All 49ers

The Best-Case Scenario for the 49ers in 2024

Last year felt like a best-case-scenario season for the 49ers until they lost the Super Bowl in overtime.

Grant Cohn

Jan 28, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy (13) celebrates after winning the NFC Championship football game against the Detroit Lions at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports
Jan 28, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy (13) celebrates after winning the NFC Championship football game against the Detroit Lions at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports / Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports
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All 32 of Sports Illustrated's NFL team publishers recently laid out the best-case scenarios for the team they cover this season. Here's the best-case scenario for the 49ers according to yours truly.

"The oldest roster in the NFL stays relatively healthy for the second consecutive season and makes it back to the Super Bowl. But this time when the 49ers have a lead in the second half, Kyle Shanahan actually knows what to do with it. He sticks with his running game, runs down the clock and ends the pattern of him coming from ahead to lose Super Bowls."

There's not much more to add. Last year felt like a best-case-scenario season for the 49ers until they lost the Super Bowl in overtime. They clearly were the best team in the NFL on paper. The NFC was weak. Their division was terrible. And they stayed uncharacteristically healthy. And they still didn't win a Lombardi Trophy.

This year, they have to hope that their aging roster can stay healthy for one more year. And if it does, then they have to hope that their head coach finally knows what to do with a second-half lead in the Super Bowl if they make it that far. Because he's the only head coach in NFL history to blow two 10-point leads Super Bowl history.

Barring injury, the 49ers have the roster to win the Super Bowl. They just need a coach who can close. Is Shanahan that coach? We'll find out soon enough.

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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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