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Brock Purdy Says the 49ers Haven't Found Their True Identity as a Team

This past Sunday, Kyle Shanahan called 41 passes and just 22 runs even though he led by multiple scores for most of the game.

Grant Cohn

Oct 6, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy (13) carries the ball against Arizona Cardinals linebacker Krys Barnes (51) during the first quarter at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Kelley L Cox-Imagn Images
Oct 6, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy (13) carries the ball against Arizona Cardinals linebacker Krys Barnes (51) during the first quarter at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Kelley L Cox-Imagn Images / Kelley L Cox-Imagn Images
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SANTA CLARA -- The 49ers are facing an identity crisis.

They no longer have a dominant defensive line which used to be a staple of their team, nor do they have Christian McCaffrey who was their offensive MVP. Now they're trying to learn how to win in new ways, and they're failing.

Kyle Shanahan isn't calling runs or playing action passes nearly as frequently as he did in the past. Instead, Brock Purdy is dropping back and running in circles multiple times per game.

"The standard here is excellence," Brock Purdy said after the 49ers lost 24-23 to the Cardinals. "That’s what we're trying to get to. But every year is different with just the team, the chemistry and getting guys together. You’ve got new keys, some guys leave. I think all throughout this, it's early in the season and we're still trying to find our true identity as a team and we're getting there. It’s a couple plays away and a couple drives away from gelling and gluing together. But I'm confident that we'll find it. We’ve just got to get into a rhythm and play complementary team football. We’ve got a Thursday Night game coming up, so we'll have another chance at it."

It sounds like the 49ers want to get back to running the football because that has been their identity since 2019, the first season they went to the Super Bowl under Kyle Shanahan. That season, they won the NFC Championship Game while passing just eight times.

This past Sunday, Kyle Shanahan called 41 passes and just 22 runs even though he led by multiple scores for most of the game.

Strange.

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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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