If not officially, the 12-6 loss to the Los Angeles Rams marks the end of San Francisco's faint playoff hopes. The 49ers, who now fall to 6-8, have a 0.1% chance of making the playoff. Barring the meteor, there will be no important football games after Christmas. And they have only themselves to blame.
This squad of players had, as they put it, all the "individual talent" needed to match up to anyone in the NFL. But as Thursday night dragged on and the game grew old, each of them showed the cracks that have doomed this season. QB Brock Purdy, who took the league by storm his first two years, posted another dreary outing full of off-target passes as he let himself be ruled by the weather once again. LB Dre Greenlaw, whose shocking Achilles injury helped derail last year's Super Bowl push, couldn't stay on the field long enough, soon enough, to help put away a struggling Rams offense. His partner in crime, Fred Warner, couldn't drag the defense to a 4th quarter stop without him, especially on his broken ankle. And a long list of 49ers stars, from OT Trent Williams to RB Christian McCaffrey to WR Brandon Aiyuk, simply watched from the sidelines, unable to change the course of the 49ers' sinking ship.
But there's only one player who truly encapsulates the impotence of the 49ers' 2024 season: Deebo Samuel. Deebo, who let the world know earlier this week he needed more touches to make a difference. Deebo, whose 569 receiving yards this year marks the worst per-game total of his career. Deebo, who would make $28 million next year on a team with Super Bowl aspirations.
Deebo, who in the open field with the 49ers' best chance of the night to score, did this:
There's no mystery to why the 49ers have struggled this year. The All-Star cast is full of understudies, and those remaining haven't lived up to their billing. There wasn't much emotion on the San Francisco sidelines as Brock Purdy was pulled to the ground and the clock ran out. Deebo Samuel, whose last-gasp special teams efforts were icing on a mud pie, told the world a quarter and a half prior; he just couldn't do it. None of them could.
It's not Samuel's fault, not entirely, that the 49ers lost. In a game without Trent Williams or their top three running backs, the 49ers couldn't run the ball - just 63 yards all day on 19 carries. When Rams QB Matt Stafford struggled against the conditions early on, a crowd of 49ers' defenders couldn't wrangle a tipped ball. Not just once, four separate times did a loose ball squirt away from a nearby Niners defensive back. And when the chips were down in the fourth quarter, Sean McVay's Rams ran the ball with impunity, punishing the 49ers' undermanned Wide-9 technique, controlling the ball for 9 minutes and 18 seconds as they scored the only points of the quarter to pull ahead for good.
Perhaps the 49ers could take notes from LA's organization. Despite being regularly trounced as Kyle Shanahan's team rose to prominence, the Rams are the ones who seized on their Super Bowl run and won a Lombardi Trophy. Despite being down in the second half in both of their games this year, the Rams showed resilience and grew stronger as the game went on. Their final play call, a 5-man blitz on a Hail Mary that neutered San Francisco's scoring chance before Purdy could get the ball out of his hand, was the kind of inspired coaching decision that 49ers fans haven't seen in all too long. It smelled like the difference between a coach willing to gamble to give his team an edge in the most critical situations, and one nursing a 3-0 lead in the second quarter like the game ended at the half. While it's hard to argue that the Rams are a dominant franchise with the kind of Super-Bowl-or-bust aspirations the Niners have, the 49ers have no right to claim it should have been them. They aren't even a winning team.
The 49ers can go home, waterlogged and doused in spirit, and go about the business of preparing for next season, self-defeating offseason decisions and all. Maybe by then they can find a coach willing to watch film of his biggest losses, captains who can find a way to stay on the field, and players who won't simply walk away when things get tough.
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