Two years ago, in the days after the 49ers ended their second consecutive season of injuries, they fired their sports coach and strength and conditioning coach.
These changes were foreshadowed when general manager John Lynch and coach Kyle Shanahan spoke the day after the end of a 4-12 season.
Shanahan said the injuries were “a major problem in two years”. Lynch said there were not many players available “and this is something that we are investigating a lot”.
Two years later, however, Shanahan and Lynch were at a Groundhog Day press conference on Monday: It was a day after the 49ers ended a 6-10 season that ended with 19 players on the reserve, NFL record , a list that included many who led their 2019 Super Bowl race.
49ers leaders made it clear that they would not be reviewing their recently renewed training team, but would, again, examine the issue in the off-season.
“We are determined to believe them, but we are asking everyone to look closely,” said Lynch, talking about the training team. “… What can we do better? We will look. We will turn each page and every detail to find out what we can do better and to improve our processes ”.
What are the reasons behind the excessive amount of friction from the team? Sure, they had no off-season practices and an abbreviated training camp, but those were the same circumstances for 31 other teams during a season in a pandemic.
Lynch noted that the 49ers had a long 2019 season that ended in the Super Bowl in early February. However, the Chiefs also played 19 games in 2019. And they went 14-2 in 2020, ending the season with the sixth lowest number of players (six) in the injured reserve.
“They have figured out how to stay healthy and are playing really good football,” said tight end George Kittle. “So I don’t know. I think a lot of the injuries we’ve had this year, from ACLs to ankle sprains and broken bones – I really don’t know what you can do to train to prevent this sort of thing, to some extent. It’s football. Things happen. We were hit by a snowball and it went into an avalanche. “
The injuries can be random and it is possible that the 49ers went through a season in which they were unusually snake bites.
However, Shanahan acknowledged that he has signed players with a notable history of injuries in recent seasons.
In 2018, they hired All-Pro cornerback Richard Sherman when he was recovering from surgery on both Achilles tendons. In 2019, they traded the pass for the Pro Bowl, Dee Ford, whose medical file included two back surgeries.
This season, Sherman lost 11 games due to a calf problem related to one of his Achilles tendons. And Ford lost 15 games with a back injury that left its availability for the start of the 2021 season in doubt.
There are other examples besides Sherman and Ford. But there are also players like cornerback Jason Verrett. His brilliant 13-game season came after injuries limited him to six games in 2016-2019. Verrett earned a base salary of $ 910,000 in 2020.
“Sometimes you have to take some risks, which we have been doing here for our four years,” said Shanahan. “Some were worth it. Some don’t. I see Jason Verrett as a perfect man who was worth it. That was a beautiful deal. This does not mean that you want to do this all the time, because we also see some that represent a very high risk and we have not received the reward. “
The NFL cliché is not true: the best skill is talent, not availability.
However, Shanahan suggested that the 49ers needed to place an even greater emphasis on durability in their player ratings. He mentioned the fact that they just finished a six-win season, in which their 19 injured players accounted for $ 78.6 million in salary cap, according to spotrac.com.
“That does not mean that you will never be at risk again – I think it would be an excessive correction,” said Shanahan. “You have to take some risks to get to the top in this league, but we also understand that you cannot be successful if that number (salary cap) that I just gave you continues.
“So, it all comes into every decision we make. And I would like to say that it has always been this way. But the more situations you go through, the more you realize what those decisions are and that the risk-reward changes slightly. “
The 49ers played long periods without the quarterback (Jimmy Garoppolo), the best running back (Raheem Mostert), the returning wide receiver (Deebo Samuel) and four Pro Bowl players: Kittle, Sherman, Ford and the pass rusher Nick Bosa.
These seven players together lost an average of 10.7 games this season, and many were spectators during last Sunday’s loss to the Seahawks at the end of the season.
“I looked at (the) suite yesterday and three suites, it looked like an All-Pro team,” said Lynch. “We need these guys on the field, not in the suite watching the game.”
Eric Branch covers the 49ers for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @Eric_Branch