SANTA CLARA—The West Coast heat wave wreaked havoc on the 49ers’ practice schedule this past week, leading coach Kyle Shanahan to joke that he, like his players, will take intravenous fluids to rehydrate.
“I still do it, if I had too much fun the night before,” Shanahan said.
Yes, Shanahan knows the cure for his hangovers.
Now, does he know how to fix his team’s?
The Niners’ Super Bowl hangover is real. It’s been real for months.
It has manifested in the dull energy around the team in the preseason, and a slog of a September. And then Sunday’s incredible, downright comedic fourth-quarter collapse to the Cardinals in a 24-23 loss was the little bit of extra “fun” that put it over the edge.
At 2-3 on the season, now, there’s no pretending this team can carry on with business as usual. It needs fluids, stat.
It’s on Shanahan and the 49ers’ leadership to provide them.
Because this team’s season hangs in the balance in the next three games. On Thursday, the Niners will play the Seahawks in Seattle. Then they’ll host the Chiefs and Cowboys in back-to-back home games before a bye week.
If this team can’t pull itself together by then, I shudder to think of how bad the symptoms of this hangover could be in the hellacious second half of the season.
I’m fighting the urge to say that the season is over because Shanahan still deserves the benefit of the doubt here: No matter the circumstances over the last seven seasons, he has been able to keep his team together. The telltale catty comments and hardly hidden backstabbing we see with truly spiraling teams have never happened in Santa Clara, even when things were bad.
“I haven’t lost confidence in this group. We’ve been through worse,” Nick Bosa said Sunday.
And he’s right.
But, simultaneously, the Niners have never been in a situation quite like this.
If 2024 was supposed to be the 49ers’ “Last Dance,” they haven’t made it to the dance floor yet.
The last Super Bowl hangover, back in 2020, featured a worldwide pandemic and a young, upstart team. You can forgive that kind of team for finishing at 6-10—they started three quarterbacks and had to live in a hotel in Arizona for the final month of the season.
This year’s team has no such extenuating health emergency (though its injury list is arguably at an epidemic level), and it features veteran after veteran with big names and big paychecks.
The dynamic is different. This team is not one that must learn how to win — it’s built to win, and nothing else but winning will do.
And so far this season, they are falling woefully short of that mark.
Take Sunday’s game as the best case in point yet.
We underestimated these 49ers. It turns out that they could, in fact, find a worse way to lose this season. This team’s collapse to the Rams in Week 3 proved far less embarrassing than Sunday’s loss to the Arizona Cardinals.
The Niners choked away another 10-point fourth-quarter lead — a 13-point second-half lead — with a scoreless second half.
Red-zone futility, including a critical lost fumble with six-plus minutes to play, an injured place-kicker, which resulted in the Niners going for a fourth-and-23 from Arizona’s 27-yard line late in the third quarter, and a withering defense, which allowed 5.2 yards per carry in the final frame, all came together (with so many more unbecoming factors) to drop the Niners below .500 again.
They’ll have one light practice before playing again on Thursday.
That quick turnaround will be cited as a positive. I’m not here to say it’s a negative.
Because to decide one way or the other with these Niners is a fool’s errand. There’s simply nothing predictable about this team so far this season.
There’s not one thing you can take for granted on this team right now. Everything is in flux. The only consistency is inconsistency.
And shouldn’t a team that fancies itself like a Super Bowl contender play at that level more than once five weeks into a season? Even lowering the bar, shouldn’t that team’s best football not come in its first game?
Yes, we should have seen this disjointedness coming.
There hasn’t been a single moment this season—even going back to mini-camps in the spring—when this team felt organized, copasetic, and understood.
Whether it was off-the-field contract drama, injury spy games, or this team’s general chaos on the field (which has resulted in even more injuries), the Niners have never once felt in control this season.
Even the team’s biggest win — a 30-13 win over the Patriots in Week 4 — felt scattershot and haphazard.
The vibes, as the kids would say, have been off for months.
They could correct this. The Niners could get right.
The Niners famously started 2021 with a 3-5 record. The next year, they started 3-4. They made the NFC Championship Game both seasons.
This team’s best football is probably still ahead. It better be.
And if that’s the case, the 49ers’ chances are pretty good.
After all, besides the upstart Vikings (who are good but not that good), who looks elite in the NFC this season?
But that highlights the issue for the 49ers: They were supposed to be above the fray, so much better than not only their peers, but the uncontrollable factors that follow every successful team — contract drama, injury luck reversal, the weight of high expectations.
The Niners’ front office thought it built a juggernaut.
And yet, after Sunday’s game, both quarterback Brock Purdy and linebacker Fred Warner talked about how this team is looking for its identity.
These are not the questions the best of the best should be considering in October.
(Plus, I already answered the question: The team’s identity is Purdy and Warner — and neither player was at his best Sunday. I guess those guys need to re-up their subscriptions.)
So amid all this uncertainty, and no matter what the 49ers do from this point on, one thing has been made clear in the first five games of the season — the perceived “easy” part of the team’s hellacious schedule:
This team is no juggernaut.
You can place blame in so many different places for that — abstract or all-too-physical — but no matter how you slice it, the result is the same.
The Niners still have plenty to play for this season. I’m still not ruling out the possibility they go all the way. Purdy and Warner are still playing, after all.
But this team, like so many of its injured players, is operating on a week-to-week basis.
And in that sense, the idea of 2024 being Super Bowl-or-bust with this team has already busted.
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