SANTA CLARA — The 49ers are going to be alright.
I think.
Don’t hold me to that.
That’s because while the Niners’ season might be four games old, if we’re being honest about the modern NFL, it’s also just getting started.
With the way NFL teams practice in the summer (if they practice at all) and their disdain for the exhibition schedule, September is, in effect, the preseason in this league. It’s a time to work things out; to find one’s identity.
And while the 49ers had an up-and-down “preseason” they are, at 2-2 after a 30-13 win over the Patriots on Sunday at Levi’s Stadium, doing just fine.
Nothing ideal. Nothing backbreaking.
Bastardizing a baseball axiom, you can’t win a division in September, but you can lose one.
And contrary to the doom-and-gloom following the Niners’ back-to-back losses in Weeks 2 and 3, there is plenty to celebrate with this team.
They found an identity, after all:
This is Brock Purdy’s team.
This is Fred Warner’s team.
It doesn’t take 25 years in the NFL to figure out that the quarterback and middle linebacker are important to team success — they’re the guys who wear the helmet speakers, after all. But four games in, the 49ers can argue they have the best quarterback-mike combo in the league.
That’s a development — an auspicious one — amid a season that has been defined, to date, by noise and nonsense.
Purdy not only looks like a franchise quarterback, but once again an MVP candidate. And he’s doing it without that other MVP candidate, Christian McCaffrey. He’s doing it without an elite defense (at least in Weeks 2 and 3). He’s doing it with an offensive line that seems hellbent on making him run for his life.
Conditions are hardly perfect, but Purdy has been pretty close to it, overall.
Purdy’s taken his game to a new level in 2023, with Sunday’s scrambling-and-deep-ball-throwing performance showing how dangerous he is to opposing defenses. No. 13 isn’t just some dude in Kyle Shanahan’s offense — he is the dude Shanahan has been waiting for since he arrived in the Bay.
“He has the confidence of when to hang in there and when to make the play work and when to break,” Shanahan said of Purdy’s Russell Wilson-like scrambling ability.
“[I] Love having that aspect [to] our offense.”
You also have Warner operating at a level far superior to anything — or anyone — I have ever seen. This is some Brian Urlacher, Ray Lewis-type stuff, only all the more impressive, because the role of the middle linebacker is so much more athletically challenging these days.
Warner is not only the best run-stopping linebacker in the game, slipping past blocks with stunning ease and delivering the kind of hits that make seasoned professionals question their line of work, but he’s also the best pass-coverage linebacker going, too.
His interception on Sunday, which gave the Niners an early 13-0 lead, was as impressive an individual defensive play as you will ever see: Warner read quarterback Jacoby Brissett like a kid’s book, abandoning his initial responsibility to go to where he knew Brissett would throw the ball.
Rising up like a video-game linebacker circa the early aughts (my fellow millennials know about this), Warner not only made an insane catch, but, despite landing on his tuchus, he was able to get up before being touched and run 45 yards into the end zone, stretching the ball over the goal line like he was George Kittle.
It all happened so fast that the otherworldliness of the play could have been overlooked. But let’s be clear: Linebackers aren’t supposed to be able to do stuff like that.
Especially not linebackers, who, the play before, delivered a hit so hard on Patriots running back Antonio Gibson, you could hear the pads crack in the press box, roughly a thousand feet above the field.
Warner is beyond appointment television. He’s the kind of player that requires you to be in the stadium to fully understand. The higher you are in the stands, the more you can comprehend how otherworldly this specter of a player is.
I know TJ Watt is having a great season in Pittsburgh, and I know we’re less than a quarter of the way through the season, but if Warner isn’t the clubhouse leader for the Defensive Player of the Year, we need to find a new voting bloc.
And then there’s the outstanding play of Jordan Mason (on pace for nearly 1,900 yards this season), Jauan Jennings (back-to-back games where he’s been the Niners’ top receiver), and Nick Bosa (still as fine a defensive end as there is in the league).
There’s plenty to be optimistic about with the Niners.
Of course, there’s also the downsides.
The injuries — my god, the injuries.
It was easy to predict that the Niners, one of the NFL’s oldest teams, which played 20 games last season, wouldn’t be able to repeat their good luck with injuries in 2024.
But the pendulum has swung so swiftly in the opposite direction, so quickly, it’s downright comical.
And there’s no reason to think it will stop anytime soon. These injury gods are vengeful and relentless.
They already claimed McCaffrey and Javon Hargrave, and have smitten Deebo Samuel, George Kittle, Trent Williams, and now Dominck Puni.
Oh, and we’ll see what they did to Warner, who only played one half Sunday (he still led the Niners in tackles for three-plus quarters), because of an ankle injury.
“I know Fred tried to go… but didn’t feel like he could,” Shanahan said.
“I would have been out there if I could have been,” Warner, who was seen on the sideline needing multiple Niners’ staffers to stop him from going on the field. “We’ll see.”
The Niners have managed the storm of injuries. To a passing degree, they’ve handled the contract-negotiation nonsense of the offseason and training camp (though Brandon Aiyuk’s reputation has not).
A long-term injury to Warner might be the one thing this team cannot overcome.
“We’ll see,” indeed.
But if Warner remains at the top of his game, week-in, week-out, and Purdy keeps tapping into his seemingly bottomless bag of tricks, the 49ers will be just fine.
Perhaps that will disappoint you and them — after all, there were high hopes about this team.
But on Sunday, the Niners’ season was on the line. There would have been no returning from a home loss to the Patriots — that’s disqualifying.
Purdy and Warner came through. The Niners followed suit.
You can’t ask for much more, at least at this juncture.
The Niners are in good hands, and while they have little slack for the final 13 games of the campaign, they still have everything to play for.
