49ers might finally be locked in
At about 7 p.m. on Sunday, the San Francisco 49ers’ season hit the precise halfway point. Eight-and-a-half games played. Eight-and-ahalf games remaining.
For the first half of this season, the 49ers have been a mystery. Super Bowl contender? Underwhelming disappointment? It varied from game to game, even from series to series. The 49ers have been a team in search of an identity. Desperate for some momentum.
Maybe they found it in the early moments of the season’s second half, which was the second half of Sunday’s game. The 49ers recovered from their sluggish start to shut out the Los Angeles Chargers on defense and get a little traction on offense with 12 second-half points.
The 49ers are now 5-4, a half-game behind the Seahawks, who lost on Sunday morning in Munich and have yet to take their bye. The 22-16 victory gave the 49ers a two
game winning streak, only the second time this season the team has managed to string together back-to-back wins.
It’s not a lot of momentum, but maybe it is something to build on. And it is definitely better than the alternative — an ugly home loss to the banged-up Chargers — which looked like a real possibility for much of the evening.
“Overall, I thought we played our best team game against the Rams a couple of weeks ago, so that was momentum,” head coach Kyle Shanahan said. “I wanted to pick up on that this week.
“I was proud of our team today. I want to score touchdowns. I want to blow people out. But that team’s really good. We still found a way to win, which was so imperative.”
It truly was imperative. Shanahan has an unflattering record coming out of the bye week: 1-4 coming into Sunday’s game. Last season, the 49ers came out of the bye and were blown apart by Indianapolis in a monsoon.
A loss on Sunday would have been even worse for the 49ers, whose early struggles with mediocre opponents have given them no room for error. Coming out of the bye and getting healthy, with two weeks for Shanahan to tinker with his offense and incorporate Christian McCaffrey, while going up against a beat-up Chargers team with one of the league’s worst run defenses, there would have been no excuses for underperforming.
But underperforming was very much what the 49ers were flirting with for much of Sunday’s game. In the game’s opening drive, the Chargers marched down the field for a touchdown and the 49ers’ vaunted defense was scrambling.
The 49ers’ first three offensive drives consisted of a field goal and two three-and-outs before they finally put together a second quarter touchdown drive. But the first half ended on a sour note when Dre Greenlaw was ejected from the game for a helmet-to-helmet hit on Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert.
Finally, the 49ers found something in the second half, on both offense and defense.
“As much as you want to blow a team out, you’ve got to just find a way,” said Fred Warner, who led a defense that shut out its opponent in the second half for a second consecutive game. “That’s what builds character in teams.”
On offense, the 49ers found a rhythm. They eventually hit Shanahan’s magic number of 40plus rushes for the game: 41 carries for 157 yards with McCaffrey and newly returned Elijah Mitchell carrying the load. Jimmy Garoppolo was an efficient 19 of 28 while passing for 240 yards. He converted four huge third-and-long plays on the team’s two touchdown drives.
“Jimmy made some big plays on third and long,” Shanahan said.
It’s the formula that has worked for the 49ers before: effective rushing, efficient Garoppolo and dominating defense. That was the key in 2019’s push to the Super Bowl and in last year’s run to the NFC Championship Game. So it has to be the blueprint again.
The 49ers should be in good shape for the rest of the season, but we’ve thought that before. They have yet to play Arizona, a team that Shanahan’s teams have traditionally — oddly — struggled against. Aside from the Super Bowl season when they swept the Cardinals, Shanahan’s 49ers are 1-7 against Arizona. The Cardinals, now 4-6, beat the Rams on Sunday; they are giving up a home game next week to play the 49ers in neutral Mexico City.
Most of the remaining games will be played at Levi’s: a home stretch of matchups versus New Orleans, Miami, Tampa, Washington and Arizona. They have only two road games, at Seattle and Las Vegas, and neither require a long plane ride or a time change.
All season, we’ve been waiting for this 49ers team to get into a groove. To find their identity. To gain some momentum. Maybe, at the exact midpoint of the regular season on Sunday night, they finally locked in.