouldn’t take those aforementioned odds on the 49ers taking a trip to Atlanta in February.

That said, 49ers fans should be excited about Garoppolo. This is a quarterback who revitalized a franchise with his five-game, season-ending winning streak — that can’t possibly be ignored.

And fans should be excited that he and Shanahan just finished an offseason together. They should be on the same page with the offensive ideology, allowing them to dive a bit deeper into the playbook.

I once heard that NFL football is a game where an oddly-shaped ball bounces around for 60 minutes, and the best passing team wins.

With Garoppolo and Shanahan at the helm, you can bet that the 49ers are going to be able to move the ball through the air.

You should be excited about the teams’ free-agent signings, too. On offense, Weston Richburg and Jerick McKinnon should make big impacts in their first year in red and gold.

The middle of the 49ers’ offensive line was a sieve last year — Richburg, one of the best centers in the NFL, should eliminate that problem. Meanwhile, McKinnon is a near-perfect running back for Shanahan’s zone-blocking-heavy offense — he’s a one-cut-and-go guy with elite speed and tremendous skills in the passing game.

Add the fact that Marquise Goodwin — one of the fastest people on the planet — seems to be even faster, and with George Kittle showing all the signs that he could be a breakout player, and you have something engaging happening on the offensive side of the ball in Santa Clara.

The defense is worth excitement, too: Richard Sherman is mentoring a young and talented secondary in the dark arts of the Cover 3 system, Adrian Colbert and Jaquiski Tartt are putting out Earl Thomas and Kam Chancellor vibes, DeForest Buckner is poised to be an All-Pro, and the linebacker corps — led by Reuben Foster, Malcolm Smith and impressive rookie Fred Warner — is fast and hard-hitting.

Yes, there’s a lot to grab onto if you’re a 49ers optimist.

So where does all of this talent put San Francisco?

8-8.

And that’s not bad. It’s an improvement over last year! Why 8-8?

Because despite the tremendous upside on both sides of the ball, depth still looks to be a serious issue with this team. Yes, it’s better than it was last year, but San Francisco has a long way to go before it’s a Super Bowl contender.

There’s also the issue of the pass rush — the 49ers are likely to have a hard time pressuring the quarterback from the edge in 2018, and in today’s NFL, that’s the name of the game on defense.

Add in a division that’s not as tough as it was last year but is still pretty difficult, all things considered, and a tough schedule to open the season (at Minnesota, at Kansas City, at the Chargers and at Green Bay in the first six weeks), and the notion of a division title starts to dissipate.

A few injuries and you can see the push for double-digit wins fall away, too.

Don’t forget, this team was 1-10 before Garoppolo took over as the starting quarterback. A quarterback can’t cover up all that stink.

Beyond that, no one can be 100 percent sure of what kind of player Garoppolo will be in 2018. I am in the front pew of the tent when it comes to Garoppolo believers, but just as you can’t ignore that end-of-season winning streak, you can’t pretend that Garoppolo didn’t take a lot of risks with his passes last year. Nearly 6 percent of his throws were interceptable, which put him in the same category as Jacksonville’s Blake Bortles (who is objectively terrible).

Perhaps those risky throws were a byproduct of a bad offensive line in front of him, mediocre talent around him and an unfamiliarity with the system he was running.

Maybe those were unforced errors that will continue in 2018. We just don’t know.

And that’s a big part of these 8-8 Niners.

But take solace in the fact that, while these Niners might appear to be a team on the rise in the macro, and middle-of-the-pack in the micro, that nothing ever works out the way one expects. A few of those bounces can go one way, and the eight-win Niners suddenly have 10. The other way, and the Niners are perhaps treading water at six wins.

A year ago today, such an advantageous position would have been borderline unfathomable. Now, a .500 season would be viewed as a disappointment.

It’s truly incredible what a competent (how competent we’re about to find out) quarterback can do for a team.