Ironing the grid

They've been having some strange times in Santa Clara, home-from-home of San Francisco 49ers, culminating in their Leeds United owning edition 49ers Enterprises becoming so soccer-addled they're into buying the actual Glasgow Rangers. So it feels like a good time for a catch up with events on the West Coast of the United States now they're entwining West Yorkshire with the West Coast of Scotland.

Their main deal is still the slowed down rugby football their team plays in the NFL. At the start of their most recent season of gridironing, the San Francisco 49ers were full of optimism about lifting the Super Bowl for the first time since 1994. In the previous five seasons they'd got to two Super Bowl finals, most recently losing to Taylor Swift's faves the Kansas City Chiefs in the 2023 version (held in 2024). They'd reached two NFC Championship finals, too, which is sort of like a 'good' bowl that can qualify you for the Super one.

2024 was supposed to be the season when years of careful planning and roster building and Paraag Marathe negotiating salary cap conscious contracts in his sleep came to fruition. Marathe, General Manager John Lynch and Head Coach Kyle Shanahan had a roster spread through with experience, excitement and quality, and good reasons for thinking their organisation could go all the way. True, their carefully planned quarterback succession strategy, designed to take them from Jimmy Garoppolo to Trey Lance, had taken them back to Jimmy Garoppolo and then via Josh Johnson to Brock Purdy, the 262nd pick in the 2022 draft, i.e. the least wanted player of the year aka 'Mr Irrelevant'. Nonetheless, the Niners were still presenting very well as if they knew what they were doing.

So how did it go? Well, on the eve of the season wide-receiver Ricky Pearsall was shot during an attempted robbery, but fortunately he recovered well and that drama served mostly as a metaphor. It was actually one of the less severe injuries to afflict the Niners as the season went on. Major players from all departments suffered serious injuries, and tragedy affecting Charvarius Ward and his family put the football in perspective, when his infant daughter died. That perspective felt somewhat lost by thrilling wide-receiver Deebo Samuel, who complained on social media that he wasn't getting the ball enough, then got the ball in the next game and dropped it instead of scoring a certain touchdown. The greater headloss was linebacker De'Vondre Campbell's, who sat sulking on the bench against LA Rams until, when he was called to replace an injured teammate, he refused to play, quit the team and walked off the field.

Losses, overall, were the 49ers' big problem. Amid defensive fiascos and special teams mess-ups that they're trying to fix with new coaches for next season, they didn't even qualify for the play-offs, far from the Championship game, miles from the Super Bowl, turning a 5 wins 4 defeats first half of the season into a final record of 6-11. In a defeat to Detroit Lions the cameras caught Lynch slapping a table from his executive perch.

The season was, essentially, a disaster, but the Niners have had disaster seasons before. This was pretty much a repeat of their 2020 campaign. Sticking with his liking for long-term stability, Lynch is still backing Shanahan for next season, supported by the return of their defensive coordinator from 2017-20, Robert Saleh. The general vibe is that if they get the players who should have succeeded last year back to fitness and keep them there, then success can still come the Niners' way, but there's also a risk that they've missed their carefully cultivated chance of winning things. Deebo Samuel, who was a genuinely fizzing star player to watch, has already left for a fresh start, and ahead of the NFL equivalent of a transfer window there's lots of talk about who else might be going, not much about who might be coming. Meanwhile everyone is trying to stay calm about the fact they're still massively underpaying star quarterback Brock Purdy, and that pretty soon they'll have to find a way of massively paying him, while he would obviously prefer some massive overpaying if they wouldn't mind.

One interesting aspect of the NFL is that in recent seasons the players' union, the NFLPA, has been asking the ironing athletes to complete anonymous surveys about the clubs they play for. Those are compiled into public 'report cards', ranking clubs on topics as superficially benign as the food and as immediately controversial as the quality of coaching. Imagine getting an honest assessment from the players about what it's like working at Old Trafford right now — or even from their neighbours about what's gone wrong at Manchester City this season. It would be delicious. Right up until we had to read about Leeds United, I guess.