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USA Today Sports Media Group
USA Today Sports Media Group
Sport
Kyle Madson

49ers top yet another ESPN roster ranking, highlighting urgency to win Super Bowl

The 49ers Super Bowl window is open. Whether it’s open wide or only a little bit remains to be seen, but it is undeniably there to jump through this season.

Pro Football Focus and ESPN have both touted their roster as the best in the NFL. Now a ranking by ESPN’s Bill Barnwell placed the 49ers WR, TE and RB talent as the best in the league.

It’s better to have good players that put a team out in front of various preseason prognostications. However, this is the fourth time in as many years San Francisco will go into a season with a loaded roster and they don’t have a Super Bowl trophy to show for it. Winning the preseason rankings doesn’t get a banner.

The good news, and perhaps what matters most in the TE, WR, RB rankings, is that the margin for error is wider for quarterback Brock Purdy in his second full season as a starter. He still needs to improve, to be sure, but he’ll have a stellar supporting cast to lean on that should help him overcome some of the inevitable mistakes that come from young signal callers.

Purdy is the key to all of this for the 49ers. What he looks like in the future without this group of playmakers remains to be seen. It also doesn’t matter in the scope of 2024. If he can elevate his game to make a couple more plays with this supporting cast around him, it could mean that this is the year San Francisco finally gets over the hump.

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