It’s already been a strange season for the defending NFC champions.
The San Francisco 49ers lost their top wide receiver and interior defensive lineman to injuries. They’ve dropped games — games they were winning handily — to a pair of division opponents. And their history of struggling with the Minnesota Vikings and Kansas City Chiefs defense continued in 2024.
And yet even after a 4-4 start full of mistakes and injuries, they remain in the thick of the division race — a half-game back of the first-place Arizona Cardinals.
And despite losing Brandon Aiyuk and Javon Hargrave, they still have a loaded roster with more talent on the way. What can we expect from them in the second half of the season? Here are a few projections …
The 49ers will have a shared backfield … but only at first
If Christian McCaffrey is back for Sunday’s game in Tampa Bay as expected, the 49ers will have an embarrassment of riches at running back. They’ll have the reigning Offensive Player of the Year as well as hard-running Jordan Mason, who propped up the offense over the first eight games and ranks fourth in the NFL in rushing yards.
The 49ers likely will have a significant role for each when McCaffrey first returns. You can envision them alternating series or using McCaffrey as the third-down back or in the red zone as they make sure not to overload McCaffrey and his recovering Achilles tendons.
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But if McCaffrey returns to full strength in the weeks ahead, it’s also easy to see the 49ers’ slipping into last year’s habits. McCaffrey was the league’s top offensive player because he was a problem on all three downs and scored a ton — 21 — of touchdowns.
Furthermore, running backs coach Bobby Turner usually doesn’t adhere to a tailback-by-committee approach. He’s more of a hot-hand theorist. And if McCaffrey gets hot, it’s hard to see Turner and Kyle Shanahan taking him off the field for significant stretches, especially as wins become more critical in November and December.
If that happens, it would leave Mason in a decidedly junior role and good-looking rookie Isaac Guerendo getting most of his game day snaps on special teams.
The 49ers will likely plan to ease Christian McCaffrey back in, but if he’s as good as he normally is that could be tough. (Darren Yamashita / Imagn Images)
Deommodore Lenoir will win the Len Eshmont Award
The Len Eshmont Award is the 49ers’ most prestigious end-of-season honor. It’s essentially the team’s MVP award as voted on by the players and it goes all the way back to 1957.
No cornerback has won it since 1975 when Jimmy Johnson got it. Johnson, who also won it in 1969, died in May at age 86. He was so beloved by his coaches that they retired his number, 37, immediately after he played his last snap.
In that way, it would make for lovely poetry if Lenoir won it this season. It also might be entirely deserved. He’s been the 49ers’ most consistently good player going back to spring practices and it isn’t lost on his teammates that Lenoir is having a career-best season while manning two positions, outside cornerback and nickel cornerback.
Of course, a stellar year for Lenoir also means the 49ers might not be able to re-sign him. He’s due to become an unrestricted free agent in March.
George Kittle will lead the team in touchdowns … barely
The back half of this season could be a lot like 2022 when McCaffrey arrived in Week 7 and then scored three touchdowns — rushing, receiving and throwing — the following week in Los Angeles.
If you count the passing touchdown, he scored 11 in the regular season for the 49ers, tying him with Kittle for the team lead. We think Kittle will win it outright this season considering McCaffrey will start playing in Week 10 at the earliest and because Kittle has a much bigger lead than he had two years ago. His six touchdowns are double the next-best mark (Jauan Jennings, Brock Purdy and Mason have three each). He also leads the team with 503 receiving yards at the almost-midpoint.
Brock Purdy will get market value for a top-level starting quarterback
Will it be $50, $55, $60 or $65 million a year? Prepare yourself for a lot of blather and debate when it comes to the 49ers quarterback and how expensive his next contract ought to be. It’s already been a regular talking point even though Purdy’s not eligible for an extension until the season is over.
The answer is that if Purdy plays the second half of the season like he played the first, he will get whatever the going rate for a top-tier quarterback is at that moment.
Yes, he needs to be sharper against man coverage. And, yes, his completion percentage — which was around 70 percent last season — has dipped to 64.5 percent this year. But he still ranked fourth in passing yards and eighth in rushing yards heading into the bye and promises to be compensated like a top-10 passer.
That’s just how the system works.
The 49ers, after all, made Jimmy Garoppolo the highest-paid player in the NFL in 2018 based on five starts. What’s interesting is that Garoppolo’s reign as highest-paid player was brief. He signed his deal in early February and before the year was out was in 11th place in the highest-paid category. His $27.5 million-a-year figure, which was so bonkers in February 2020, seems quaint now.
It also ought to be a lesson to the 49ers: The quicker that deal is completed, the more they’ll save (See: Aiyuk, Brandon).
If Brock Purdy keeps playing like he has, he’ll get a top-of-market contract in the offseason. (Neville E. Guard / Imagn Images)
Brian Schneider ultimately won’t keep his job
Shanahan had nothing bad to say about Schneider and his special teams last week while squashing any notion that the 49ers could part ways with the embattled Schneider over the bye week.
“That hasn’t entered my head at all,” he said.
His comments came as no surprise. As Shanahan noted, the special teams were coming off their best outing of the season, one in which they essentially battled the Dallas Cowboys’ top-rated special teams to a draw. Perhaps more importantly, there aren’t a lot of midseason options for a team when it comes to special teams.
After the season? That’s another question.
Jake Moody should be back after the bye, which ought to mean more touchbacks and fewer risky kickoff returns. But the weather is only going to get worse, there are upcoming games in Green Bay and Buffalo and it will be harder to consistently boot the ball deep into the end zone.
Considering what happened over the first eight games, Schneider and the special teams don’t have much room for error. Every gaffe will be magnified and tossed on the pile with the others. That group has to be almost perfect, or at least blunder-free, and judging from the first half of the season, it’s hard to see that happening.
The 49ers will be neck and neck with one rival
The 49ers, who are 11th in the NFC playoff picture and are projected by The Athletic’s model to have a 38 percent chance to make the playoffs, probably will have to win their division to get in and their biggest competition for that honor will be the … drum roll, please … Los Angeles Rams.
The Rams, the team that embraced trading away draft picks a few years ago, have come full circle in making strong selections in recent seasons that promise to fuel their future success: running back Kyren Williams, receiver Puka Nacua and edge rushers Byron Young and Jared Verse. Meanwhile, Matthew Stafford is the best quarterback among the 49ers’ division rivals.
The teams’ Week 15 rematch in Levi’s Stadium — a Thursday night affair — will be huge. And the 49ers’ season finale, a throwaway game last season, already looms large considering it’s against a division opponent, the Arizona Cardinals, the 49ers fell to in Week 5.