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49ers Fall to No. 21 in NFL.com's Week 17 Power Rankings

The 49ers are one of the worst teams in the NFL this season.

Grant Cohn

Dec 22, 2024; Miami Gardens, Florida, USA; Miami Dolphins defensive tackle Calais Campbell (93) hits San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy (13) on the pass attempt during second half at Hard Rock Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jasen Vinlove-Imagn Images
Dec 22, 2024; Miami Gardens, Florida, USA; Miami Dolphins defensive tackle Calais Campbell (93) hits San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy (13) on the pass attempt during second half at Hard Rock Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jasen Vinlove-Imagn Images / Jasen Vinlove-Imagn Images
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The 49ers are one of the worst teams in the NFL this season.

They shouldn't be this bad. They have lots of injuries, but plenty of teams have more injuries than they do. They still have lots of talent. And yet, they find ways to lose close games almost every week.

This past week, they got run over by the Miami Dolphins, who are one of the softest teams in the league. The 49ers made them look like a Super Bowl contender. And that's why the 49ers have fallen to no. 21 in NFL.com's latest power ranking.

"Sunday's defeat to Miami wasn't another one-score loss," writes NFL.com analyst Eric Edholm, "but it might as well have been, given that the 49ers had the ball twice with less than 10 minutes left and a chance to take the lead, until a late Dolphins touchdown put victory out of reach -- although official elimination from the playoffs came long before that moment. Miami was the better team. San Francisco, meanwhile, failed to eclipse the 18-point mark in a loss for the seventh time this season. This one must have felt incredibly familiar to Niners fans, who have seen this script play out before. Injuries, bad penalties, special teams errors and yet another turnover all cost them another game. For seven straight contests now, the 49ers have been even or in the negative in turnover differential, and they're minus-8 in that category over their last five games combined. Four of those were losses. Deebo Samuel ran hard, seemingly wanting to atone for his big drop one game prior, but that was a mere consolation amid a lost season."

The fact that the 49ers offense has been so bad this season is extremely alarming. They still have Kyle Shanahan, Brock Purdy and George Kittle -- they should be scoring more than 20 points per game easily, but they're not. You have to wonder if the league has caught up to Shanahan and Purdy in particular.

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Grant Cohn
GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.

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