For the second successive season, the 49ers will have to turn things around after a disappointing start to the season to reach the playoffs.
The 49ers are 3-4 after an error-strewn performance in a 44-23 defeat to the Kansas City Chiefs and face a critical NFC West matchup with the Los Angeles Rams in Week 8.
In 2021, San Francisco recovered from going 3-5 across the first eight games to win seven of their final nine and reach the postseason at 10-7, before going on to progress to the NFC Championship Game.
The Niners have the roster to reach similar heights this season but, after dropping two straight, they have several pressing questions to answer if they are to reach the playoffs in back-to-back seasons for the first time since 2013.
Can they fix the red zone struggles?
The 49ers, unsurprisingly for a team led by the beautiful football mind of Kyle Shanahan, aren’t struggling moving the ball and — though they were handily outscored by the Chiefs — were consistently in position to go blow for blow with a Kansas City offense that performed at an extremely high level in Week 7.
For San Francisco, the problem was that mistakes frequently undermined their progress when they got the ball deep into Kansas City territory, leaving them to settle for field goals or, in the case of Jimmy Garoppolo’s crushing red-zone interception at the end of the first half, miss the chance to score points entirely.
The 49ers were just two for five in the red zone against the Chiefs, their struggles in that regard marking a continuation of a theme of the 2022 campaign.
San Francisco has found the endzone on 12 of its 22 drives where the 49ers have entered the opposition 20. That is a touchdown efficiency rate that puts the Niners in the middle of the pack, but is realistically not good enough for them to challenge to go deep into the NFC playoffs.
With a bye week on the horizon, it is high time for the 49ers to find a solution for what has been an average red zone offense at best so far this season. If they cannot do so, it could continue to be an inconsistent and frustrating season on that side of the ball.
Is this just a defensive blip?
The 49ers’ defense was clearly the best in the NFL through the first five weeks of the season, the subsequent two have seen it come back down to earth with a huge bump.
Though the 49ers only gave up 289 total yards in the Week 6 loss to the Atlanta Falcons, San Francisco was consistently confounded by Atlanta’s zone-read game as an injury crisis on the defensive side of the ball had a major impact.
San Francisco got several of their injured players back in Week 7, but the 49ers’ defensive performance against the Chiefs represented a low point for DeMeco Ryans’ group as they surrendered 529 yards and six total touchdowns, frequently failing to get off the field on third down as Patrick Mahomes and Co. shredded the Niners regardless of situation.
It was an uncharacteristically poor performance versus an opponent that excels at taking defenses out of their comfort zone. The 49er defense had no answer for the motion and the jet sweep game that helped Chiefs wide receiver Mecole Hardman score three touchdowns and also saw its usually sound zone coverage picked apart by Mahomes, with the typically excellent San Francisco linebackers too often looking lost at sea.
The hope will be that with another week for nagging injuries that may have impacted the performance of some against Kansas City to heal and the benefit of facing a common opponent they know extremely well in the Rams, the 49ers will see a return to the defensive form of the opening five weeks.
Should the defense thrive at SoFi Stadium, the Falcons and Chiefs games will likely be seen as an aberration. If it fails again, then there will be even more severe scrutiny on a group thought to be the strength of the team.
What's the identity?
Both problems on the offensive and defensive side of the ball feeds into an overarching question surrounding this 49ers team, and that question surrounds their identity.
It’s clear the Niners are a team still figuring out what they are, especially on the offensive side of the ball.
Kyle Shanahan alluded as to why that is the case during his press conference on Wednesday.
Speaking about the offensive struggles, he said: “Going through a year when you have every single person on our offense is in a new position except for our O-Line coach, I think you start out that way some. Especially when you spend the whole offseason getting everyone ready for a plan with what we were going to do with [QB] Trey [Lance] and things like that, then you go a different direction by the first quarter of the second game, so everyone’s up to date on stuff, but you realize it’s your first time going through stuff with people.
“Our first time playing the Rams, I felt like it was our millionth, but last time we put a game plan together I realized a lot of these guys haven’t gone through this with us, so you have some of that stuff, but that stuff you go throughout the year with and you have that with players too.”
The 49ers are clearly still adapting to having to pivot from Lance to Garoppolo early in the season, but San Francisco does not have much time to reacclimate itself to the return to the old normal.
San Francisco must figure out whether it is a team that’s going to lean on the run game with Christian McCaffrey and trust a normally domineering defense to get back to its best, adopt a more pass-heavy approach or achieve what is likely Shanahan’s aim and develop an extremely diverse dual-threat offense with McCaffrey and Deebo Samuel at its core.
The Niners might not succeed in figuring out what they are until after the Week 9 bye, but the resolution they come to will have a defining impact on how far they go in 2022.
