San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan spoke with Albert Breer of Sports Illustrated on Saturday night. Hours earlier, the coach's team had just upset the Arizona Cardinals at State Farm Stadium. The Cardinals' loss made their path to the playoffs much more difficult. For Shanahan and the 49ers, their playoff hopes were already gone. All they could do was play the role of spoiler.
Shanahan was obviously proud of his team's effort. With nothing more than pride left to play for, San Francisco (mostly) contained dynamic quarterback Kyler Murray and beat the Cardinals 20-12.
"I love these guys, I mean it," Shanahan told Breer from the team hotel neighboring State Farm Stadium. "I have every year. It's really fun to be their coach, but I also like them as friends. I don't want that to sound the wrong way, but we care about each other. And you hold each other accountable, and you're hard—I'm harder on my friends and loved ones more than anyone in the world—because you have such high expectations for them, and you believe in them so much. I feel like that's how our team is. We believe in each other.
"And that's why we're hard on each other because I feel like we've got a good team. And it hurts our record [6–9] doesn't show that. But we're going to still go out and show who we are on tape regardless of the result. I think if we keep that attitude, good things will happen eventually, and you can chalk it up to having better luck once we get this year over with."
The 49ers looked like anything but a sub .500 team while knocking off a playoff-hopeful squad. San Francisco accumulated 227 rushing yards against the Cardinals. That was key for a team that has struggled to replicate the dominating rushing attack it displayed last season.
Many of the 49ers' struggles this season are due to the insurmountable number of injuries they have endured. The team was down to its third-string quarterback on Saturday. Although, at this point, some might argue that C.J. Beathard is the better of the two backup options after going through an entire game without an interception. Nick Mullens, whom Beathard replaced after Mullens suffered an elbow injury, has thrown at least one interception in seven of his eight starts this season and thrown multiple interceptions in four of those contests.
Losses of multiple starters were too much for Shanahan's almost unrecognizable roster to overcome, which is why it sits at 6-9. Being stuck in Arizona for a month after being forced to leave Santa Clara due to county restrictions banning contact sports hasn't helped.
"We were six minutes away from being champions," Shanahan continued. "We brought a lot of the guys back, ran into COVID, and by Week 2, we didn't have the same team. … We thought that was rock bottom, and it seems like 30 more things happened after that, all the way to being topped off with getting kicked out of your home."
San Francisco has had every reason to give up on the season and just try to limp its way to the finish line. That isn't what's happening, though. The 49ers coach admits that he was concerned that this season's challenges might have been too much to overcome.
"So my biggest worry this week was that our team had given us everything that they had left, and I was afraid we weren't going to have much left this week," Shanahan said. "Going into the week, losing a couple more guys, having a couple COVID things come up, we were able to get one practice in this week. And the guys, just like they always do, no one was dogging it at practice. Everyone was going hard. And I was just worried we were going to be running on E. …
"We had a chance to run away with that game, just with the effort our guys made. And they made some big fourth-down conversions that kept them in it, and we missed some field goals, which made it a lot tighter. There were just so many guys, too, throughout the game who got banged up. And there were just so many situations where guys who aren't made of the right stuff would tap out. Guys had every excuse to do it. And we didn't have one guy tap out. We needed every guy. We needed everybody today. That's why it's such a special win."
Next season's roster will look very different. Forty players are scheduled to become free agents, and with the salary cap expected to drop as a result of COVID-19's impact on the 2020 season, Shanahan and the 49ers' brain trust have some difficult decisions ahead of them.
"I know we can't bring every single person back," Shanahan said, "but there's not one person we don't want to bring back. So we're going to try to get as much settled and go into this offseason and figure out every avenue to improve our team, and I can't wait. Gonna enjoy these last eight days, but I'm also looking forward to getting them over with, so we can all rest, recover and come out swinging next year."
Click here to read Breer's entire MMQB feature over at The Athletic.