Finally, your dull repetitive nightmare is over, and the San Francisco 49ers have run out of pretense. The playoffs are finally and officially the pipe dream they seemed to be six weeks ago, and they can now become the gentlemen of relative leisure they have been hinting at since Hallowe'en.
In losing to the ultra-moribund Dallas Cowboys, a team with no discernible defense or Ezekiel Elliott, the 49ers are now the tenth team in NFL History to lose a Super Bowl one year and then sport a losing record in the next. They can stack up all the injuries and the virus and the bad luck and the exile from Main Street, but as Bill Parcells once said, you are what your record says you are, and the 49ers are 5-9, losers of six of their last seven games and possessors of the third-worst defense in points allowed in those seven weeks. They have the same record as the Jets since November began, for God's sake.
In short, a few blooms are off the Shanahanian rose and even the tedious Garoppolo debate has lost its ability to titillate the proles. That's what 5-9 gets you.
Put another way, even the Raiders lasted longer than you did before being eliminated. Seven hours, to be exact. There is no point in looking for small victories, you see. Besides, you always talked about never caring about the Raiders anyway.
Sure it's time to look ahead to the glorious future that you al thought you had back in September, before all the ligamental and bacillic carnage and burdens of roster attrition began. It'll all be better next year -- only four of those ten teams we told you about had a losing record two years after barfing up a Super Bowl, meaning there is only about a seven percent chance that you'll have to go through this all again next year.
But maybe a valuable lesson has learned –– never to assume that the future is assured. The 49ers were as wired for a deep run this year as any Super Bowl loser, and then they lost all of their best players and a bunch of middling ones. The Garoppolo argument went from zero to stupid quickly, and now the 49ers' quarterback controversy isn't even "Our starter stinks but our backups don't make us happy" but "Garoppolo's the guy, we can't blow all the savings we wanted to make on him on something else, this is the deal, so the hell with it."
In fact, it might help you all to operate on the theory that next year is going to suck slightly less than this year, but only slightly. The joy you found in 2019 was largely based on happy surprises, so that will take a bit of brain gaming. Don't concern yourself with how 2020 went to hell, but how you thought 2019 was going to look just like 2018. Put no stock in the last two weeks of this year, either. The Cardinals and Seahawks are just better than you, and by a lot. But next year... maybe it won't stink nearly so much.
In other words, this year is over, and it deserves the lower-case-v viking funeral it's going to get. If you need to be angry with Kyle Shanahan for being below .500 as a coach, or having played 13 of the team's 67 games on his resume with no chance to advance to the next round, or not making Nick Mullens something other than the backup with more interceptions than starts. Remember that 2019 was found money, and the best way to think 2021 can work out the same way is to pretend you're broke. Life as the plucky underdog is always better than the snotty frontrunner, and the 49ers gave you 2020 to remind you of that.
