Victories are better than a No. 1 pick
SANTA CLARA >> Niners fans have been looking toward the NFL Draft since Jimmy Garoppolo tore his ACL in September. It’s understandable: In this lost season, the reward of a high draft pick can make losing tolerable.
But that doesn’t mean that winning shouldn’t be celebrated.
The 49ers beat the Seahawks for the first time since 2013 Sunday, with Robbie Gould’s 36yard field goal in overtime deciding the game.
As the 49ers reveled in the longawaited victory in the driving rain at Levi’s Stadium, I couldn’t help but think of another group of people who wanted to rain on the Niners’ parade — the collective that wants the Niners to tank the rest of the 2018 season to guarantee landing the No. 1 overall pick.
The logic the pro-tanking crowd exposes comes across as sound — it’s a lost season, so why not maximize it?
After all, tanking certainly works in other sports — it’s triedand-true in the NBA and Major League Baseball. It might work in Madden franchise mode, too.
But in the real world, deliberately trying to lose in the NFL is a terrible idea.
Winning is a habit. Losing is a habit, too. Which habit do you want these young and generally inexperienced 49ers to be developing heading into an all-important 2019 season?
The answer should be obvious. Every win in this league is a minor miracle: Thousands of man-hours are poured into the
planning and preparation for each contest, but when you’re dealing with a prolate spheroid for a ball and 22 men looking to avoid and inflict pain on every play, all that preparation can be for naught.
Not a single one should be taken for granted, much less scorned.
Winning begets winning and losing begets losing — this Niners team still needs to learn how to win.
The 49ers’ draft pick will figure itself out.
But learning to win isn’t something you can just pick up on the fly or through happenstance.
After the 49ers choked away a win against the Cardinals — the lowly, nogood Cardinals — in October, Niners head coach Kyle Shanahan declared that his team needed “closers” — guys with the mental and toughness to close out a victory.
Some players were born with that extra gear, but for most, it needs to be developed.
But now the Niners have “closed” in back-to-back games. They’re developing the confidence — organically — necessary to compete for a playoff spot in this league.
Make no mistake, next year is a massive one for the Niners — Garoppolo’s return and three years of Kyle Shanahan and John Lynch offseasons mean that the Niners need to produce winning results — playoff-contention results — next year.
Wouldn’t it be nice if they had the blueprint for winning in hand at the start of the season?
Wouldn’t that help the Niners’ cause far more than a single rookie?
I can hear the retort: In 2016, the Niners won their second-to-last game of the season and missed out on Texas A&M (now Browns) defensive end Myles Garrett in the draft because of it.
But that situation couldn’t have been more different to this one.
That Niners team was going nowhere — coach Chip Kelly and general manager Trent Baalke were fired at the end of the season, signaling the start of a full rebuild. That season was, indeed, meaningless.
We’re now two years into that rebuild. Expectations have changed. This Niners team (Garoppolo or no Garoppolo) should be able to wipe the floor with that 2016 team.
Yes, Nick Bosa, the Ohio State defensive end who should go No. 1 in the 2019 NFL Draft, is the type of player the Niners need moving forward, but the old adage “one in the hand is better than two in the bush” is true and it applies here.
Except, in this case, it’s 53 in hand and one in the bush.
And while a good chunk — a third to a half — of the Niners’ roster will turn over ahead of next year’s season opener, but the positive lessons that come from winning games will remain in the locker room year-overyear. And the leaders that are being forged through these victories — guys like George Kittle and Nick Mullens — will be able to speak with a bit more authority, too.
Richard Sherman — the defense’s veteran leader — knows all about winning, having been a member of the Seahawks’ near-dynasty earlier this decade.
Sunday’s win over the Seattle — a team Sherman was ones synonymous with, but who released him — meant a lot to the veteran for obvious reasons.
But he didn’t expound on those reasons much in his postgame press conference. (And Sherman is not a man who lacks for words.)
He wanted to talk about his young teammates.
The defense, which has woefully underperformed most of the year and has been easily maligned, has put together a couple of good games in a row, led by Sherman and the unblockable DeForest Buckner. The offense looks a lot closer to the magic Garoppolo put on the field in the final stretch of the season than it ever did under C.J. Beathard, with Mullens and young receivers — particularly Dante Pettis — developing an indelible but likely transferable understanding.
Shanahan’s confidence seems to be growing, too — his play calling has been stellar in the last two games. He’s a young head coach who is learning his role and responsibilities, too.
“It means more that the guys showed up the way they did,” Sherman said. “Those guys played their hearts out. We’re out there with an incredibly young team. I would guess we’re putting out the youngest guys in the league at this point. We have three rookies in the secondary. We have basically three rookie receivers. Kittle is in this second year. Rookie running back. Second-year quarterback. They’re young guys, but they stepped up to the moment.”
Sherman knows that’s the first step on the road to something special.
Does that guarantee that the Niners will get there — that Sunday’s win portends big things for this franchise in 2019? Of course not.
But this team is no longer treading water — it has now beaten a playoffcaliber team (and their bully) and are starting to earn compounding interest on their confidence.
There’s evidence that they’re starting to figure it out.