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It's hard to call the San Francisco 49ers' 2024 NFL season anything other than a massive disappointment.
Returning to the field with Super Bowl expectations after falling just short of the Kansas City Chiefs earlier in the calendar year, Kyle Shanahan's team has taken a tumble few fans could have even dreamed of, sitting at just 5-7 with five games to go while occupying the basement of the NFC West.
What gives? Did the 49ers know this would happen, especially as the injuries kept piling up? Well, considering Shanahan's comments on the matter during his Friday media session, the answer to that question is a resounding no, as he fully expected the team to be sitting pretty at 8-2 before the “tough” segment of the team's season.
“We understand where we’re at. We go to work and we practice football. We don’t discuss it all week, we don’t read all week. I get all that. I understand how the NFL works, I understand what our record is at. We knew coming into this year we were going to have to work to, I didn’t feel there right after training camp, I thought we had a chance though to get better as the year went, especially at the beginning of our schedule, which I thought was a lot easier than the second half. I thought we would improve and kind of build that as we went and I was hoping we could be 8-2 when we got to the tough stretch. And I’ve talked about those three games, which I feel we should have won that we let get away from us, and that got us to 5-5,” Shanahan told reporters.
“And then right when we got at the toughest part where I was hoping we would have had some continuity and developed into the team that I thought could really make a run and push some things, that’s when we took a, subtracted a lot of guys from us and we’re kind of at our toughest spot and that’s where we are now which when you don’t take advantage of kind of what you had earlier in the year and you are in a tough spot, that’s why it makes it extremely hard to get out of.”
Whoa, interesting stuff, right? Well, wait, it gets even better, as Shanahan has plenty more to say about what went wrong in San Francisco this season and how the team can fix it.
Kyle Shanahan believes the 49ers dug their own hole in 2024
Addressing how the season fell off so spectacularly and how the 49ers can fix it, Shanahan laid it out plainly: the 49ers simply need to play better to get where they want to be.
“So, as I said earlier in the week, we’ve got to do some special things to get out of this hole we put ourselves in, and we understand that,” Shanahan noted. “But you know, we can talk about it every day we have to come to a press conference or talk about it outside of here. But when it’s with each other, it’s how to play better football, how to find a way to get a win. And that usually comes down, it only comes down to playing better football.”
Asked if he usually breaks down the schedule and predicts the team's record before it starts, Shanahan noted he doesn't; it was just this season that he looked at the schedule and made a judgment call about where he thought the team would be through ten weeks.
“It’s not that. I thought we should have been 8-2. Yeah, we were 5-5 and I believe there were three games that we let get away that we should have won,” Shanahan noted. “That doesn’t mean that we’d been much of a different team at 8-2 than 5-5, but it’s how you improve as the year goes.”
Can the 49ers get back on track? Will they be able to halt their losing streak and make things interesting down the stretch? Only time will tell, but right now, it's hard to feel too confident about a team when even their head coach is lamenting a season that isn't quite over just yet.
