San Francisco 49ers: Is the Season Over After Thanksgiving Night Loss?
For weeks, the San Francisco 49ers offense has been teetering on the border of league average. That’s been enough—it’s let them slip past the New Orleans Saints, the New York Giants and the Washington Redskins.
On Thanksgiving night, the offense was not league average. It wasn’t even below league average—it was an entirely inept performance against, to be fair, a tough Seattle Seahawks defense. With their season more or less on the line, the San Francisco 49ers put up one of the worst performances of the season.
The passing game was nonexistent. Colin Kaepernick threw two interceptions and was generally inaccurate throughout the night. None of the 49ers’ big three receiving targets, Anquan Boldin, Michael Crabtree and Vernon Davis, managed to get any kind of separation against the Seahawks’ vaunted pass defense.
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They certainly weren’t helped by the complete lack of rushing success either. Frank Gore carried the ball 10 times for 28 yards, and neither Carlos Hyde nor Kaepernick added much on the ground.
The 49ers knew that to make the playoffs, they probably had to go 4-1 from here on out. In other words, the 19-3 loss to Seattle on Thursday night doesn’t end their season...but it does mean that in order to make the playoffs, they almost certainly will have to win in Seattle in two weeks. After watching the performance the offense put up on Thursday night, that possibility seems laughable at best.
I need to be very clear—this isn’t on the defense at all. Yes, it allowed a couple big plays from Russell Wilson, and it didn’t get to the five-sack number I predicted the morning of the game.
However, considering that its players were on the field nearly constantly and saw themselves having to deal with bad field position time after time, I think the defense actually had quite a valiant performance. Vic Fangio should be commended for putting together a Super Bowl-caliber defense despite massive injuries.
When your defense holds a playoff-caliber team to 19 points, you have to win that game. Coming into this week, 153 teams had scored 20 or fewer points in a game in 2014. Only 29 had won. Holding the Seahawks to less than 20 points would have been considered a great result entering the game, practically ensuring a victory.
Instead, the 49ers unleashed their patented zero-dimensional offense. It hasn’t been great at all this season, but this was by far its worst performance—at the worst possible time.
It’s almost impossible to assign blame for this one because there’s so much to go around, and it all cascades on top of one another.
Colin Kaepernick certainly had one of his worst games as a pro; there’s no doubting that. He was inaccurate and alternated between forcing the ball at Richard Sherman and ignoring that side of the field entirely.
Would he have done better if Greg Roman was calling a more exotic offense? After all, the Seahawks seemed to have no trouble diagnosing the 49ers’ offensive game plan, such as it was. It was the same uninspired game plan we’ve seen from him week in and week out.
It’s noteworthy that the NBC commentators pointed out that it looked like Jim Harbaugh took over some of the play-calling late, when the 49ers began to move the ball and showed their only signs of life all game.
Then again, Roman’s relatively conservative style has worked in the past when the players were playing better! Can you blame passes falling incomplete when receivers aren’t getting any spacing from their cornerbacks? The passing game isn’t going to open up if the run game is being stopped dead in its tracks. The run game isn’t going to go anywhere if the offensive line can’t get its assignments straight.
In the long run, I think the coordinator is easier to replace than the quarterback. That, plus a talent infusion, is probably the long-term answer to the offense’s woes—bringing in one of the talented rookies from this year’s receiving class would make things feel a lot different right now.
Imagine this team with Jarvis Landry, Donte Moncrief, Jordan Matthews or John Brown on the squad. The passing game might be a bit more successful if teams couldn’t just clamp down on Anquan Boldin. Crabtree and Davis have, more often than not, taken themselves out of the equation this year.
You can’t replace Kaepernick, even if you want to after one bad game. I don’t think there’s much doubt that he’s not having a good season compared to last year, but he’s made subtle improvements in his game overall—remember his play against the Dallas Cowboys, New Orleans or Washington?
It feels like the end of the world right now after this awful performance, and he’s not “great with a capital G” like Jim Harbaugh has said, per The MMQB's Greg A. Bedard. But don’t let one truly terrible performance destroy your faith in him. If the 49ers surround him with better play-calling and more talent, I still believe he’ll be fine.
This is all getting ahead of ourselves, though. This is all action to be taken in the offseason, and there’s still four more games to go here in the regular season. The 49ers no longer control their own fate after this week’s loss, but they’re still at the tail end of the playoff hunt—I’d put it at about a 30-70 proposition for their making the playoffs from here on out. You can’t quit just yet.
If they were to win out, the 49ers would still essentially be guaranteed a playoff slot—there’s very few scenarios that would see an 11-5 49ers team staying at home. That would mean somehow beating the Seahawks in Seattle though, and in the aftermath of the Thanksgiving Day loss, that seems like a pipe dream.
So, what if the 49ers win their other three games—on the road against the Oakland Raiders, at home against the San Diego Chargers and at home against a probably clinched Arizona Cardinals team in Week 17?
There’s every chance that a 10-6 team might miss the playoffs this year. And the win by Detroit Thanksgiving morning certainly didn’t help matters any, but the 49ers still have tiebreakers over the Philadelphia Eagles and Dallas. That’s about a 2-to-1 shot of making the playoffs, I’d say, from quick back-of-the-envelope calculations.
But even if this team does make the playoffs, do you really believe it's going anywhere with this offense? As currently constituted, I could maybe see the 49ers upsetting Dallas, New Orleans or the Atlanta Falcons, all of whom have severe defensive deficiencies. But a matchup against even an average defense like the Green Bay Packers? The 49ers would get sent home with their tails between their legs.
It’s hard to quantify just how badly this loss hurt. Had the 49ers kept it close and been competitive, it wouldn’t be as bad because there would be hope they could make a few small tweaks and get revenge in Seattle in two weeks. But they didn’t keep it close, and it wasn’t competitive. It was one of the more painful games 49ers fans have had to watch in a long time.
The 49ers are on the canvas with the referee counting. This wasn’t yet a knockout blow, but it may be just about time to throw in the towel on the 2014 season.
Bryan Knowles is a featured columnist for Bleacher Report, covering the San Francisco 49ers. Follow him @BryKno on Twitter.
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