You never actually hear a metaphorical window close. For starters, the window in question is metaphorical; for another, that kind of window doesn't open up and down as you might imagine it, but in and out. That way, it can open and close with a gust of ill wind or a burst of good fortune. The transparency of it might make you think the window is not just wide open but a glass door that leads out to the backyard pool and allows the largest of mesomorphs easy passage. Approach with too much confidence and you might walk right into it that way, and your insurance won't cover the cost of the dentist having to pull glass out of your gums.
We don't know if the San Francisco 49ers' six-year window of Super Bowl contendership is finally closed, but it certainly has a totally unjustified sense of closing soon. They just feel too ordinary for one to care about in that way.
We—well, you, to be honest; the empirical "we" actually couldn't care less about the 49ers—have come to expect the 49ers to suddenly become fearsome and mighty after Halloween. Since Kyle Shanahan's School For Gifted Youngsters finally extricated itself from the awfulness of the franchise’s post-Harbaugh era back in 2019, the 49ers are notorious for owning November, December, and early January. They are 31-16 in those months; they are also 32-14 in the second half of the season and 37-14 after a bye week. That is three different ways of saying Shanahan’s Niners tend to finish well, even though it should also be said that they are 26-18 before Halloween, so the big-finish thing is kind of a myth. They're usually just good from start to finish.
Still, Sunday's 20-17 loss to the Seattle Seahawks and their pixieish miracle-maker Geno Smith felt a bit more like the beginning of the end than the end of the beginning. Acolytes will grind on about the Niners’ injury list, which is why you should avoid acolytes of all kinds when you're looking for a dining companion. But let's be honest: Football is injuries, lots and lots of them. Yes, losing Nick Bosa and not having George Kittle is not an optimal circumstance, but the Niners’ tale of collective woe is no more comprehensive or compelling than anyone else's. It's as good a reason as any if you need an excuse, but it's also going to fail on deaf ears. There are always seven teams that have more compelling injury tales than yours, no matter what team you back, which is why professional old crank Bill Parcells was right when he said a team is what its record says it is.
The 49ers did not look like the team that is used to cheating the reaper in crunch time, as they typically have been. They looked ready to be reaped, and so they were. Smith looked unafraid of the team that had whipped him five consecutive times and held him to barely 100 yards of total offense through the first two-and-a-half quarters. Maybe some of that was Bosa's injured hip, but one suspects Smith would have broken that game-winning 13-yard TD run to win the game anyway. He has that way about him.
The 49ers are actually learning not about injuries, but the equally debilitating truth that is guilt by association. They are part of the ultradrab NFC West: The Arizona Cardinals lead the division at 6-4, followed by the Los Angeles Rams, Seahawks, and 49ers at 5-5. Nobody you fear, nobody who fears you. In the NFL's official playoff standings, the first three teams below the playoff line are the Rams, Seahawks, and Niners. The division, from top to bottom—it’s not a long trip—is the epitome of wall-to-wall, seven-layer meh, and its teams are the mean to which the entire league is deliberately steered.
The 49ers are not supposed to be part of that, by virtue of reputation and recent accomplishment. Their great flaw was not being able to close in the big moment, not missing the moment entirely. All the years spent killing Jimmy Garoppolo and more recently Brock Purdy for not being elite ignored the fact that the rest of the roster really was pretty damned elite. Now they're average at everything and horrible at nothing, in the most average division. They're just like the Cardinals, Rams, and Seahawks, only they've already lost three of the four division games they've played, which is muy no bueno, tiebreaker-wise.
The 49ers have been a team of extremes for more than four decades now: either stupendous or just stupid since Bill Walsh formed his auxiliary brain in 1981. They’ve had just four seasons at or near .500 in 43 seasons. Now they are as .500 as .500 gets, and because of that, their window looks like someone is about to close the shutters but is too lazy to lock them shut. Their schedule from here on has only one demonstrably soft touch—that’s Chicago in three weeks. Every other game has a measurable level of bastardy written into it, starting with back-to-back road games against good teams in grim weather (Green Bay and Buffalo), and a Week 17 shorts grenade against Detroit, with equal compatriots in blah (Rams, Dolphins, Cardinals) intermingled therein. These Niners look very 8-9, unless they look 9-8, and that's strange living for them. The 49ers do not traditionally have huge-import events in December and early January; they're either already in or already condemned.
So maybe that's what this closing window actually is—a window you can neither fully open nor fully shut, even if all you want is to close it for a moment to keep the heat in the house. The 49ers are not used to being just like everybody else, and yet here they are—indistinguishable from any of the other flawed teams scrabbling at the bottom of the playoff picture. Are they the Falcons, or maybe the Colts? Is that a question anyone wants to invest the time to answer? For the entirety of Kyle Shanahan’s tenure, the team hasn’t had to ask. Now it’s just the first question among many.
