Originally posted by VinculumJuris:
Two factors in my mind:
1 - Seattle's young talent proved to be legit and ramped on a crazy trajectory. Though some of our young talent went down with injury, I do not see them having the same upside that Seattle's proved to have even if healthy all season. SF might have gotten better overall with young players, but I have a very hard time believing the team would have climbed as much as Seattle did because that just doesn't happen that often. Meanwhile, the core is aging (especially on offense).
Edit: I see it as unlikely that our young talent would have sufficiently ramped to keep pace with Seattle, even if the vets had stayed healthy. More likely in my mind is we have a couple of keepers who can turn into good depth or average starters but no game changers. All of it is speculative, including your hope that SF would have gotten materially better had everyone stayed healthy. I just see the likely outcome leaning in an unfavorable direction for us.
2 - New head coach whose program is clearly formidable. It took him one season to lay the groundwork, and we saw the fruits of that maturing throughout this past season. I'm a Shanahan fan and think he did a great job last season but do not think his program is gaining steam.
Much easier for a coach to have a formidable program when they're not missing any of their starters on that side of the ball while facing teams who match up poorly against them either due to personnel or injuries to their personnel.
Seattle doesn't beat the Rams without their offense going off and even then they needed a terrible muffed punt to get it done.
I don't want to keep playing the injury excuse but it's a lot easier to coach when you aren't missing key pieces to your roster and playing teams that are.
We were beat to hell and couldn't run the ball well or scare them with any of our pass catchers while the Pats were a slam dunk matchup for Seattle. Only chance they had was Maye throwing his nuts on the table and making perfect throws…instead he showed up neutered.
And while Stafford can certainly make throws Brock cannot…the biggest thing was Rams could actually run the ball and had 2 WRs who could threaten that Seattle secondary and make plays against them. Brock had to grind out every yard and eventually it all broke down.
. Let's see how last years draft class progresses before we write them off . I get it though, it sucks watching them draft guys that make immediate l, massive impacts, but that's not the norm
