Success difficult to maintain in the NFL
A challenge like this was inevitable, though I’m sure the 49ers didn’t think it’d come so soon.
They entered the season with one of the most talented rosters in the NFL. A preponderance of injuries has left San Francisco in a position that’s considerably less impressive.
The terrible luck and subsequent scramble to add players ahead of Sunday’s game against the Giants highlights an unfavorable truth: Maintaining excellence is more difficult than achieving it in the first place.
And there might only be one effective route for that kind of maintenance — elite quarterback play.
With Jimmy Garoppolo likely out for Week 3 with a high ankle sprain, that may elude the 49ers for at least the short term. Longterm? Well, despite a nice firsthalf performance in Week 2, it’s fair for fans to still have doubts in that regard.
After all, the Niners still do. The 49ers’ success last season was built on having a great defense and a great overall offensive roster. Garoppolo won the team a few games, no doubt — he’s no scrub — but he was also seen as a liability for the team in the playoffs. That has to be considered, too, no?
Still, San Francisco advanced to the Super Bowl on the basis of having excellent coaching and arguably the best 52-man roster — that’s everyone but the starting quarterback — in football. The Niners then lost the Super Bowl to a team with a better quarterback.
And then came the tricky part: Maintaining the excellence of that roster.
There are teams all around the NFL that can put great 52-man rosters together for a few years — squads that can insulate or even lift up a quarterback. But keeping that caliber of all-around team is expensive and, contrary to what some teams around the NFL might think, the league is governed by a salary cap.
It takes an incredible bit of luck to keep that excellence going for more than a few seasons. And luck is something that’s clearly not on the 49ers’ side.
There was obvious attrition coming into the 2020 season. The 49ers traded DeForest Buckner away this past offseason; they couldn’t stomach signing him to a nine-figure deal. It was justifiable, and the return — a first-round pick that became Javon Kinlaw — was exceptional. But even I, someone who is exceptionally bullish on the South Carolina rookie, can say that the 49ers took a step back at 3-technique for the 2020 season after that move.
Salary cap concerns also played a significant role in the Niners letting Emmanuel Sanders walk in free agency, just a few months after they traded away a third-round pick to land him. With the offseason foot injury to Deebo Samuel (and perhaps even if he was healthy) the 49ers entered 2020 without a clear- cut No. 1 receiver. Further injuries led to Kendrick Bourne being the team’s top wideout for Week 1.
Even with outstanding coaching and player development, two deliberate losses like that sting.
The salary cap is such a burden upon San Francisco that the Niners were making moves to create space before either of those veterans left. Center Weston Richburg and linebacker Kwon Alexander both restructured their deals late last season, effectively extending contracts but providing San Francisco some immediate cap relief.
Richburg remains on the Physically Unable to Perform list. Alexander looks like a shell of the player the 49ers signed from Tampa Bay before the 2019 season. Both of those restructuring contracts look like mistakes right now.
Of course, the Niners weren’t done. Dee Ford, who, because of injuries, had been slated for an easy release at the end of this season, restructured his contract with the 49ers in a similar vein to Richburg and Alexander before the start of the season. The new deal is effectively an extension — it’ll save the Niners some money on the 2021 salary cap — but Ford will be around Santa Clara at least another season or two.
Will he be an asset? Or, better question: how many games will he play in that span? That’s anyone’s guess. The oft-injured pass rusher is once again sidelined — this time with a neck/ back injury.
To offset deals like that, the 49ers have to consistently draft as well as anyone in the league and develop talent at an elite level. They have that kind of ability, but there’s simply not much margin for error.
And with those three questionable restructuring deals and the endless string of injuries, they might have already gone over the line.
We’ve seen this play out in Atlanta and Philadelphia in recent years, and it appears to be happening in Minnesota this year. There are countless other examples in the sport’s history.
The 52-man roster worsens — even just a little bit — by decision and after injury, and the quarterback simply isn’t good enough to overcome that downturn.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just have a quarterback who covers up all of a team’s problems, like they have in Seattle and Houston? There’s a reason that for 17 of the past 20 seasons, just three quarterbacks have represented the AFC in the Super Bowl.
This is why I said at the beginning of the year that Garoppolo needed to have an MVP-caliber season for the 49ers in 2020. The Niners’ 52-man roster was going to take a step back this year, but if he took a step forward, they would still be the class of the NFC.
Such an outcome remains necessary and possible.
Now, is it plausible? This is now the big question of 2020. It’ll be on hold for a week or two as Garoppolo rests his high ankle sprain, but when he returns, it’ll tell us so much about how bright the Niners’ future really is.