Under the “football is a game of inches” mantra is a picture of Kyle Shanahan leaning against a Gatorade cooler in the San Francisco 49ers locker room.
You cannot tell Shanahan’s story without Emmanuel Sanders, MetLife Stadium, blockbuster trades for future Hall of Famers, or a Google search of “Can you still play with a torn UCL?”
It’s that time of year when we make predictions about the upcoming 49ers’ season. The writers with zero rooting interest believe the Niners are destined for another playoff
run. As always, expectations are high. However, there are varying degrees to which this team can be good and potentially great.
We’ve seen them look like the most dominant team in the league for nearly a full season. We’ve also seen them bottom out and miss the playoffs completely. Then there are the iterations of the 49ers where they stumbled into the playoffs, despite being a cut below the league’s elite. No team in the 2020s experienced the volatility of an NFL season more than San Francisco. The ride has been turbulent.
The past five seasons have established the 49ers’ best and worst versions. The peak looks like a team scoring 40 while their opponent struggles to get to 20. The basement is struggling to score a touchdown or having multiple three-game losing streaks in a season.
We’ll use the 49ers’ past performance to predict what 2026 may look like.
If everything hits: 13+ wins
The impact Brock Purdy has had on the 49ers cannot be understated. Once he took over around December 2022, the offense, on the brink of a breakout, went nuclear to end the season. The defense, already excellent, morphed into the stingiest unit in the league.
The season ended on a sour note, but the window between December 2022 and the NFC Championship Game that year was what it looked like when everything was clicking. Look at that season compared to other years this decade:
Offense is at the top, and defense is at the bottom. The higher the better for the offense, while you want your EPA on defense to be lower.
The 49ers didn’t lose a regular-season game after Halloween that year. From the time Purdy took over through the Divisional Playoff Round, the team had a +78 point differential. Two games were played within one possession. One was a Thursday night game against the Seahawks, and the other came against Jarrett Stidham — a game to this day remains among the most exciting of this timeline.
What does everything breaking the 49ers’ way look like in 2026? The defensive personnel would need to take a Neil Armstrong-level leap for mankind. My theory for why the defense dramatically improved in the second half is that they had to defend fewer possessions without the pressure of feeling like they needed to get a stop on every drive.
It helps when you have these four as your second-level defenders:
Azeez Al-Shaair on one side and Talanoa Hufanga on the other, with Fred Warner and Dre Greenlaw down the middle.
This was before Arik Armstead returned to the lineup, another piece of the puzzle that helped the second-half surge. Hufanga’s sensational season was rewarded with All-Pro recognition, but once Armstead returned to the lineup, the 49ers’ rushing EPA was lower than any team in the league since 2019.
Their rushing EPA of -0.272 topped the Seahawks last season (-0.206), the Vikings stout run defense in ’24 (-0.203), the Bucs in 2019 (-0.239) and 2020 (-0.209), as well as the Jets 2019 unit (-0.234). Those are the best rushing defenses since 2019.
That team had a breakout candidate in Charles Omenihu, who managed 43 pressures and 29 quarterback hits. The team is banking on that being Osa Odighizuwa this year.
Finding the Samson Ebukam of the group unlocks a different tier. Does Alfred Collins take a jump? Is it Romello Height in the form of a pass rush? Gracen Halton landing in the perfect role? Or is it a situation where the success is due to the sum being greater than its parts?
Ideally, that’s Mykel Williams. Ebukam was known as a run defender, but as the third-best rusher, he took advantage of his opportunities, turning them into 44 pressures and 27 quarterback hits. Williams assuming that role, while Collins does the same unheralded dirty work Armstead did, is the best-case scenario.
Success rate is another statistic where the 49ers flourished in 2022 and 2023:
Again, you want the blue to be closer to 50 percent while the lower the orange, the better.
To me, the talent on the field in 2022, paired with the coaching staff, made the 49ers defense infallible. You’d need Nick Martin to produce like Al-Shaair, Malik Mustapha to make the splash plays that Hufanga did, and Renardo Green to eliminate one side of the field like Mooney Ward. That is asking…a lot.
Low success rates occur when your team makes mistakes on late downs after giving up little to nothing on early downs. Veterans in the secondary (Tashaun Gipson and Jimmie Ward) were a big part of that. Ji’Ayir Brown and Upton Stout would need to mature from an eye-discipline perspective and eliminate missed tackles. Gipson Jr. missed two tackles after playing over 1,200 snaps, while Ward only missed six.
It may shock some when you remember that Purdy never threw for over 300 yards during the regular season as a rookie. They weren’t historically good like in 2023, but the haymakers still landed at a rapid rate.
A game didn’t go by where Christian McCaffrey didn’t rip off a big play during that stretch. If it wasn’t George Kittle one week, it was Brandon Aiyuk the next.
The 49ers don’t have the same thoroughbreds heading into 2026. Kittle is returning from an Achilles injury, while McCaffrey is off a season where he had three carries of 20+ yards, and none until November. As for Aiyuk, some are questioning whether he even wants to play the sport anymore.
So, who would need to step up or fill in to make life easier on the quarterback?
Mike Evans had three receptions of at least 20 yards last season. In 2024, he caught seven of his 15 deep targets. Evans’s 6’5″ frame is the obvious answer. Getting a full season of Ricky Pearsall would go a long way. Sprinkle in a little Christian Kirk here and a lot of De’Zhaun Stribling there, and the path to explosive plays shouldn’t be few and far between like it’s been during the previous two years.
That puts pressure on Kaelon Black and Jordan James to run the ball effectively. Teams did not respect the 49ers’ ability to hurt them on the ground last year. San Francisco couldn’t solve those issues, leaving opposing defenses free to allocate more bodies to the passing game.
As you can see, a lot has to break the 49ers’ way for this team to recapture the magic it had in 2022. It’s not impossible, but it’d require a clean bill of health across the board and for a couple of young players with little to no experience to make a seismic leap.
The offense hums, but the defense remains a step behind: 10-12 wins
The more realistic scenario would look like the watered-down version of the 2023 offense with the 2023 defense. You see flashes of brilliance offensively as the new pieces get assimilated into their surroundings, while the defense is good but not good enough to get off the field against the best of the best.
The record depends on how the ball bounces. There were no stretches in the second half of 2022 when the 49ers, as a team, looked like they had cracks in the armor. Despite making the Super Bowl in 2023, the team went through a three-week stretch in the early season when several analysts were ready to write it off. Then there was the Christmas game against the Ravens when Purdy couldn’t figure out which team to throw it to.
Still, a +193 point differential was the third-best in the league thanks to the offense’s ability to score 30 points rolling out of bed.
In 2026, the success rate is closer to 45 than 50. The third-down efficiency goes down, but the red zone increases. McCaffrey and the running game rush for a buck 50 a game, as he gashes defenses with 40-yard runs every other game. Instead, Black and James play the roles of Jordan Mason and Elijah Mitchell, leading to an offense that can finish games in the final four minutes without giving the ball back.
I think there are more reasons to believe the defense will be closer to 2023, where they were hovering between the top 6 and 10 against the pass, but were dreadful against the run, and that’s what ultimately does this team in. That year, the Niners finished the regular season in the bottom 7. Nobody remembers because of a juggernaut offense.
The secondary will improve thanks to the defensive line. They won’t be of the shutdown variety, but teams won’t have time to expose them down the field. When you have to work for every yard, quarterbacks get frustrated, start to press, and make mistakes.
The rookies and the veteran they traded for are primarily pass-rush-first players. Teams will need to score to keep up with the 49ers, much like in 2023, but as we saw in the playoffs that year, you’re going to need some good fortune to get off the field defensively and advance.
There’s too much talent to compare this team to 2021 or 2025. Those squads overachieved, and it showed in the postseason. The 2023 team will stand the test of time offensively. That’s why I think the watered-down version of that unit makes sense.
The bottom falls out and the injury bug bites again: .500 or worse
You name it, and it happens. Christian McCaffrey gets banged up early and is in and out of the lineup all year. Mike Evans doesn’t reach double-digit games as his hamstring aggravates the 49ers. We get two months of Ricky Pearsall, but don’t see him again until mid-December.
A defense where you’re crossing your fingers on somebody emerging is undisciplined once again, and you never know what you’re going to get. Deommodore Lenoir is closer to Ambry Thomas than Emmanuel Moseley. Renardo Green is more like Josh Norman and Mooney Ward. Dre Greenlaw can’t stay healthy, and we’re talking about why in the world Nick Martin was drafted in the third round.
The offseason investments in the defensive line never get to show their true colors because they’re fighting for their life to get to passing situations, not to mention picking up the slack for the offense. And special teams is an adventure all season long.
It would take shades of 2024, when everything around Purdy crumbled; he was left to do the heavy lifting by himself, and he proved incapable of doing it. Maybe that does turn out to be closer to 2021. Instead of the coin flip games that went in the Niners’ favor that year, it’s the opposite, and that’s how you end up with eight wins instead of ten. Gulp.
