Maybe a few months from now, the San Francisco 49ers will look back on Dec. 7, the night before they dismantled a Chicago Bears team in transition, and find their turning point. At the very least, the evening can give a proud old team some hope that all the pain, difficulty and frustration of the fall of 2024 might actually take this group somewhere.
The setting was the team hotel. The speakers were quarterback Brock Purdy and corner Deommodore Lenoir, two guys who don’t typically say much in these settings.
Lenoir detailed bonds he’s built over the course of his life, the tough places those bonds have led him and how he felt similar bonds with guys in the room. Purdy told them that it was time to play desperate. You have to play desperate, or you’ll lose a lot of games, he said.
“DMo just talked about how his family has a lot of brothers, and he’s had brothers who have passed away, he has brothers who are not with him anymore,” tight end George Kittle said, over the phone, hanging out with family Sunday night, hours after the game. “He felt like when he became a 49er that he found new brothers, and he plays for us every single day. I think that resonated a lot with the team.
“Brock was, Hey guys, go out there, play team football, play for each other. Find the energy. Find the spark. I’m shortening that. Brock talked for a while. They both did a great job.”
Combine their messages and you can create a nice, fun story line. This aging team that’s been to four NFC title games and two Super Bowls over the past five years is feeling its football mortality, and seeing that it has one or two more shots left to win it all together as a group created a sense of urgency that led to Sunday’s blowout.
Or, it could be simpler than that. It could be that they just played better.
Either way, Sunday was the manifestation of what, justifiably, was expected of the Niners coming into 2024. It happened with Brandon Aiyuk out for the year, and Christian McCaffrey gone for the foreseeable future. It came with Trent Williams and Nick Bosa down. It happened emphatically, with a halftime box score that looked like Alabama-Mercer.
At the break, the Niners had 319 yards to the Bears’ four. The Niners had 14 first downs and the Bears had one. The Niners had the ball for 20 minutes, the Bears had it for 10. The Niners averaged 8.6 yards per play, and the Bears averaged 0.2 (not 2, 0.2).
NFL games aren’t supposed to go like that, even if one of the teams is in its first game with an interim coach who was promoted to interim offensive coordinator a month earlier.
But that’s who the Niners were on Sunday. Now, the question is, can they be that again?
And again and again and again?
We’ve got less than a month of the regular season to go, and story lines are evolving as such. And we’ve got all of it covered in the MMQB this week. Over in the Takeaways, you’ll find …
• A look at the Los Angeles Rams’ resurgence, behind a vintage Matthew Stafford performance.
• A dive into the quarterbacking futures of the Minnesota Vikings and New York Giants.
• An assessment of what Tua Tagovailoa and Russell Wilson mean to their respective teams.
But we’re starting with the Niners, and what they have left.
The reality of the Niners’ situation coming into Sunday was this: They hadn’t won a game in nearly a month, and their last two losses, to the Green Bay Packers and Buffalo Bills, were noncompetitive routs on national television. They looked, as I said last week, like a punch-drunk old prizefighter, still full of pride but without the power he once possessed.
So, my first question for Kittle was the obvious one.
“Did I see it coming?” Kittle said back to me. “Yes, 100%. We’ve had this ability the entire season. Unfortunately, we’ve had a bunch of turnovers, and we haven’t been converting on third downs, and extending the football field. We’re a really good offense. We’re a really talented offense, a lot of guys all over the field. I just waited for us to play team football.”
The wait ended Sunday, with a lot of names you might be less familiar with.
In Williams’s spot at left tackle was 2021 fourth-round pick Jaylon Moore, who had seven starts over three years coming into the season. Old standby Jauan Jennings is in a much more prominent role with Aiyuk down, and first-round pick Ricky Pearsall and veteran Chris Conley are now the ones providing depth (and snaps). Journeyman Sam Okuayinonu started opposite Leonard Floyd at defensive end, with Bosa down. Isaac Guerendo was the bell cow back with McCaffrey and Jordan Mason on injured reserve.
As Kittle saw it, therein lay another layer of the urgency that Purdy implored his teammates to find on Saturday night. Yes, of course, there’s the idea that there are only so many shots this group of Niners will get. But, on the other side of the coin, there’s an entire crew of new guys, who are getting their shot for the first time.
"Personally, I’ve had a sense of urgency since my rookie year when my tight ends coach John Embree yelled it at me every single day,” Kittle says. “I’ve always had a fire lit under my ass. And when you have a lot of injuries to guys that played long into the season, [Javon] Hargrave, Bosa, Brandon Aiyuk, Trent Williams, when you miss guys like that, those are guys who have gone through the reps, who have been down 20-plus points at halftime in an NFC championship game and found a way to win. You lose that, you need guys to stand up.
“You need guys to take advantage of the opportunity that’s in front of them. I would love to have B.A., Trent Williams, Bosa, Christian McCaffrey, but it’s an opportunity for the guys behind them to go make a name for themselves. That’s one thing that I really try to hit on. This is your shot. When those guys come back, you’re going to be competing with them, but right now, you’re the guy. Take advantage of that opportunity and show why the Niners need to keep you around for as long as you want to be here.”
Kittle then stopped and collected his thoughts.
“Just having that sense of urgency,” he says over music playing, and family socializing in the background, “I think where it might not have hit the last two weeks, it hit this week.”
Which is to say, even if he didn’t know it would happen this week, he figured, knowing his team, this sort of Sunday was on its way. So, yes, he saw it coming.
The next question would be: What contributed to the Niners being at 5–7 going into Sunday? Injuries are definitely a part of it. But Kittle refused to leave it at that, even if that would be the easy thing for a 31-year-old four-time All-Pro say.
“Honestly, you need great coaching and you need great execution to be a great football team,” Kittle says. “I just don’t think as an offense we’ve been executing the way we need to be. Coach [Kyle] Shanahan keeps calling the plays for us. Whether it was penalties, whether it was turnovers, whether it’s just not being on the same page, we just haven’t been playing clean football. Our offense, when we stay on the field, is incredibly efficient.”
In other words, while Purdy missing the Packers game was a big part of losing that one, so too were the nine penalties and three turnovers the Niners had against a Green Bay team that only turned it over once and was flagged just five times. And while losing McCaffrey in-game was difficult to reckon with in Buffalo, losing the turnover battle 3–0 for the second consecutive week was something the Niners could control, and didn’t.
So this week, without an opponent like Buffalo or Green Bay on the other side, the Niners drilled down on turnovers (committing one to Chicago’s one), knowing that if the injuries shrunk down their margin for error, the mistakes would eliminate it, and any shot the team had, regardless of the opponent.
“The last couple of weeks have been really frustrating,” Kittle says. “When you have an offense that’s performed like this the last couple of years, whether it’s efficiency in the red zone, third down, running the ball, we’ve been really good. To not play up to those standards this year, whether it’s injury or not, we have a lot of superstars still on the field, it’s been frustrating.
“Guys came together this week with the mindset that this is the only week that matters. Screw what’s happened the entire season, whether you’ve had a bad game or you’re not having a good season, don’t think about that. Think about this game and put your best stuff on tape. I think the entire team did that today.”
Actually, Kittle had a feeling that this sort of outing was coming in Buffalo before he knew the game would be played in a blizzard, or that McCaffrey would go down.
So, maybe it was a week later than he’d hoped.
The good news is, if the Niners take care of business, it may have come just in time.
At 6–7, if San Francisco wins out, it’s hard to imagine they won’t be in the playoffs. That said, they’ll have to earn it, with the mighty Detroit Lions, feisty Arizona Cardinals and Miami Dolphins still on the slate and, this week, the archrival Rams.
These two teams head into Thursday night in a similar spot.
The Rams are 7–6. They’ve dealt with a ton of injuries. They’ve turned the page, like the Niners soon will have to, and have gotten a lot younger around battle-tested vets like Stafford and Cooper Kupp. They’ve been plucky over the past few weeks and, like the Niners, will head into Levi’s Stadium coming off a potential turning-point win.
And Kittle, for one, can’t wait to see how it goes.
“I used to hate Thursday night games and now I love them because that means there are no full practices, everything’s kind of a jog through, the game plans can’t be that confusing,” he said. “All it means is that the boys just have to go out there and roll. It’s always good to have a win going into a Thursday night game because you have a great vibe. The boys are going to be rolling, and everyone’s going to be really excited to play this game.
“Thursday night, against the L.A. Rams, in Levi’s Stadium, it’s going to be a hell of a game.”
With a lot at stake, too.
Win, and perhaps those galvanizing speeches from Saturday night take on real meaning, with the proud old Niners back at .500—catching fire at a point where the uber-talented group can realistically envision taking another shot at winning that elusive Lombardi Trophy.
Lose and, well, you can forget all the good vibes coming out of Saturday and Sunday. They’ll be replaced with bigger questions for the franchise to answer.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as George Kittle on How the 49ers Returned to Form in Rout Over Bears.
