SANTA CLARA — The NFL season is five weeks old, and for the San Francisco 49ers, the early returns have offered both reassurance and startling confusion.
Did anyone see this coming?
Call it bizarro 2024, where the Niners are equally injured and are playing in tight games, only this year, they’re finishing them with wins.
The strangeness of the 2025 Niners is just getting started, but somewhere between a quarter and a third of the way through the season, this felt an appropriate time to review some of my preseason predictions.
And while — excuse me while I pat myself on the back — I nailed a few of them, there are a few others that I wish I could have back.
We deal in facts here, and the facts are forcing a few painful mea culpas. Enjoy.
Prediction 1: The 49ers will miss the playoffs.
Nice try, Kurtenbach
Look, not all the hay is in the barn, but a good deal of it is already there.
The 49ers are 4-1. Since the NFL expanded to seven playoff teams per conference in 2020, only two teams that have started 4-1 or better have missed the dance: the 2020 Bears and the 2021 Chargers. Perhaps the 49ers can be the third, but that seems unlikely, no?
The simple math says they’re virtually in. The Niners have already guaranteed a .500-or-better division record with three NFC West wins on the ledger. And with 10 wins almost sure to be good enough in the NFC this year, they simply need to play .500 football over their final 12 games. Only 6-6 the rest of the way? I’d bet on that.
So, no, they haven’t made the playoffs yet, but I am getting out ahead of this: even if the process of deduction was sound, the prediction itself was a miss.
Prediction 2: The 49ers’ offensive line will be a top-10 unit
Just a massive whiff
I made this prediction several times this summer. My logic was based on a sound premise: that offensive line play in the NFL has never been worse, and the 49ers’ “totally fine” five-man unit would look really good by comparison.
They have not been that. Not even close. They have been, by production and observation, a bottom-10 unit.
No team in the NFL is currently averaging fewer yards per carry than the Niners. And while running the ball is a team effort, the eye test confirms the numbers. Watch Christian McCaffrey, typically one of the league’s most patient and well-paced backs, diving head-first into the line of scrimmage snap after snap — he doesn’t trust the line of scrimmage to move forward. Any delay from him means a tackle for loss, and he knows it. That’s no way to win in the NFL, even if they are, in fact, winning football games.
We can point to injuries—Trent Williams, Ben Bartch (IR), Connor Colby, Dominick Puni, and Colton McKivitz have all been on the injury report. Center Jake Brendel is the only one who has stayed healthy — or as healthy as any offensive lineman can be.
But the facts are the facts: the inability to run the ball and suspect pass protection is this team’s biggest problem. For the last few years, I’ve pushed back at the fan base who bemoaned the state of the O-line. This year, they have a point.
Prediction 3: Brock Purdy will be an MVP candidate in 2025
Can we void this one?
The MVP conversation is over. Purdy’s three missed games—soon to be four—is an automatic disqualification from a volume award.
But putting the award aside, the more urgent point is that in the two games he did play, Purdy didn’t look like an MVP. Four touchdowns against four interceptions is not elite play, even in a small sample. Blame the toe injury, the scattershot roster around him, or the porous offensive line, but the mojo was gone.
Niners coach Kyle Shanahan says the team has not considered putting the quarterback on injured reserve. And frankly, with the perfectly capable play of Mac Jones holding down the fort, there’s no reason to rush him back.
Whenever Purdy does return, his task won’t be to chase an award; it will be to rediscover the form that convinced the franchise he was a potential $250-million player. That is a significant change in expectations from just a few short weeks ago.