Why 49ers need to fix four things to avoid falling in NFC West
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — In February, two days after the San Francisco 49ers fell short of winning a Super Bowl for the fourth time in five years, general manager John Lynch was asked what it would take to finally get over the hump.
Lynch responded not with a specific position that needed bolstering but with a more abstract concept: The 49ers needed “finishers in every area of the team.”
San Francisco needed to find the missing piece who could make the one tackle or catch the one pass that would swing the pendulum in its favor against teams, such as the Kansas City Chiefs, on stages as big as the Super Bowl.
But five games into the 2024 season, the Niners might not even have enough to overcome supposedly inferior NFC West division foes in the Los Angeles Rams and Arizona Cardinals. That has been apparent in brutal losses to each of those teams, both games in which the 49ers held double-digit fourth-quarter leads.
From 2017 to 2023, the 49ers were 51-2 in the regular season under coach Kyle Shanahan when leading by double digits in the fourth quarter, though they lost Super Bowl LIV in such a scenario and held a 10-point lead in the second quarter of Super Bowl LVIII.
While there’s plenty of time for these 49ers to figure out how to put opponents away, Thursday night’s meeting with the Seattle Seahawks (8:15 p.m. ET, Prime Video) comes with significant implications for a Week 6 contest. A loss would ostensibly drop the Niners to three games (including the tiebreaker) back of the Seahawks while rendering them 0-3 in the division and 0-4 in the conference. A win would put them right back into first place in the NFC West.
If the 49ers are going to find the finishing flourish they’ve lacked so far, there are multiple areas that will have to improve — starting with getting healthy, solving red zone issues, winning the turnover battle and improving internally on defense and special teams. None figure to be quick or easy fixes but without them, the Super Bowl window for this core could close sooner than anyone in 49ers HQ expected.
The 2023 Niners were a juggernaut in the regular season, racing out to big leads and coasting to victories. For the many holdovers still on this year’s roster, the squandered opportunities have been a reminder that every year is different and it’s a thin line between 4-1 and 2-3.
