49ers head into season with a big advantage
The 2020 NFL season is going to happen, pandemic or no pandemic, which means teams have less than one month and no exhibition games to prepare for the season opener.
That’s an exceptional challenge.
But the 49ers — the defending NFC Champions—are an exceptional team.
And they have two marked advantages over the vast majority of the league before we head into what we all hope is a one-off season.
The first is continuity. The 49ers bring back the three most important people on a football team: the offensive coordinator, the defensive coordinator, and the quarterback.
Can you imagine the stress a firstyear head coach is under right now?
There was never any question that Kyle Shanahan was returning to the 49ers; he went so far as to sign a sixyear extension in June. But Jimmy Garoppolo and defensive coordinator Robert Saleh? Well, it was a bit hairy there.
The Niners kicked the tires on Tom Brady before making the correct decision to stick with his former understudy. And I will never understand why the other 31 teams in the NFL didn’t poach Saleh this past offseason; he’ll be a wonderful head coach when he gets the chance. (My prediction is that he’ll be the head coach of his hometown Detroit Lions this time next year — though it’ll be a year too late.)
But with the big triumvirate in place and the vast majority of the NFC Champions returning, the 49ers can attack this strange training camp with a clear and uncontrived purpose. There’s no massive install coming on either side of the ball; anything they do in the month of August is about refinement and advancement.
The second major advantage the 49ers have is identity. Yes, so much of that advantage correlates with continuity, but it fits on a more macro level, too.
Because the 49ers know what they’re about, and even more specifically, what they’re looking for, and they can replicate that year-over-year.
Keeping assistant general manager Adam Peters around this past offseason was big, but the 49ers’ ideals for each position and their team are larger.
I don’t believe that major college football will be played this year. (Note how “should” is not part of this equation.) If that, indeed, comes to pass, the 49ers will be in a better situation than the rest of the teams in the NFL. They know what they are looking for in the draft — the lifeblood of any good NFL team — and they can find it without games.
Just look at the team’s first-round picks, Javon Kinlaw and Brandon Aiyuk. Both checked all the boxes for the 49ers when it came to physical characteristics. Truth be told, the game film was ancillary to the combine results, just as it was for George Kittle and Fred Warner.
The 49ers haven’t hit on all their draft picks since Shanahan took over and hired John Lynch — the Dante Pettis draft pick remains in question, though he seems to be doing well this preseason — but they sure have hit on a lot of them, especially in later rounds.
It’s not luck — unless you think you can manufacture luck through a clearcut methodology. So by the time we hopefully head into a 2021 season that better resembles what we saw on a weekly basis before this year, I think the 49ers’ advantage on the field is going to grow.