Kurtenbach: After 14 weeks, we finally saw the real 49ers

SANTA CLARA — It’s nice knowing these 49ers didn’t totally fool us.

It’s comforting to confirm that the kind of performance they put on the field Sunday — a 38-13 onslaught of the Chicago Bears at Levi’s Stadium — is, in fact, still possible for this team.

We can take some solace now, having seen for the first time this season a Niners team that showed toughness, fight, and grit. They were aggressive and efficient, and they built momentum through complementary football.

Yes, the 49ers might have waited 14 weeks to show it, but the team in red jerseys on Sunday was a good football team.

Those Niners on the field Sunday were the Niners we expected to see all season — a team that went from offensive performances the past two weeks (losing by a combined margin of 73-20) to the right kind of offensive (319 first-half yards, 24-0 lead) on Sunday.

The shame is that it was probably too little, too late for San Francisco. While they are not technically eliminated from postseason contention, the 49ers’ only realistic route to the playoffs is to win the NFC West. Seattle’s win over the Cardinals Sunday leaves the Seahawks with a two-game lead (and a tiebreaker) with four games to play.

The cause of 2024 is probably lost.

But at least the Niners didn’t lose the plot.

Sunday was a perfect bounce-back situation for San Francisco, and they knew it. The season was spinning out of control, with the Niners losing three straight games, each in increasingly embarrassing fashion, and another loss — especially to a team with a rookie quarterback and a first-time head coach — would likely put it in an irreversible tailspin.

Those faint playoff hopes would undoubtedly die and the vultures surrounding this team, waiting for its ultimate demise, would create a deafening noise.

“We just had to dig deep and find ourselves,” quarterback Brock Purdy said. “This league is hard. It’s tough. If you don’t have momentum and energy and belief within a building, it can be really tough.”

“I just wanted to make sure we came out today and showed grit, showed fight,” Kyle Shanahan said. “We haven’t been able to battle and finish a game when things have gone bad… I think we’ve [won in those situations] a lot in the past, so we know how it looks and know what it feels like.”

In a season in which the 49ers have had no luck, they did receive a reprieve on Sunday. Despite extra time to prepare after playing on Thanksgiving, the Bears didn’t provide any challenge. In fact, the Bears couldn’t have made the game easier for the Niners. Their offense was ineffective for the first two quarters of the game, and their defense for all four.

Teams have found success against the Niners’ offense playing tight man-to-man coverage this season. The Bears, having just fired their head coach — who was also their defensive coordinator — dropped into zone defense snap after snap.

It was just what the doctor ordered for Shanahan, the Niners’ offensive playcaller, whose much-criticized offense is built to be the exact kind of zone defense the Bears played.

Purdy threw 20-for-25 for 325 yards and two touchdowns. Jauan Jennings — the situational receiver who, because of injury and poor play, has been thrust into the No. 1 role — had another outstanding game, catching seven passes for 90 yards and two touchdowns. And George Kittle, given space to roam against that zone defense, scampered for 151 yards on six catches, with 104 coming after the catch.

That’s to say nothing of rookie running back Isaac Guerendo, who ran for 78 yards on 15 attempts and added two catches for 50 yards.

In all, the Niners had nine plays of 20 yards or more and nearly tripled the Bears’ total yardage output.

And by playing their finest game of the season, the Niners gave themselves something to play for on Thursday night, when they host the Rams with a chance to pull themselves out of the NFC West cellar and back to .500 on the season.

“We feel good right now. We played well,” Shanahan said. But “if you don’t take care of business on Thursday, [there’s] not much to celebrate about today.”

But even if Sunday’s performance proves to be a one-off or a consolation prize amid a lost season, the momentum created by this game should not be ignored.

It’ll silence the questions — macro and micro — about this team, at least for a few days. We can all use a break from debating Purdy’s “true” value and fending off worm-brained national media theories of trading Shanahan to other teams this offseason.

“You guys are going to have to kick me out of here,” Shanahan said of the unsourced rumor that the Niners could trade him to the Bears this offseason.

As if he’d want to take over that mess. Chicago made the 2024 Niners look like, well, a Super Bowl team Sunday.

Alas, Sunday’s performance lends credence to the idea that this Niners season was simply cursed and that San Francisco—somewhere under that hex—is a good football team that’s not, in fact, in need of a full rebuild this offseason to return to Super Bowl contention.

“We just wanted one win,” team captain Fred Warner said. “We just got back to being us.”

Indeed, the Niners did. So, no matter what happened in the lead-up to Sunday or what happens from this point on, we can at least say we’ve seen it once.

And amid everything that has gone down this season, one afternoon of excellence might be enough to build real momentum for 2025.