Kurtenbach: You thought the 49ers’ chaos was limited to last season? Think again

SANTA CLARA — Per 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan, quarterback Brock Purdy is a “longshot” to play in the 49ers’ Week 2 game in New Orleans.

And suddenly, that term — longshot — feels terribly apt in describing just about everything surrounding the 2025 San Francisco 49ers.

We made it one whole week before the walls of Levi’s Stadium were caught up in what is a far-too-familiar fire. I suppose that’s progress from last year, when the season went to hell before it even opened, thanks to Brandon Aiyuk’s absurd holdout and Christian McCaffrey’s last-minute scratch going into Week 1. But that’s hardly anything to celebrate.

The Niners used to be the NFC’s team to beat. Now they’re the conference’s most chaotic team.

And no, that’s not a compliment.

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Their starting quarterback is hurt, and it might not be a one-week thing. Their star tight end, George Kittle — the prescribed fulcrum of their offense — is out for the next four weeks with a hamstring injury. No one knows what’s going on with wide receiver Jauan Jennings, but I suppose it’s a positive that his inability to separate also applies to his shoulder. Trent Williams looked like a mortal in Week 1 and had a noticeable limp on Wednesday. The defense is stocked with kids, and it seems like the entire offense is leaning on a player, Christian McCaffrey, with the reliability of a Jaguar sports car — awesome when it works, but you’re always one turn away from it being breaking in 15 different places.

Things are going great, folks!

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Amid this tsunami of bad news — the kind only the 49ers seem capable of delivering, it seems — there is, perhaps, a single silver lining: Sunday’s game against the Saints should be one of their easier contests of the campaign. Yes, that beautiful last-place schedule is helping them out early. And the Niners need all the help they can get right now.

But if you’re leaning on a last-place schedule at this juncture of the season, doesn’t that speak volumes?

(Also, let me know how all those last-place schedules have worked out for the Browns.)

Yes, Mac Jones is a capable backup quarterback, but that doesn’t mean you should expect him to win games. If Jennings can’t play, Jones will be throwing to a receiver group that caught a grand total of four passes in Week 1, with all of them being Ricky Pearsall’s. Jones will be playing behind an injured left tackle, left guard, and right guard, and going up against a defense coordinated by former Niner assistant Brandon Staley, who has spent the last half-decade learning from Shanahan and Sean McVay after giving them so many fits they felt the best way to beat him was to make them join their staffs. That Saints’ defense, much like Seattle’s in Week 1, can take away the foundation of the Niners’ offense, the outside zone run, with a five-man front.

Quickly: This will be the season of the five-man front in the NFL, and Staley, going back to his time as a linebackers coach for Vic Fangio in Chicago, might be the genesis of its modern revival. Shanahan said he “blacked out” the 2020 season, but he should flip on the film of Staley’s Rams and their five-man front. It dominated the Niners that year.

And while the Niners’ defense is playing well, they’re still relying on five rookies — you’d be a fool to count on linear progress from any of them.

Sunday night, the Niners opened as high as 7.5-point road favorites. As of Wednesday afternoon, that number is falling faster than a frat boy in the French Quarter at 4 a.m.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it was down to 2.5 points by kickoff.

The whole conceit of the 2025 season was that the veterans would hold down the fort until the prodigious roster of kids caught up to the speed, smarts, and physicality of the NFL game.

That plan is clearly not working out.

No, it’s Fred Warner and Nick Bosa running defensive day care while Shanahan uses scotch tape to put together a broken plate.

Not being able to tap into Purdy magic for Sunday’s game looms large. And with two division games coming in Weeks 3 and 5 (Kittle will miss both), you’d be forgiven for forgetting that the Niners are, in fact, 1-0 and are, as it stands at the time of this column’s publishing, favorites to win again.

Call it PTNS: Post-Traumatic Niners Syndrome. When this train goes off the rails, it doesn’t seem to simply derail — it goes into a canyon and explodes into a million pieces. There are no half-measures with this team.

And for a while, that kind of all-or-nothing standard was a positive.

But these days, the concept of “Super Bowl or Bust” seems downright fanciful. Hilarious even. This team was scrambling to put together a cogent, passable 53-man roster only a few weeks ago. Now they’re in full survive-and-advance mode. The Niners aren’t even sure if they can bring in a third quarterback for the week because they’re already in a roster crunch.

As Purdy would tell you: sometimes if you’re scrambling because the play was busted from the moment you broke the huddle. Sometimes you bust your toe up on that play.Thomas has a 100

There are four more months of football left to play. That’s a lot of time to get things right, yes. And the Niners have the kind of coaching that you can believe will make the most out of a bad situation.

But four months is also a tremendous amount of time for even more things to go wrong.

Which way do you think this is trending?

The way I see it, Shanahan might need to “black out” the 2025 season, too.