After his team improved to 6-0 on the season for the first time since 2019, Kyle Shanahan dropped the word “frustrating” multiple times while speaking to reporters postgame.
The 49ers appeared to be well on their way to a flawless start to the season after a commanding 20-3 lead in the first half against the Washington Commanders on Monday Night Football. But Washington’s 14 unanswered points in the second half completely changed the momentum of the game.
As San Francisco’s offense scored just three points in the second half, it was the defense — specifically third-year safety Malik Mustapha — who stepped up with the game on the line.
But the 49ers, continuously unfazed by their perfect record every week, know they should’ve never let it get to that point. Why? Because they hold themselves to a different standard.
“The emotions are fresh off a game like that where I felt like that game should have never gotten to that point, right? It’s just how high the standard is for us as a team,” Fred Warner said postgame. So yeah, I mean, of course, 6-0 is fantastic; you can’t draw it up any better, especially the fight that we had out there and on defense to be able to finish it out. But you know, we’re still going to continue to chase progression. Like, you don’t want to just be a 6-0 team; you want to be a team that’s on the rise, right?
“Because the only thing that matters is being at your best when your best is needed later on in the season, right? So finding ways to win while also finding ways to get better as a team overall. That’s the goal. It’s not just about winning.”
The obvious thing to point at for the 49ers’ snoozy second-half offense was the loss of Mike Evans, who was ruled out with an Achilles injury just moments before the half.
Still, even with a loss as big as Evans, no one made excuses for the flat offense.
And they certainly weren’t going to blame the second-half letup as a result of facing the lowly Commanders, who fell to 1-4-1 on the season.
“I think when you can win and not play your best, obviously it’s better than losing,” Christian McCaffrey said. “But I know our standard is high, especially on offense. My standard is high; I can’t put the ball on the ground. But there’s a lot of stuff we need to clean up.
“Winning a game in the NFL is extremely difficult. There’s not a bad team in the league, and it’s a constant game of ebbs and flows and momentum here and there. So for us, it’s not an exhale. We just have to go out and execute better, especially on offense, when it’s our job to try and go win the game. So we’ll get it fixed.”
Even George Kittle, one of the most positive and high-vibes guys on the team, was visibly frustrated after the narrow victory.
He even went as far as to say that if it were any other team in the visitors’ locker room, the 49ers might’ve suffered their first loss of the season.
“I mean, winning in the league is incredibly hard, so I’m always happy to win,” Kittle said. “But when you’re up 20-3 and you can’t shut the door on a team that has been struggling — I mean, if we were playing a super efficient team, I think we lose that game pretty easily — and we just can’t have that. We have more difficult games in our future. We have to go to Kansas City. We have to play Seattle again. Anytime you play the Rams, Matt Stafford is Matt Stafford.
“There are teams out there that will take advantage of us going three-and-out multiple times, and our offense, whether it’s our players or our game plan, I think it’s too good for us to perform like that.”
Kittle doesn’t think it will take long for Shanahan to relay that message heading into Week 7.
In fact, the veteran tight end recalled the moment when the 49ers dominated the Carolina Panthers on the road with a 22-point victory in Week 5 of the 2022 season, and immediately after, Shanahan called in half the offense for individual meetings to say that they weren’t performing at a high enough level.
“Kyle’s been coaching for 15-plus years in the NFL. He knows what it takes, and you realize how hard it is to win the league,” Kittle said. “So if you’re just sloppy on certain details, they catch up to you. It’s inevitable for them to catch up. So you either have to look at yourself in the mirror, like, ‘What can I do to get better?’ And there are plenty of things that I think every single person on this offense would be like, ‘I should’ve done this better, I should’ve done that better.’
“And hopefully we have guys that are strong enough to not get their feelings hurt about it. Kyle’s a hard coach, and we all deserve to get coached really hard.”
The 49ers had 17 first downs in the first half. The Commanders had two.
By the end of the game, the 49ers had 20. The Commanders had 19.
Evans missing the second half didn’t help that cause, but again, no 49er is making any excuses. Especially not a team that has relied on its next-man-up mentality all season long as Evans’ status could put San Francisco without its top five receivers.
“Mike Evans is an amazing football player. … I don’t think we went three-and-out three straight times because Mike wasn’t out there,” Kittle said. Obviously, he would have helped, but we just got to execute, and I don’t think we did. I mean, we ran six passes in a row, and I know that there were some mess-ups somewhere in there. So we’re going to watch film. We’re super stoked to win. Winning is very hard in the NFL, but we should be much better than that, much more efficient than that as the offense that we’ve put on tape so far this year and we definitely were not.”
The 49ers improved to 6-0 in their first true prime-time game of the season, but judging by the locker room, you wouldn’t be able to tell.
Deebo Samuel said it perfectly: the 49ers have been here before. They’ve ridden the highs of an impressive win streak and defied all the odds against them for the duration of a season before crumbling in the playoffs.
Their goal is much bigger and brighter than stacking up wins. It’s about getting the one that counts in February. And no one — not a player, coach or front-office executive — can feel confident that will happen if the 49ers display another performance like Monday’s.