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The Niners went into their Week 9 bye at a crossroads as a team.
Their once-dominant 5–0 outfit—winning games by an of 20 points per week—had lost three straight, and fallen out of first place in the NFC West. The excuses were ready for the players. Trent Williams and Deebo Samuel were hurt. They played consecutive road games two and three time zones away, then came back to face the Bengals on a short week. They got everyone’s best shot, with those three opponents recording season-turning wins.
All of it could be explained away. San Francisco could’ve chalked landing in an unexpected midseason ditch up to a million things.
Instead, the Niners looked in the mirror. And in doing so, they saw something familiar.
“If you look at the last couple seasons, we sort of went through a stretch of losing a couple of games and then sort of having to realize, ,” quarterback Brock Purdy told me as he headed for the exits at TIAA Bank Field in Jacksonville on Sunday after a 34–3 win over the Jaguars. “And then it was just going on to finish out the season strong. For this season, [we] lost three in a row going into the bye. For all of us, man, it’s been a sucky feeling. For all of us, a bad taste in our mouth.
“So we got away a little bit, but also came back with a chip on our shoulder again, trying to play the 49er football that we all know.”
Purdy wasn’t around for all the history he cited, but it right there for him, and everyone else, to learn from. The 2019 teams lost two of three in December, then regained its mojo and got to the Super Bowl. The ’21 team lost four straight, and five of six to fall to 3–5, and got to the NFC title game. Last year’s group started 3–4 and, like the ’21 team, got to the conference championship round.
And the 2023 Niners are, very clearly now, shooting to do more than any of those teams.
So there they were going into the bye, looking at themselves collectively, and individually, and confronting what they like about where they were on Halloween. The hope, of course, was for a really good team to find its potential.
On Sunday, the red-hot Jaguars felt the brunt of that. And, yes, the beatdown of Trevor Lawrence & Co. was as much about where the Niners are going as it is about where they are as a team.
