The 49ers’ biggest question coming into the 2024 season was whether they could avoid many of the same issues that befell them in the post-Super Bowl 2020 campaign.
Luckily, the world hasn’t been stricken with a worldwide pandemic again.
But the Niners sure seem to have caught the injury bug again.
Two of the team’s most important offensive players, Christian McCaffrey and now Deebo Samuel, will be out for weeks to come.
Yes, the Niners are down not one but two do-it-all threats—the players who made the Niners’ offense the envy of the league.
Yikes.
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In his conference call with the media on Monday, San Francisco head coach Kyle Shanahan said Samuel has a calf strain and will miss “a couple of weeks,” starting with the Niners’ game this upcoming Sunday against the Rams in Los Angeles.
This, after McCaffrey was placed on injured reserve before the Niners’ Week 2 loss to the Vikings on Sunday. He’s not eligible to return to the field until October, but there is skepticism he’ll return when he is first eligible.
Obviously, this is not the start the team wanted. In 2020, a downright biblical string of injuries undercut the Niners’ season before it really started. Four seasons later, the Niners aren’t beating the 2020 redux allegations.
Now, San Francisco’s season isn’t over because of two injuries, even if they are arguably their two most important skill position players.
But this season has become significantly — perhaps exponentially — more difficult without Nos. 1 and 23 in the fold. The Niners are 8-9 over the last five years when Samuel hasn’t played. They’re 1-2 without McCaffrey since he arrived in 2022.
Since McCaffrey was acquired via trade in October 2022, we’ve never seen the 49ers without one or the other on the field.
Sunday’s game against the Rams will be a new territory for the Niners.
It puts the spotlight not on the stars’ replacements—Jordan Mason and, in all likelihood, Jauan Jennings—but rather on the remaining stars on the offensive roster.
So for this bad luck to strike amid the struggles of two other key offensive players — Trent Williams and Brandon Aiyuk — only makes optimism that much harder to find.
Both Williams and Aiyuk skipped training camp amid contract disputes. Their rust was evident in underwhelming performances Sunday in Minnesota. (Williams allowed four pressures and Aiyuk was not on the same page with quarterback Brock Purdy on big downs.)
Both will have to be immense against the Rams (who are down two of their own stars, Puka Nakua and Cooper Kupp) on Sunday. That runway where they can ease into the system has proven short—Burbank airport short.
This challenge also presents an incredible opportunity for quarterback Brock Purdy.
The Niners’ QB1 is in line for a massive contract at the end of the season. He can prove he’s worth every penny and a bit more by elevating his game to All-Pro levels in the coming weeks.
It’s what the great quarterbacks do when they’re missing their top weapons. They make it work.
So far in Purdy’s short career, he hasn’t. Last year, he went 0-3 when Samuel missed the better part of three games mid-season.
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The 49ers cannot afford to lose in the upcoming weeks. The good news is that this is the easy part of their schedule—the Rams are decimated by injuries, too, and the Patriots and Cardinals represent two of the easier opponents on the slate.
The bad news is that the team’s schedule after that is a brutal challenge for even a healthy 49ers team.
This is the stretch where the Niners needed to rack up wins — to put hay in the barn for the winter. Anything less than a 4-1 record going into a Thursday night game in Seattle on Oct. 10 would have been unacceptable.
The Niners already have that loss on the books, and harvesting that hay just became a whole lot tougher.
This team should still have enough talent to win without McCaffrey and Samuel.
But “should” doesn’t get you anywhere in the NFL.
It’s an early gut check for Shanahan, Purdy, and a team that believes it’s going back to the Super Bowl.
How the 49ers respond will tell us everything if that dream is at all possible.
