Trent Williams Says the 49ers Learned Their Lesson

Apparently, they've fixed their problems, addressed their weaknesses and learned from their mistakes. And their 31-point win over the Jaguars proves this.

Grant Cohn | Nov 17, 2023

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San Francisco 49ers

SANTA CLARA -- The 49ers have lost three of their past four games, but they also won this past week, so everything's fine.

They've fixed their problems, addressed their weaknesses and learned from their mistakes. And their 31-point win over the Jaguars proves this.

"If there was any type of complacency or any type of thinking we had it figured out, we definitely got a rude awakening," Trent Williams said Thursday in the 49ers locker room. "And luckily it came at the beginning of the season as opposed to some of those must-win games down the stretch and in the playoffs. Part of what you're saying is right -- we learned that lesson earlier. When you start 5-0, it's kind of hard to imagine losing three in a row. But this game has a way of humbling everybody, and I think we got our slice of humble pie. But that's not taking away from any of those teams -- they beat us fair and square. But this game has a bunch of ebbs and flows, ups and downs, and we went through a down period. Now we're trying to get back up to playing our standard."

TRANSLATION: The 49ers became complacent when they were 5-0 and started looking ahead to the playoffs. So they had to learn a lesson, which is to take the season one game at a time because each game counts equally. Sure, the 49ers are the fourth-oldest team in the NFL and they've been to three of the past four NFC Championship games and Trent Williams in particular is one of the oldest players in the NFL, but they just now learned to take it one game at a time.

Hey, better late than never.

Published Nov 17, 2023

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.