Albert Breer of The MMQB spent the past month visiting teams around the NFL. He visited with the San Francisco 49ers on August 6 and spoke with several players and personnel, including head coach Kyle Shanahan.
Breer was curious about the offseason hype heading into last season and if Shanahan ever bought into it. The 49ers were coming off of a five-game win streak to end 2017 and were one of the most discussed teams that offseason. Many predicted a breakout year for the Shanahan-led squad which finally had a franchise quarterback in Jimmy Garoppolo.
Then came September 23. That's when a visit to Kansas City changed everything. The 49ers lost their starting quarterback to a torn ACL and went on to finish with a 4-12 record. And that was after already having lost running back Jerick McKinnon, who suffered his own ACL injury before the start of the season.
Breer asked Shanahan if there was a lesson learned from the offseason hype heading into 2018, and the coach's lengthy answer somewhat surprised the reporter.
"No, but that's why you never get caught up in what people are saying," Shanahan told Breer. "I never felt like we'd arrived. I knew where we were at, I knew that season was going to be extremely tough. We knew why we won those five games in a row at the end of the year. So there was not a part of me that felt like we'd arrived. And I believe the players in the building didn't think so either. We knew it was going to be tough, we knew where we were at, and we didn't have a lot of depth.
"And we lost our running back before the year started, which was a huge deal and people didn't realize it, and then we lost our quarterback third game in, that was really tough. We knew we hadn't arrived. We knew it was gonna be a grind. We knew we had to stay healthy. And we knew it was going to be close games. You can be 5–11, 8–8, 11–5 because of those games.
"We never felt like that. And that was a little bit of the hard part, because it wasn't like, 'Oh, we're disappointed.' I knew it was gonna be tough if we lost those guys. Now, we should've won more than we did. We lost a couple close games and I think we should've won three more games than we did. But that's where we were at last year. We're in a much better position now."
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