Kurtenbach: You thought the 49ers’ chaos was limited to last season? Think again

SANTA CLARA Per ers coach Kyle Shanahan quarterback Brock Purdy is a longshot to play in the ers Week battle in New Orleans And suddenly that term longshot feels terribly apt in describing just about everything surrounding the San Francisco ers We made it one whole week before the walls of Levi s Stadium were caught up in what is a far-too-familiar fire I suppose that s progress from last year when the season went to hell before it even opened thanks to Brandon Aiyuk s absurd holdout and Christian McCaffrey s last-minute scratch going into Week But that s hardly anything to celebrate The Niners used to be the NFC s gang to beat Now they re the conference s most of chaotic band And no that s not a compliment Related Articles ers Brock Purdy long shot to play in Sunday s championship at Saints ers of the st century The best Niners of the last years ers satisfy their competition itch on the golf class ers place George Kittle on injured reserve replace kicker Jake Moody with Eddy Pi eiro The ers defense is leaning on rookies Here s how they did in Week Their starting quarterback is hurt and it might not be a one-week thing Their star tight end George Kittle the prescribed fulcrum of their offense is out for the next four weeks with a hamstring injury No one knows what s going on with wide receiver Jauan Jennings but I suppose it s a positive that his inability to separate also applies to his shoulder Trent Williams looked like a mortal in Week and had a noticeable limp on Wednesday The defense is stocked with kids and it seems like the entire offense is leaning on a athlete Christian McCaffrey with the reliability of a Jaguar sports car awesome when it works but you re reliably one turn away from it being latest in different places Things are going great folks Related Articles The ers defense is leaning on rookies Here s how they did in Week Kurtenbach An act of mercy it s time again for the ers to cut kicker Jake Moody Kurtenbach The ers season-opening win was all kinds of messy Get used to it Studs and Duds ers stars come up clutch in come-from-behind win over rival Seahawks Kurtenbach A gut check for the Faithful I m predicting the ers will miss the playoffs in Amid this tsunami of bad news the kind only the ers seem capable of delivering it seems there is perhaps a single silver lining Sunday s contest against the Saints should be one of their easier contests of the campaign Yes that beautiful last-place schedule is helping them out early And the Niners need all the help they can get right now But if you re leaning on a last-place schedule at this juncture of the season doesn t that speak volumes Also let me know how all those last-place schedules have worked out for the Browns Yes Mac Jones is a capable backup quarterback but that doesn t mean you should expect him to win games If Jennings can t play Jones will be throwing to a receiver group that caught a grand total of four passes in Week with all of them being Ricky Pearsall s Jones will be playing behind an injured left tackle left guard and right guard and going up against a defense coordinated by former Niner assistant Brandon Staley who has spent the last half-decade learning from Shanahan and Sean McVay after giving them so a great number of fits they felt the best way to beat him was to make them join their staffs That Saints defense much like Seattle s in Week can take away the foundation of the Niners offense the outside zone run with a five-man front Swiftly This will be the season of the five-man front in the NFL and Staley going back to his time as a linebackers coach for Vic Fangio in Chicago might be the genesis of its modern revival Shanahan mentioned he blacked out the season but he should flip on the film of Staley s Rams and their five-man front It dominated the Niners that year And while the Niners defense is playing well they re still relying on five rookies you d be a fool to count on linear progress from any of them Sunday night the Niners opened as high as -point road favorites As of Wednesday afternoon that number is falling faster than a frat boy in the French Quarter at a m I wouldn t be surprised if it was down to points by kickoff The whole conceit of the season was that the veterans would hold down the fort until the prodigious roster of kids caught up to the speed smarts and physicality of the NFL tournament That plan is clearly not working out No it s Fred Warner and Nick Bosa running defensive day care while Shanahan uses scotch tape to put together a broken plate Not being able to tap into Purdy magic for Sunday s championship looms large And with two division games coming in Weeks and Kittle will miss both you d be forgiven for forgetting that the Niners are in fact - and are as it stands at the time of this column s publishing favorites to win again Call it PTNS Post-Traumatic Niners Syndrome When this train goes off the rails it doesn t seem to totally derail it goes into a canyon and explodes into a million pieces There are no half-measures with this unit And for a while that kind of all-or-nothing standard was a positive But these days the concept of Super Bowl or Bust seems downright fanciful Hilarious even This gang was scrambling to put together a cogent passable -man roster only a insufficient weeks ago Now they re in full survive-and-advance mode The Niners aren t even sure if they can bring in a third quarterback for the week because they re already in a roster crunch As Purdy would tell you sometimes if you re scrambling because the play was busted from the moment you broke the huddle There are four more months of football left to play That s a lot of time to get things right yes And the Niners have the kind of coaching that you can believe will make the most of out of a bad situation But four months is also a tremendous amount of time for even more things to go wrong Which way do you think this is trending The way I see it Shanahan might need to black out the season too