How on earth did the 49ers win that game?
How on earth does a team that can’t consistently run the ball or pressure the passer, featuring guys off the street in the starting lineup because their roster is held together by athletic tape and sheer stubbornness, beat the Rams, arguably the best (and the least injured) team in the NFL, 26-23 in overtime on Thursday?
How on earth is this Niners team 4-1 on the season with a pristine 3-0 in the NFC West?
The answer isn’t complicated. It’s a word that makes the spreadsheet jockeys of the NFL wince, but it matters more than cap space and draft capital:
Culture.
Kyle Shanahan’s Niners have it in buckets.
It’s going to take them to the playoffs — they can play sub-.500 football the rest of the way and make it thanks to this incredible, improbable start — and if this team ever gets healthy (OK, healthier), perhaps even more.
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There’s something special about this Niners team — there’s no doubt about it. And to think that this was supposed to be a bridge year for San Francisco, whose front office has been focused on building for 2026 since before 2025 started.
They’re building something, all right: a winning machine.
What else do you call a team that, even with their roster torn down to the studs — backup quarterback, third-string pass-catchers, a defense that lost its superstar pass rusher — is still able to win, on a short week, on the road (you can’t call it a “home” game), scrapping and clawing all the way to the finish line?
That’s not normal.
We all heard the talk this week. Respectable minds suggested the far-too-injured Niners should “punt” this game and take the long weekend to get healthy for Week 6.
It turns out the game they punted was the loss this past Sunday to the Jags.
The toughness on display Thursday night — the sheer, gritty sticktoitiveness — was a testament to the team’s leaders: Shanahan and defensive coordinator Robert Saleh.
For all the head-scratching seasons we’ve seen in Shanahan’s tenure — there have been some real duds — for him to have his team looking down at their divisional rivals while there’s a medical tent full of key players looking up from the training table makes him the frontrunner for NFL Coach of the Year.
Because this isn’t a fly-by-night operation defying common sense. This is the start of something big.
When we refer to “programs” in football, we typically mean those at the college level.
We think the pros are too rich, too savvy, too mercenary to buy into some hokey belief system, right?
Wrong.
These 49ers embody the values their coaches preach: toughness, smarts, and resilience.
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Backup quarterback Mac Jones showed them all on Thursday. He was cramping, dragging a massive knee brace, and taking shots that would fell a lesser player. Twice in this game, I was certain he was done. I think he was throwing up on the sideline in the second half. At one point, he needed two trainers between possessions — one for the gimpy leg, one for the throwing arm.
He deserved a third to fan him with a palm frond while he choked down his bananas. (He had three, if you’re scoring at home.)
But he found a way. He finished the fight, throwing for 342 yards. He could barely turn, which is a real problem for an under-center quarterback, but he willed his team to a victory. Toughness? That doesn’t do Jones’ performance justice.
He also stuck with the recently signed Kendrick Bourne, who had a nightmare Sunday, didn’t know the plays (illegal motion followed by a burned timeout because of an incorrect alignment), and had a nasty early drop. But Jones kept feeding him, and down the stretch, Bourne became the team’s offensive engine down the stretch, finishing with 10 catches for 142 yards. That’s resilience.
And the smarts. My goodness, were those on display.
It’s easy to see now why Shanahan loved Jones in the 2020 draft. They have a mind-meld. Jones runs this scheme with the timing and precision the play-caller craves. With this many players sidelined, the scheme had to win Thursday, and Jones was the perfect triggerman for it.
But this same ethos extends to the defense. Riddled with kids and feeble up front without Bosa, they bent. The Rams picked up yards in chunks, particularly when Matt Stafford zeroed in on rookie safety Marquise Sigle. But the Niners did not break.
It came down to the final minutes, twice: Rams were at the 3-yard line with four downs to take the lead in the final 67 seconds, but there was rookie defensive tackle Alfred Collins forcing a game-changing fumble. Then, in overtime, the Rams went for it on fourth-and-1, well inside field goal range, down 3. They ran to the right, and it’s Sigle, the kid they picked on all night, who comes up to deliver the game-winning stop.
To the guys who live on a spreadsheet, this stuff doesn’t matter. They’ll say the Niners are lucky — mere paper tigers — and regression will bite them the rest of the season.
But to anyone who understands that this sport is about grown men hitting each other as hard as they can, and to those who know that spirit beats talent on any given Sunday or Thursday, the Niners’ performance in Los Angeles was a declarative statement.
Nothing will be easy for this team, and the injuries have only made things oh-so-much harder. But they have proven to be tougher than their circumstances.
You can’t help but believe they’ll find a way to win, even when the deck is so clearly stacked against them.
The 49ers were forced to build something new after their first Super Bowl window slammed shut.
They’re doing it.
The winning machine is back in service. It might be clanky and spitting smoke right now, but it’s running on bile. One day, it’ll have even better fuel.
But bile will do for now, because it has allowed a team living through what should be a worst-case scenario to find itself in the best-case scenario through five games.
