San Francisco 49ers: Stacking up the wide receiver groups in the NFC West
By Kevin Saito
The San Francisco 49ers have done a pretty good job reloading a talent-bare team and making it competitive – how do they stack up against the rest of the NFC West though?
When John Lynch and Kyle Shanahan became the San Francisco 49ers new brain trust, they were tasked with a Herculean job – take this once proud franchise out of the gutter, turn it around, and make it great again.
From Jim Harbaugh, to Jim Tomsula, to Chip Kelly, to Trent Baalke, and to Jed York himself, the 49ers fell from grace and fell hard. They were no longer the “gold standard,” other organizations aspired to emulate. They simply became Team Upheaval and Drama and were run about as poorly as the Cleveland Browns have been run for time out of mind.
But, things are changing. Slowly, but surely, Lynch and Shanahan are instilling a new culture and changing San Francisco’s fortunes. You could sense a real change starting to take hold with that five-game winning streak that closed out the 2017 season.
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Under the steadying hand of Lynch and Shanahan, the 49ers seem like a team that’s far more settled. A team that’s far more at peace. And a team that can finally exhale, get away from the drama and turmoil that plagued it for several seasons, and focus on football.
Focus on getting back to winning games and competing for championships.
The hill ahead of them is steep though, and there is still a lot of work to be done. This is a team that still has plenty of weak links that will need to be addressed and fortified before they can be considered legitimate title threats.
But, things are starting to turn in the right direction.
As we all know, the best way to the playoffs is by winning your division. But, given the way the Rams have loaded up over the last couple of years – this offseason in particular – it’s going to be a tall order.
One the 49ers may not be ready to fill just yet – but, football is a funny game. On paper, the Rams look almost unbeatable. On the field though, we won’t know how it all works out until we see it all work out.
In this series of articles, we’re going to take a look at how the 49ers stack up with the rest of the NFC West by position group, staring with the division’s wide receivers.