The power of a well and oft-told narrative is not to be diminished, but it also should not be feared if countervailing information comes to light. And so it is that the San Francisco 49ers, irradiated scoundrels though they may be and summer vacation wastrels they absolutely proved to be, came up with the one enduring rebuttal to all the amused schadenfreude that has been aimed their way.
Specifically, they answered it with a comprehensive kicking of that arse.
The 49ers put that indisputably goofy offseason all the way behind them—for a week, anyway—by taking the preseason Super Bowl favorite Los Angeles Rams and choke-slamming them and their national reputations on an Aussie Rules ground, 27-7. People made a point of saying afterwards that this was the worst opening game loss by a preseason championship favorite in 50 years, and it was. What this tells us is that all pregame gambling information, like almost all pregame information, has only one utility—to bait degenerates into spending money in defense of or repudiation of that information. The football stuff, by contrast, takes care of itself. The Rams, whose preseason standing was somewhere between consensus pick and indomitable favorite, never came close to proving it on Thursday. The score, for what it's worth, was probably a flattery to the Rams. The whompage was evident everywhere.
In many ways, this played out as the prototypical Kyle Shanahan game, starting with getting into town early. Shanahan is so passionate a body clock devotee that he has taken the radical step of having his team stay in Youngstown, Ohio, between road games, and he and his charges dutifully rode the Circadian rhythm where their trip across the international dateline was concerned. The Rams, as you have heard, took a different approach. The argument between Shanahan sending the 49ers to Australia early and Sean McVay keeping his Rams in the States until just before kickoff can now be considered settled once and for all, at least until Lane Kiffin decides to have his team circumnavigate the globe and then drop into Starkville on 50 different helicopters right before the Mississippi State game. He has about two years before he's either fired or quits anyway, and surely wants to pack as much innovation into that time as he can.
The travel itinerary debate mostly gave us a look inside how desperate the football media is to take an inconsequential story and make it into a dirigible, but at this point that blimp won't hunt. So we can consider this solved quickly and probably for the foreseeable future—every time a game is played 17 hours away by air, do not wait until the last minute to board the plane unless you want to lose by three scores. The real difference between the two teams was more elemental, though. When the 49ers get to determine how a game is played, they win, and they do that by letting their defense dictate the early terms and then using its run-first-whenever-feasible offense to build on that advantage.
Invigorated initially by the returns of old hands Fred Warner, Dre Greenlaw, Deommodore Lenoir, and Nick Bosa, as well as new faces like Osa Odighizuwa, that defense took and maintained early control. They rendered putative Hall of Fame candidate Matthew Stafford both dazed and might we add confused, and he never got into any discernible rhythm. This in turn allowed the 49er offense, which is the same game with some new names, to slowly smother the proceedings with one of their favorite gambits—lots and lots of Christian McCaffrey, with added sugary goodness from rookie third-rounder Kaelon Black. It was textbook Shanahan, and like most textbooks is not designed for casual reading.
McCaffrey and Black did their jobs within that scheme, but the difference came in how the 49ers seemed to solve one of their great 2025 deficiencies. They revamped their receiving unit by signing injury-prone uber-wideout Mike Evans from Tampa Bay and former Ram Demarcus Robinson and reacquiring prodigal favorite Deebo Samuel, and those imported veterans gave Brock Purdy enough targets to keep him upright and sighted. San Francisco had only two three-and-outs the entire night and the Rams neither sacked nor hurried Purdy in the pocket; they now get to worry not just about how quickly Aaron Donald can get ready to play but whether Myles Garrett, controlled to the point of invisibility by Trent Williams, is going to be healthy enough to give them the pass rush they fantasized about during hour 11 of their flight.
In all, this was more of a comprehensive beating than it was a reminder from your stick-in-the-mud parents to get to the airport with plenty of time to spare. It also has no particular bearing upon what is to come in the season ahead, because the NFC West is its own unique gauntlet, plus the Arizona Cardinals. There's no mystery as to why the league chose to frontload its new season's schedule with those three divisional powers while leaving the Cardinals to play the Chargers in L.A. in the same unholy broadcast window as Dolphins-Raiders. But the real reveal is that the 49ers are not to be dismissed as a divisional or conference afterthought. There is still enough talent here that they will have to work their way out of the top echelon of the NFC, as they did in 2024 with the array of injuries that led fans to discover Hell's Own Power Plant. Now that it has been shown to be merely a next-level tanning salon, we can move on to our next talking point, whatever that is. Just get there early.
