Fifteen practices.
Two hours each.
Fifteen walkthroughs.
Two hours each.
That’s it. That’s all the time Kyle Shanahan said his 49ers team will have on the field during training camp this season.
Because of the pandemic, there have not been off-season practices, there won’t be preseason games, and training camps have been condensed, as to allocate proper time for player and staff intake, which included rounds of COVID-19 testing and now a physical ramp-up period.
So when the 49ers take the field for practice in a few weeks, it’ll be for the first time since the Super Bowl.
So is 15 practices enough time to prepare a team?
It has to be.
Kyle Shanahan silenced every doubter of his coaching ability last year, and that earned him a well-deserved extension this offseason. Even with the Super Bowl let-down, he aced last year’s test. But this season’s edition is far more difficult.
Is Shanahan truly one of the NFL’s elite leaders? We’re going to find out in 2020, because fewer practices this summer means the gap between good and bad coaching will never be starker than it will be this fall.
Shanahan cannot complain about unfair treatment, though — these are roughly the same circumstances every other team in the NFL will face, too.
That’s good and bad news for the 49ers.
The good news for San Francisco is that they don’t have to install new systems ahead of this season.
No, this is the fourth year that Shanahan has been at the helm of the Niners’ roster and the third with Jimmy Garoppolo at the helm of his offense.
And the mistake several teams made this past offseason to not to make San Francisco defensive coordinator Robert Saleh a head coach means that there will be schematic continuity on that side of the ball as well.
Yes, there was some roster turnover year-over-year, but most of the team’s new, veteran players — including tight end Jordan Reed, signed Monday — have previous experience in Shanahan’s system.
So the Niners should have an advantage on at least some of their competition because the depth chart is fairly established and the vast majority should be well versed with Shanahan and Saleh’s playbooks.
I can’t imagine how stressed first-year head coach Kevin Stefanski is in Cleveland right now.
The bad news for the Niners is that 15 practices hardly seems like adequate time to integrate anything new the coaching staff wanted to install for this season. All those plans to build off of last year’s success — to take things to another level in 2020? Those need to be tempered or perhaps scrapped altogether. Like they say in every action movie, there simply isn’t enough time.
And some of the offseason roster changes and injuries have placed an outsized onus on their two first-round draft picks, defensive tackle Javon Kinlaw and wide receiver Brandon Aiyuk.
The Niners’ simple-but-effective defensive line scheme and deep rotation might give Kinlaw a chance to be up-to-speed by the time the season starts, but Shanahan’s offense puts more responsibility on wide receivers than any other scheme in the league. With Deebo Samuel’s foot fracture — his return date remains unknown — Aiyuk should be the team’s top wide receiver. He’s certainly the most talented. But can he take all of the lessons from the Niners’ online classes this summer and apply them to the field with limited reps? It has to happen, otherwise, the Niners will be relying on role players to become impact players. That’s a recipe for disappointment.
And complicating matters, San Francisco cannot afford a slow start this season. No team wants to start slow, duh, but the Niners play in the toughest division in football and open the campaign with a divisional game. While the team’s goal is to return to the Super Bowl and win it, there are steps to that process, the first of which is winning the NFC West. Week One against the Cardinals carries weight.
There’s also the issue of cutting down the team’s roster, which stands at 80 players.
There weren’t too many positional battles heading into the season — again, the Niners are an established team — but for guys on the fringes of the roster, the lack of preseason games will be difficult.
Last year Shanahan said of preseason games “I’d rather have zero than four.”
But while he might put less stock in the preseason than most coaches, it doesn’t mean that he didn’t want any exhibition action — his preference was to have two.
“What do you miss?” Shanahan said Monday of going straight into the regular season. “Evaluating running backs to me [will] be a lot harder. A lot of things, we’ve evaluated before the preseason games happen. That’s why there’s a lot that doesn’t matter out there, but it’s hard to know how good a guy’s going to break tackles until you actually see guys try to tackle. Punt returner, things like that… those will be a little harder to evaluate. We haven’t decided exactly how we’re going to do it, but we’re going to have to see that if we can’t make a decision.”
To remedy that problem, Shanahan even suggested the unthinkable for a modern-age coach like him: actual tackling in practice.
“I’ve never done tackling before, I’ve never planned on it,” Shanahan said. “Bringing guys to the ground, to me, is where guys get hurt and you want to only do that on game day, but there might be certain drills and stuff you have to set up. There’s going to be a few guys on this team where gosh, it’s neck-and-neck and it’s got to play out and as a coaching staff, we’re going to have to figure out how to put those guys in that position, which will be new for us.”
This many moving parts, this tight of a timeline to prepare for a season where you’re a Super Bowl favorite. I bet Shanahan is happy he landed that contract extension this summer.
Because if he can pull this off — if he can take the 49ers where they want to go despite these circumstances — he’ll have earned every dollar and year of that deal.