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SEATTLE — “If you’re pushing the edge, eventually you find the edge.”
That’s a matter-of-fact line from “Free Solo,” a harrowing documentary about rock climber Alex Honnold and his quest to scale Yosemite’s El Capitan without a rope.
There is no margin for error, because any mistake likely means a fall to the death.
The whole endeavor is not all that dissimilar from the 2025 49ers season, which ended with a 41-6 defeat on Saturday night to the Seattle Seahawks in the divisional round of the playoffs. At last and inevitably, the undermanned 49ers — whose shorthanded roster had worked with precious little margin for error — met an elite opponent. They slipped and tumbled to their ultimate demise.
Honnold scaled the 3,000-foot monolith of sheer granite, but the 49ers couldn’t complete their own odds-defying journey.
“Nobody thought we’d even be here, let alone thought we would win this game,” left tackle Trent Williams said. “At the end of the day, we were playing with house money, playing with who we played with.”
When running back Christian McCaffrey and tight end Jake Tonges — George Kittle’s injury replacement — both went down on Saturday, the 49ers faced a cumulative talent drain that was humongous even for their own inflated standards.
The only path to win against an opponent as talented as the Seahawks, who’d fielded one of the best defenses in NFL history this regular season (and who entered with a rest advantage thanks to their first-round bye), essentially required perfection. And the 49ers managed the polar opposite, allowing Seattle kick returner Rashid Shaheed to sprint 95 yards to paydirt on the game’s first touch.
Coach Kyle Shanahan’s disastrous option-pitch fourth-down play call and a fumble from Tonges followed that, allowing Seattle to open a 17-0 lead. The cement dried into a blowout following a third-down holding penalty from 49ers’ defensive tackle Jordan Elliott as the unraveling continued.
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“It’s hard to win when you give up turnovers and special teams touchdowns,” Shanahan said, “and we did both tonight.”
In the 49ers’ locker room, the mood was predictably somber — but the type of devastation that comes with most playoff losses did not permeate the air.
Instead, veterans like McCaffrey came to grips with the journey’s sudden finish.
“It’s such a weird emotional rollercoaster that you go through,” the star running back said. “It takes time to process everything because it just comes to an end. In all my years playing, this is one of the proudest I’ve ever been to be part of a team. I love everyone in the locker room.”
It was poetic that the 49ers’ season ended right where it began — in Seattle, where they scored a 17-13 season-opening victory over the team that obliterated them on Saturday night just over four months later.
“We came down here with a healthy team and we won,” Williams said. “That’s what we can be. Obviously when we’re playing with guys off the practice squad and signing guys that you’ve taken off the street, you have to temper your expectations a little bit.”
Aside from offering a reminder of how much talent the 49ers had lost (the Seahawks are now Super Bowl favorites, and a mostly healthy 49ers team had actually statistically controlled the Week 1 game), the neat bookend underscored one of this season’s biggest successes: The development of the 2025 rookie class.
Rookie nickelback Upton Stout, especially, looked like a markedly more polished player Saturday than he was in Week 1 — when two of his penalties helped keep Seattle afloat. Defensive tackles Alfred Collins and CJ West also made huge strides over the same period, establishing foundations that should pair well with the returns of injured veteran stalwarts Nick Bosa and Fred Warner.
“A lot of the rookies will be household names soon,” Williams said. “Obviously, tonight sucks but it’s not the end for us.”
Warner sat relaxed at his locker with his feet kicked forward after the game. Even though the 49ers determined that he wouldn’t return from his gruesome ankle injury against Seattle, the transcendent linebacker made the trip. He’d watched the first quarter of the game from a booth upstairs but then, frustrated with the 49ers’ early-game struggles, bolted down to the field.
“As soon as that first quarter happened, Warner said, “I said there was no way I was going to not be on the field to help.”
So Warner, who nearly completed what would’ve been a stunningly fast return from his Oct. 12 ankle fracture and dislocation, finished this season — defined by its offseason roster reset and resilience in the face of injuries – as a player-coach on the field.
Like so many of his 49ers teammates, Warner maximized the opportunity at hand — even if it was far from ideal. The linebacker said he was driven not only by a desire to return in time for a Super Bowl run this year, but also by the chance to continue building a foundation for future seasons.
It’s significant that Warner, Bosa, and many others are set to return in 2026 to complement Brock Purdy. The 49ers’ quarterback and most important piece again played well but never had a chance with such a depleted arsenal of weapons against Seattle.
Don’t forget that the 1986 49ers suffered a similar-sized whipping, 49-3, in the playoffs at the hands of the New York Giants. The loss didn’t impede those 49ers for long; they returned in 1987 with perhaps the best team in football (the Minnesota Vikings upset them in the playoffs) before winning back-to-back Lombardi trophies to close the 1988 and 1989 seasons.
The 49ers, who delivered 13 wins against consistent adversity, feel that they have the goods to immediately thrust themselves back into contention. They face obvious separation issues — Purdy ran for a staggering 413 yards while searching for open receivers Saturday, per Next Gen Stats – but offseason recovery should help assuage some of these problems before free agency, trades, and the NFL Draft are even considered.
The 49ers figure to be major players in all three of those arenas. For now, after they pushed the edge of their resilience for so long and finally found the limit on Saturday night, they’ll circle the wagons.
“We’re going to regroup, get guys healthy and get back after it,” Purdy said.
And then, the restocked 49ers will set out to push that edge again.