There has been no safe space for the 49ers this season, one that was to vaguely resemble something celebratory and joyous, even if the players weren’t expected to compete for a NFC West title after an offseason that saw more defections than the Cuban national baseball team. This season was supposed to be a five-month lead-up to Super Bowl 50, which will be played in their swanky, $1.3 billion stadium in Santa Clara, an hour-long, traffic-slogged commute from the city that still bears the team’s name (and will, no doubt, host a majority of the Super Bowl parties and functions). This season was supposed to bear some level of basic football competency, as one does in the NFL. A glimmer of fun along the way would only be a welcome bonus.
Instead, it’s been a season of crushing disappointment in almost every conceivable way. San Francisco, which hosts struggling Cincinnati this Sunday (4:25 p.m. EST, CBS), is 4-9, which feels like a record approximately three wins better than it deserves. They’ve lost star quarterback Colin Kaepernick for the year and possibly for good. Head coach Jim Tomsula is clearly in over his head. The team president was internally demoted. The local media turned against this regime long ago, and now the dysfunction is garnering national attention, even so far as to spur rumors that the York family may try and sell the team. Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who successfully brought the America’s Cup to San Francisco and is desperate to own a sports franchise here, would apparently be ready to jump aboard should the Yorks suddenly want to bail.
Few around the Bay Area really appreciated that it would be this bad. Yes, the Niners seemed headed for a rebuilding year, if only because the roster truly needed to be rebuilt from almost nothing. But they still had a Super Bowl-appearing QB in Kaepernick, their running back of the future in second-year man Carlos Hyde, wide receiver Torrey Smith coming in on a $40 million contract … OK, that’s about it. So yeah, it was always going to be this bad, whether the predictors saw it or not.
But a dominant 20-3 win over Minnesota in Week 1 showed that maybe, just maybe, this season would be more miracle than mirage. Holding Adrian Peterson to 31 rushing yards? Awesome. Hyde going off for 168 on the ground? Sounds great. The defense holding the Vikings to a single fourth-quarter field goal? Jed York, so succinct on Twitter, was probably doing cartwheels in the posh Levi’s Stadium luxury suites.
Then four straight losses followed (by an aggregate score of 147-55) and the season was effectively cratered a full month before the bye week. And now every meaningless win — such as the Week 13 overtime victory in Chicago orchestrated by one Blaine Gabbert, if you can even believe that premise — only serves to sabotage the Niners’ future draft position, although this team is so incredibly needy at every team position, it almost doesn’t matter where they end up. They score fewer points than anyone and give up more yards than all but two teams. There’s no immediate stopgap that’s going to stem this deluge of suckitude.
This must be a terribly embarrassing situation for the NFL, which couldn’t have foreseen this debacle when they awarded the very prestigious Super Bowl 50 to a team under the stewardship of young Jed York. Now, with less than two months to go until the Super Bowl — the first in the Bay Area since XIX at Stanford Stadium — the league must prepare for the focus to lay squarely on one of its most dysfunctional franchises.
All of these distractions threaten to color what could ultimately be a historic Super Bowl if the best scenarios play out as we hope. Imagine Carolina at 18-0 and vying for a perfect season on one side of the ball, and the New England Patriots on the other, hoping to win back-to-back titles and take the Lombardi Trophy from a sheepish Roger Goodell at game’s end. It’s a tantalizing thought, and to have the focus stay on football would be a welcome change from the Levi’s Stadium norm.
It really is a beautiful structure, clean and spacious and modern, even if the postgame traffic remains an unmitigated disaster. But Levi’s Stadium itself is deserving of a stage as grand as the Super Bowl. What it doesn’t deserve is a tenant as chronically bumbling as these Niners. Alas, that won’t be changing any time soon, so long as the Yorks remain in charge.
