This story appears in Sportsnet magazine’s NFL Preview edition.
The first game-day train in the history of Levi’s Stadium—the gorgeous new home of the 49ers—is pulling out of downtown San Francisco for the 90-minute ride to Santa Clara. Alcohol consumption on-board is not technically allowed, but there’s more beer than coffee on this car and nobody wearing a uniform seems to care. Everyone is smiling, and why wouldn’t they be? It’s 9:15 on a beautiful Bay Area morning, their team is all but a lock for the playoffs and the city’s faithful are mere hours away from meeting their favourite sons on their new turf—well, their new Bandera Bermuda grass, to be precise, grown organically and irrigated with reclaimed water from stadium facilities.
The building, like the team, is designed to be perfect in a very Silicon Valley way—from a green roof to 1,162 solar panels to locally sourced food products like nitrate-, hormone- and antibiotic-free hot dogs. There’s California wine and 42 kinds of beer. There’s a Wi-Fi setup that puts a transmitter within 10 feet of every seat, an app that allows fans to order food to their seats and a digital dashboard on the concourse that displays the stadium’s power consumption. There’s train and bike access, multiple entrance points to help avoid the choke point of Candlestick Park’s old bridge, and parking is… well, they’re still working on the details of the parking. But they’ll get there.
For a limited time get Sportsnet Magazine’s digital edition free for 60 days. Visit Appstore/RogersMagazines to see what you’re missing out on.
This is a stadium, and a franchise, obsessed with the little things. Under Jim Harbaugh, consistent attention to minute detail has become something of a 49ers trademark—for instance, Harbaugh wears cleats on game days so he has traction should he need to run onto the field to hold back one of his players and help the Niners avoid a penalty. In the most competitive division in the most competitive league in North America, you get nowhere if you don’t get the details right. It’s the small perfections that turn a 6-10 team into a 13-3 NFC Championship contender and then turn that contender into a Super Bowl favourite.
But it’s the small imperfections that can leave that same contender just a few plays short of the big prize three times in a row—twice in the NFC Championship and once in the Super Bowl. Small imperfections on a football team are like spiderweb cracks in a windshield—every time you notice them they’re a little bit bigger, a little bit more dangerous. And all you can do is keep driving, and hope you get to your destination before the whole thing shatters.
This is where the San Francisco 49ers find themselves as 2014 begins. One of the best teams in football is not the favourite in its own division, and, worse, the tiny details are no longer working in their favour. Every regime—save maybe for Bill Belichick’s in New England—has a shelf life, and the 49ers are not immune. There were reports in the off-season that friction between Harbaugh and GM Trent Baalke nearly saw the coach’s rights dealt to Cleveland for draft picks. Both Harbaugh and Baalke denied it, but it’s clear that patience is not infinite, and that a string of successes will mean little without a ring. The team also lost two of its top three cornerbacks, as well as its best safety, in free agency, and Pro Football Focus numbers show that the 49ers’ pass coverage was a hugely underrated part of their fourth-ranked defence; their top pass rusher, Aldon Smith, was hit with three felony weapons charges and a DUI and is facing suspension; and All-Pro linebacker NaVorro Bowman is rehabbing a torn MCL and ACL. Further complicating plans, defensive tackle Glenn Dorsey is out until at least November with a torn bicep; and on the offensive side of the line, guard Alex Boone is only now back with the team after a lengthy holdout.
Even if the 49ers remain elite, the opposition will be better: Last season, despite being in the NFL’s best division on point differential, San Francisco faced only the 17th-toughest schedule. Of the seven teams that finished with four wins or fewer last season, the Niners played and whipped five of them. This season, they won’t meet a team with fewer than seven 2013 wins until week 12.
None of these are season-breaking issues for a team as well-built as San Francisco, but they’re a reminder of just how hard it can be to hold a great group together. If it doesn’t happen for them this year, it may not happen at all, and it seems like everyone here—from Harbaugh and the players to the fans flooding into that gorgeous new stadium—knows it.
On the field, it’s still a couple of hours before kickoff but the warm-up has the adrenalin of a regular-season exercise. Colin Kaepernick whips passes to a gloveless assistant coach so furiously that a better-equipped Michael Crabtree is called in to catch them. Offensive tackle Jonathan Martin, rescued from the bullying mess that was the Miami Dolphins locker room, bounces through drills in time to tracks from Drake and Future blaring from the speakers, a grin spreading across his face. He loves football again, he says, and it shows. The brand-new video boards run highlights from the Harbaugh era on a loop in full HD, and once in a while almost every player stops and looks around, taking it all in. It’s not the first time they’ve set foot on this field, but it’s the first time they’ve done it with an opposing team on the other side.
And then the game starts, and things start falling apart. As if on cue, the sound system skips during the national anthem and the 49ers logo on those HD screens starts flickering in and out during the introductions. Kicker Phil Dawson misses wide on his first two Levi’s Stadium field-goal attempts. Receiver Brandon Lloyd gets a clear step on Denver Broncos cornerback Aqib Talib, only to have Kaepernick’s pass sail through his hands. The two linebackers competing to man the spot next to Patrick Willis while Bowman rehabs—Chris Borland and Michael Wilhoite—are both picked on relentlessly by Peyton Manning. Newly signed starting safety Antoine Bethea suffers a nasty concussion as he’s blocked on a totally innocuous play. His replacement, Craig Dahl, is immediately victimized for an easy touchdown by Julius Thomas.
At halftime it’s 17–0 Broncos; by the end it’s 34–0. The 49ers fumble twice, backup quarterbacks Blaine Gabbert and Josh Johnson each throw an interception, and the final San Francisco possession ends with a first-and-goal at the Broncos’ six on which they manage five total yards on four plays. “It’s off right now. Definitely, definitely off,” Harbaugh says after the game. “It’s a guy here, a guy there. We’re taking turns with it.”
Three days later, the field itself gets its turn when Harbaugh has to pull his team off of it at practice as pieces of that gorgeous Bermuda grass start tearing away under players’ feet. It’s hard to miss the metaphor.
The Niners have now played two exhibition games and scored three points to their opponents’ 57. A 21–7 win over the Chargers one week later will seem positive, but the first-team offence will fail to score a touchdown. Pre-season results are easy to ignore unless they expose the flaws you’ve been dreading for months. A lack of depth, sloppy execution that seems a mark of impatience—the latter born perhaps of the notion that it will be a long grind to get back to where you’ve already been for three straight years. Only when the Niners’ playoff spot is secured will their season really begin. That’s a daunting hill to start climbing in August.
Even on a good day, Jim Harbaugh answers questions from the media in a manner that sounds like a Saturday Night Live parody of an NFL coach—referring in his camp-opening press conference to seasons past as “the wars” and to the beginning of a new one as “a rebirth, like you come out of the womb reborn into football.” He’s not a man to take things lightly—but he might take you lightly. His press-conference laugh is almost non-existent and his jokes, when he makes them, are usually punctuated at the end by just the faintest notion of a smile. It lets you know he’s kind of kidding, sure, but marks a turn and pivot. It signifies that what he’s just said might be over-the-top, but he knows it’s your job to write it down anyway and attempt to get some mileage out of it. That, to Harbaugh, is a good joke.
There have been many of those good days lately. The 49ers have averaged 12 regular-season wins in three years under Harbaugh, placing him second in league history in victories over a coach’s first three seasons behind George Seifert, the last 49ers coach to lead the team to a Super Bowl win. They’ve allowed the fewest points in the league over that stretch and their average margin of victory is 8.5 points, second only to New England. Some of the peripheral stats are staggering, too: Over those three seasons, the 49ers are first in rushing yards allowed (per game and per carry), second in turnover differential and rushing yards per game and third in forced fumbles. Last season, the 49ers were top five in nearly every non-passing statistical category.
But they have nothing to show for it and the pressure is mounting. They were supposed to be champions, maybe even a dynasty. Now the dynasty is located north up the West Coast, directly in the 49ers’ way. The silver lining to that is, if you’re the sort of coach who hunts for ways to motivate a team beyond “Do everything you did last year, and then do it a little bit better,” the Seattle Seahawks are a perfect enemy and Richard Sherman is the villain you need right now.
It was Sherman’s arm that kept the football out of Michael Crabtree’s hands and kept the 49ers out of the Super Bowl—“If I throw it a foot farther, it’s a touchdown,” Kaepernick said after the game. It was Sherman’s verbal dig at Crabtree after the game that stoked the rivalry further. It was Sherman who called that NFC Championship Game “the real Super Bowl” and said the 49ers were “the second-best team in the NFL.”
These days, the Seahawks are the 49ers, only younger and faster and better at every position except the offensive line. They’ll play twice in the regular season and, barring disaster for one club or the other, again in the playoffs. Those games will probably be tight. In the past three years, the 49ers are 4-3 against Seattle, but have been outscored 151–117. They know their enemy, but the question is whether or not that enemy is moving beyond their reach. They know how close they’ve come—and that the margin for error will be thinner than ever this year. “There’s no ‘figuring it out.’ There’s no ‘We’ll see,’” says 49ers tackle Joe Staley. “We have to close out those games this year. We have to find a way to win those close games.”
Last year, the difference in the season’s most pivotal close game was Sherman’s outstretched arm on a slightly underthrown pass—a tiny detail that is the only reason the first NFL game in Levi’s Stadium history was not a Super Bowl rematch.
Jim Harbaugh’s stare turns to ice when it is pointed out. “Never thought about it. No,” he says after the game, immediately trying to turn away from the podium. But the questions don’t stop: How much did the defence struggle with Manning’s quick pace? Is Gabbert’s confidence shot? Just how concerned are you about the offence not scoring a touchdown?
They won’t stop until sometime in January or early February. And when exactly they do will go a long way to telling you what the answers are.