49ers insist they’re not dead yet after getting buried in Buffalo
There’s too much pride on a team used to success to concede a lost season with five games to play.
That’s about the most you can say about the 49ers following a snow-bound 35-10 loss to the Buffalo Bills Sunday night, where a national television audience got to see first-hand what has become of a team that played in four conference championship games and two Super Bowls since 2019 and now sits at 5-7.
Moments after fullback Kyle Jusczcyk lost his first fumble since 2018 at the 1-yard line in the third quarter when the 49ers were threatening to get within 21-10, NBC analyst Cris Collinsworth offered what could soon be the epitaph on the 2024 season.
“That is the 49ers’ season right there,” Collinsworth said.
It was another failure in the red zone, an ongoing problem since Week 1 when the 49ers kicked six field goals against the New York Jets.
There were three more turnovers, added to the three in last week’s 38-10 loss in Green Bay. And no takeaways. There were two more missed field goals by Jake Moody, although one was a pipe-dream 55-yard attempt before halftime in horrible conditions.
There were more injuries, of course, which has been a constant throughout the season. Christian McCaffrey, looking like himself for the first time all season, ripped off 53 yards on his first seven carries before straining his posterior cruciate ligament on a 19-yard burst and then shutting it down on the next play.
We’ll find out soon if we’ve seen the last of McCaffrey for 2024 after just four games. The 49ers limp home to face the Chicago Bears (4-8) next week at Levi’s Stadium.
Middle linebacker Fred Warner, who revealed this week he has played with an ankle fracture since Week 4, left briefly when both forearms seized up with cramps. He got an IV and returned, but forearm cramps?
“It was a freak thing,” Warner said.
That doesn’t even include players that were left home, such as edge rusher Nick Bosa, left tackle Trent Williams and cornerback Deommodore Lenoir. Or those who have been long gone on injured reserve, such as Brandon Aiyuk and Javon Hargrave.
It’s something the 49ers will need to determine going forward. How much of the entire 2024 season was a “freak thing” and bad luck and how much was of their own doing?
“I’m real disappointed. We’ve got a lot more pride than this,” coach Kyle Shanahan said. “We definitely know we have people out, but we can play a lot better than that. Having three turnovers in each of the last two weeks, being unable to stop the run, you can usually guess the outcome.”
The Bills rushed for a season-high 220 yards and averaged 5.8 yards per carry.
What Shanahan isn’t willing to do with even a low-percentage chance of a playoff berth is publicly berate his team, rejecting a query about the 49ers’ willingness to fight.
“I’m not going to say this team is the same as last year’s team and we’re not fighting as hard,” Shanahan said. “We’ve had a bunch of guys out there who have been trying to find their way since the beginning, haven’t quite found it yet. There’s still a lot of season left. We expect to be better. But I’m not going to say our team doesn’t have fight.”
Quarterback Brock Purdy, who was 11-for-18 for 94 yards and wasn’t nearly the operator in the snow as counterpart Josh Allen, conceded the conditions were “difficult.” He lost one attempted pass when it simply flew out of his hand before it was going forward for a lost fumble.
“Late in the game, it felt like the snow started to melt a little bit and the ball became more slick,” Purdy said.
Losing McCaffrey, who appeared to finally gain traction in the most unlikely place, was a blow.
“We all saw what he was doing and he was on fire, man,” Purdy said. “Looked great, hitting the holes hard. Bouncing off guys and making some explosive plays. When you lose a guy like Christian, it sucks. It takes away some things how we do them in the offense.”
Forever upbeat tight end George Kittle conceded that losing McCaffrey and Warner (temporarily) was difficult to accept.
“It’s not a very fun thing, especially since Bosa and Trent are not here either,” Kittle said. “But it’s football. People go down. We’ve had plenty of seasons where people have gone down and you need somebody to step up. That’s what we need . . . we’re in the NFL for a reason and it’s on all of us.”
The onslaught of injuries and mistakes, Kittle believes, are part of the deal.
“Football’s tough. Stuff happens,” Kittle said. “You’re going to let it beat you down into oblivion and you’re just going to give you up or you’re going to go down swinging every single day that you have. What’s crazy is we only have so many opportunities left but we’re not technically out of the playoffs. And while it feels dark and gloomy and depressing, we can still win out and I really think we can do that.”
Warner knows what’s next — and it’s Chicago, with nothing else that matters.
“We’re as desperate as they come to try and get a win,” Warner said. “I’m down for whatever. I just want to get a win. I could care less about anything else. Whatever they need me to do, whatever they need the team to do, let’s do that and get one win.”
Since Purdy stepped into his job, both he and his teammates have largely met a standard that has been lost in a big way in losing 73-20 over the past two weeks against teams that were as formidable as the 49ers were the past few years.
“The last couple of years our mentality was coming out to games and being the enforcers and the dominators,” Purdy said. “To have two games like this back to back, late in the season, it sucks. We can’t be down in the dumps because we still have an opportunity in front of us.”