There's a whole lot of talk about the 49ers' pregame speech before their 38-13 drubbing of the Chicago Bears.
Saturday night, Brock Purdy, Deommodore Lenoir — and George Kittle, according to Jauan Jennings — addressed the team the night before at the team's hotel.
Shanahan had players address the team early in his 49ers tenure, but went away from it. He brought it back with Nick Bosa last year, and gave the three players the mic this week, in search of a spark.
“I'm not going to go into complete detail, but I do think it was just important for our team to hear, I guess, from a guy on defense DMo and then myself, just what it's going to take moving forward and where our mindset has to be,” said Brock Purdy Tuesday. “And at the end of the day, just playing desperate football with where we're at in the season and we don't have room for error.
"Like, now's the time to get up and go and to create momentum and energy for each other, both sides of the ball playing as a team. And I think just hearing that from players and having it be a player-led team, it's important, it's huge. Especially with where we're at. Yeah, that's what we said.”
The implication — that we’re all supposed to accept — is that it took this pregame rallying cry before the Bears to get the 49ers to play “desperate.” That was the message. Play with "desperation."
Fred Warner seemed a bit uncomfortable with all of that talk, and rightfully so.
"I know there's been talk about desperation around the building ever since that game this past Sunday," Warner said. "I haven't really talked about it much, because I felt like that was already the feeling the last few weeks. It just hadn't really come together like you wanted it to… I don't want it to get lost that we didn't go out there in Green Bay, we didn't go out there in Buffalo saying, 'Let's just hope that we win.' Like, trust me, I felt desperate as hell going into both those games. It just didn't work out."
The 49ers' deserved credit for the resounding win. Credit was given. Having Purdy and Lenoir speak up was a smart move on Shanahan's part, and mature on theirs.
But to hold those speeches up like they were season-altering is wildly overstating what the 49ers did Sunday and what they've shown us this season.
The 49ers are in last place in the NFC West, two games back of the Seattle Seahawks, a team currently beating them in tiebreakers. The 49ers have not beaten a team at the time of the game with a winning record. They have a -60-point differential against teams with a winning record. They are, at their core, a team that has major lapses in execution in key moments, and churned out yards, but failed in the red zone. Their defense has frequently failed to hold onto second-half leads.
The Bears, the team that they just throttled, put out perhaps the worst defensive gameplan the 49ers have seen all year. They fired Matt Eberflus and abandoned his sound defensive scheme, which George Kittle all but admitted when explaining why some plays designed for Deebo Samuel didn’t work.
“What the Bears were doing, they've been running — their old head coach, he had this very specific way that they ran their defense with the ways that their ends played and stuff like that,” Kittle said. “We had all these cool little trick plays around that, and they kind of played it completely different than they had been playing all season. And so we called them into the wrong look.”
I am not discrediting the win. But the 49ers got their most advantageous looks from a defense all year.
The Bears — who have a top-tier corner in Jaylon Johnson, a good nickel in Kyler Gordon, and a great safety in Kevin Byard — offered very little press-man coverage, which has been the 49ers’ kryptonite this season, especially when paired with simulated (rushing with the expected number of players, usually four, but flashing pressure with more players to get an advantageous protection call from the offensive lines) overload (heavier to one side than the other) pressures.
Teams like the Seahawks and Chiefs, for example, might only send four defenders, but they’d threaten to bring more than that to affect the 49ers’ protection calls. They would send three of those rushers to one side to take advantage of the protection and get one free rusher, even though it's technically five offensive linemen against four rushers.
The Bears threw at least one of those looks at the 49ers and almost got home with Byard, but they simultaneously put linebacker Jack Sanborn one-on-one against Isaac Guerendo on a rail route for a 31-yard near-touchdown. Brock Purdy threw it up for Guerendo off his back foot because he saw the matchup pre-snap.
What I’m saying is the Bears were a miles worse team Sunday than they had shown for the past few. Their defensive gameplan was a joke. We should not overstate the quality of the win until it's proven as something other than a one-off.
Oh, and after this supposed feel-good win, Samuel, one of their captains, took to Twitter to defend his underwhelming play, saying — in a now-deleted tweet — that he's, "Not struggling at all just not getting the ball!!!!!!!"
"You read what you read," Samuel said Tuesday. "A little frustrated, for sure."
Shanahan and Kittle said it doesn't affect their perception of Samuel. I will not question that.
But for a captain who called out his kicker on the field this season, and then refused to talk to media after a massive loss in Green Bay, to take to social media and complain about touches after the most convincing win of the season... let's just slow the roll on this team being some fully inspired juggernaut.
The reality is that the 49ers do not have control of their own destiny. They have to hold onto the last thread they have remaining and play with the requisite desperation they are referencing. And for the first time this season, they will have to beat a team with a winning record.
They have to prove that they can accomplish something similar on offense against an equally desperate Rams team with an unpredictable defense (not a compliment) and an offense that just beat Josh Allen in a 86-point shootout.
Rah-rah speeches don't accomplish that. High-level execution does. And these 2024 49ers have been defined by failing to execute consistently. Thursday is a chance — probably too little too late — to prove they can rebuke that legacy that in their own eyes.