Raider Nation
Devil's Advocate
Ray Ratto sums it up nicely, as usual.
The truth is a vicious ******* when it’s one you don’t want.
So it is that the San Francisco 49ers are stuck with this irrefutable *******.
It isn’t that they lost to the Seattle Seahawks Thursday night, 19-3, in a game they can only be thankful wasn’t more lopsided. It’s that they were lucky to get the three they got, and very lucky that they didn’t give up another 19.
It’s that they were exposed utterly and completely for having the lesser quarterback, the lesser running back, the lesser secondary, the lesser game plan, the lesser fan base, the lesser stadium ambience . . . the lesser everything.
They were defenestrated on national television and exposed as the incomplete work they clearly are.
But all that we knew.
It was CEO Jed York in a moment of high petulance telling the world that, without prompting, as the game literally ended, that we didn’t see coming. And now we have, and now there will be hell to pay.
“Thank you 49er Faithful for coming out strong tonight,” he typed as his fingers destroyed the phone keypad in what we can only assume was a purplish rage. “This performance wasn’t acceptable. I apologize for that.”
Swell. He’s sorry, but so’s Brenda Lee.
Owners don’t apologize for their own misdeeds, of course, so you can guess without needing more than one try at whom he was venting his spleen. It was the Khaki Avenger, Jim Harbaugh, whose own role in the postgame press conference was to repeat the same mantra over and over no matter what the question was.
“They played better football than we did in all phases,” he said with the persistence of a one-note Siri. “We didn’t get it done. We know we’re going to have to win ‘em all.”
This, we knew too. They were outgained, 379-164, and the Seahawks gifted them 105 yards and five of their 16 first downs with penalties. Marshawn Lynch outgained the entire 49er running attack in a game that would be dominated by the ground game, and quarterback Russell Wilson turned Colin Kaepernick into a figure of fun, showing a gift for escape and throwing accuracy that Kaepernick shows only sporadically.
And don’t start with Richard Sherman.
He owns the 49ers as a cornerback. Owns them.
And don’t bother objecting, or calling him a loudmouth, or any of the other clever terms you use for him. He takes San Francisco’s per diem, and laughs about it, and then calls the fans “mediocre” and complains about their language and choice of projectiles and waves goodbye as they leave the stadium, and everyone will listen because he is on the winning side.
It is the tyranny of success, and 49ers fans know how it works on both sides.
The 49ers were stripped bare and reduced to an ordinariness they have not known in the Jim Harbaugh era, and while this week’s game is not always a barometer of next week’s fortunes, they only needed to see how empty and desolate their stadium looked as they went through the motions in their final possession to know what their future likely holds.
And it is not likely to be a charming one. They can get well in Oakland next Sunday, but then they travel to Seattle where the Seahawks will be even Seahawkier. Not only will this not be easy on the eyes, it will gnaw at the souls.
The 49er locker room was a long string of scowls, none more menacing than that of general manager Trent Baalke talking in a glass office easily visible to the players and media. He wanted people to know what he felt without having to say the words, and the players, who had the words beaten out of them, were a profoundly poor substitute.
Not that words would have mattered. This was a mood and body language night, and everywhere early somberness had turn to anger as the night went on. This was supposed to be an epic battle between equals, and instead it was a swift knee to the privates. Seattle is not just better, but dramatically better, catching its stride as December looms.
The Seahawks had come off hugely physical games against Kansas City and Arizona, while the 49ers had relative tea parties (in which they were too polite to score any points) in New York and at home against Washington. All the advantages were San Francisco’s.
Now? “We have to win ‘em all,” says the embattled coach, and “This performance wasn’t acceptable and I apologize for that,” says the hotplate of an owner. You could drive Paraguay through the gulf between their two positions right now.
Is there a way out? Yes, but it requires that they receive not only the depths of their own wills but help from the six teams clearly above them (they do not get credit for being better than whichever Conference USA team wins the NFC South). They need Seattle to go all rancid, and Arizona to lose and lose and lose some more.
They need Dallas to keep losing, and they need Detroit to be Detroit again.
Mostly, though, they have to stop being the team that can’t score, that has weapons that don’t fire, has a defense that is consistently asked to do too much, a coach who doesn’t look quite so embattled, and an owner who emotes when he should let someone else hold his phone.
