49ers lacked offensive pulse without their ‘system’ QB and blowout loss to Green Bay was final nail in Niners’ 2024 season

For the desperately optimistic San Francisco 49ers fans, there will be a path through this brutal remaining maze and into the playoffs.

They’ll point to the exceedingly tight race for the NFC West crown, which could hang in the balance until the last week of the season. They’ll cross their fingers with injuries, hoping that three of their four best players — quarterback Brock Purdy, defensive end Nick Bosa and offensive tackle Trent Williams — will all come out of the tunnel next week and turn everything around against the Buffalo Bills (9-2). And they’ll definitely avoid thinking about how eerily similar this campaign has become to the 2020 season, when San Francisco was beset by health and identity issues following a Super Bowl loss the previous season, leading to a massively disappointing 6-10 record that inspired an eventual roster retooling.

On that latter point, it’s hard to ignore the symmetry of that lost 2020 season. Those 49ers were 5-6 going into December, looking like a shadow of themselves, and hosting the Bills in a game that felt like it was the last best chance to salvage the season. San Francisco lost 34-24, in a game that was really never as close as that score suggested. At the conclusion of it, there was clarity that the season was over and the 49ers had a lot of work ahead.

Niners running back Christian McCaffrey (middle) didn’t have many open lanes to run in during Sunday’s defeat at Green Bay. (Photo by Todd Rosenberg/Getty Images)

A week from now, the same could and likely will be said about the 2024 49ers, who don’t look anything like the team that came out of last season’s Super Bowl loss. You could pick any 10-minute increment inside Sunday’s atrocious 38-10 loss to the Green Bay Packers — the 49ers’ worst defeat under Shanahan since 2018 — and find alarming traits everywhere. A team that couldn’t dictate the run or find anything explosive throwing the football. A defensive front that got slapped in the ear by…

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Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-11-25 07:10:00

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