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SANTA CLARA — What do we really know about the 3-0 49ers?
Not all that much, to be honest.
Yes, there are plenty of reasons to be excited about this team — this is the first time they’ve been undefeated at this juncture of the season in 21 years, after all — but some healthy skepticism is justified as well.
This Niners’ offense remains perplexing — is the performance that ransacked the Bengals in Week 2 indicative, or should we expect more of the sputtering we saw in Tampa Bay in Week 1 and on Sunday?
It’s going to take a few more games to get a proper read.
The defense seems to have taken a big year-over-year jump, too, but is that sustainable or merely a byproduct of playing three quarterbacks who are likely to all be on the bench this time next year?
Heading into their bye week, all we can say with any level of certainty is:
• This team’s pass rush can bring it — they’re ferocious.
• As a 53-man unit, this 49ers squad have plenty of character and guts.
In this era of pro football, those are two outstanding qualities to have.
And that last one could make this season special for San Francisco.
Let’s get real: the 49ers had no business winning Sunday’s home opener. Teams that turn the ball over five times — three times inside their opponent’s 25-yard line, no less — don’t deserve to win.
Since the NFL-AFL merger, only 12 percent of teams that turn the ball over five times in a game have won said game — such teams were 183-1269 going into Sunday, per Pro Football Reference.
The Niners made it 184-1269.
How?
Well, it helped that the Niners played an overmatched quarterback. This is a quarterback-led league, after all. Steelers’ backup-made-starter Mason Rudolph is certainly no Ben Roethlisberger — he made a few nice plays, but ultimately he was ineffective, picking up nearly 75 percent of his passing yards on two egregious Niners’ defensive mistakes. San Francisco kept trying to give the game away, but Rudolph, bless his heart, kept giving it right back. The game was effectively a fail-off.
But we’ll forget that context by the time the calendar flips to October.
What will carry though is that W the Niners put on the board and the character the team showed Sunday. These Niners might have been falling over themselves for most of the game, but they made big-time plays in big-time moments — a rattled team doesn’t do that.
Yes, the Niners’ guts were checked time and time again against the Steelers. And while the response wasn’t always pretty — ok, it rarely was — the Niners passed the tests anyway.
Like when the Niners fumbled and lost possession at the Pittsburgh 11 with 6:53 to play, trailing 20-17.
San Francisco’s defense only needed three plays to force and recover a fumble of their own.
The Niners’ offense — poised not to fail again — took that golden opportunity (and a gifted first down from the Steelers) and scored a touchdown with 1:20 left: a 5-yard, into-double-coverage trust pass from Jimmy Garoppolo the prodigal receiver, Dante Pettis.
And with a four-point lead, the Niners’ defense — and in particular the team’s indomitable pass rush — made sure that Pittsburgh never came close to the end zone, pressuring Rudolph four times, pushing the Steelers’ offense backwards when they most needed to move forward. This, despite reeling a bit from the absence of breakout cornerback Ahkello Witherspoon, who was carted off the Niners’ sideline with a foot injury late in the third quarter.
“When our offense got the turnover and put us in a hard spot, we took it as Murphy’s Law,” 49ers cornerback Richard Sherman said. “And you want to slap Murphy in the face. And we did that today.”
Was there some luck involved in the victory? Of course. Yes, even in a game where the Niners turned it over five times.
All wins require some luck, though.
And no good, very bad games happen to even damn good teams.
But luck is not a reliable commodity, and good teams don’t make games like Sunday’s a trend.
So while it’s concerning that the Niners have already “stolen” two games this season, we need more time to determine what these early-season struggles are.
What I do know is that last year’s 49ers team would have been blown out under similar circumstances.
In fact, the last Niners’ team I would expect to win a game like Sunday’s was the 2013 squad — which just so happens to be the last Niners team to make the playoffs.
“The game today and the game in Tampa — those are games that we have not been able to win here,” Niners coach Kyle Shanahan said, with the “we” being his regime, which is in its third year. “To have two games like that where things don’t go perfect says a lot about the character of the guys.”
“It’s just resilience. It’s growth,” Sherman said. “We showed that all three units had trust in one another. All three units picked one another up when the other fell apart… That’s why we were able to win the game — trust. You appreciate games like this. Me, as a nine-year vet, I can appreciate games like this. I’ve been in quite a few of them. And how you respond these games goes a long way to how your season goes, and I think our men responded well.”
Ideally, for San Francisco, the kind of sloppy, disjointed play they’ve shown off twice this season is only a phase — mere growing pains — and they’ll be none the worse for wear when that stops in the near future; that they’ll look back and laugh at the time where they almost lost to Jameis Winston and Mason Rudolph. Perhaps that will be in January, ahead of a 17th game.
But in the meantime, they’re an imperfectly perfect team. One that is showing that they could well have the right and necessary mentality to reach the postseason once again.
