The loss and probably last-place finish in the division does give them an easy schedule. On paper.
Last week we asked about silver linings in the 49er’s frustratingly disappointing 2024 season. Even then, there must be some positives after the consequences of their Friday night loss to the Los Angeles Rams.
One of them is the schedule. If the 49ers’ last-place position holds up for the remainder of the season, they would get the last-place schedule—on paper, anyway.
There’s still a lot of football to be played, and we do not want them to actively start losing for either this or a better draft pick. That is not a culture you want on a football team.
But we are fans. Once we are done with “The Quest for Pick No. 6” and back to the regularly scheduled “Quest for Six,” there’s the matter of the schedule. If things hold up, the 49ers will get the last-place schedule for 2025.
To get more detailed, per Pro Football Reference, if the season ended today, the 49ers would have their two-game series against their NFC West opponents along with:
- Atlanta Falcons
- Carolina Panthers
- New Orleans Saints
- Tampa Bay Buccaneers
- Indianapolis Colts
- Houston Texans
- Jacksonville Jaguars
- Tennessee Titans
Then, there is one opponent from the NFC North, NFC East, and AFC North each.
The 49ers have capitalized on this in the Kyle Shanahan era. If you remember, in 2018, Jimmy Garoppolo was lost for the season due to a knee injury in Week 3. This thrust the 49ers into a race for the first pick in the 2019 draft. That following season, they snagged the first seed in the NFC and went all the way to the Super Bowl.
So that’s “easier.” I put that in quotes because you never know how good a team is the following season until about Week 3 or Week 4. And it’s not like the 49ers get all the subpar teams from the year before. Some teams, like the Texans, might be coming off a postseason run in 2023.
You also have to consider the NFL’s love of scheduling the 49ers twice for the Thursday Night Football gauntlet, hurting them in the rest differential metric department—something the 49ers have been slapped with for two consecutive seasons. People are talking about it a bit more after some other quarterback on another team admitted he didn’t like playing games on short rest. There’s also the travel distance, something the 49ers are often among the worst beneficiaries of.
In any case, we’ll gladly take something more manageable than the current Dark Souls-like difficulty of the Buffalo Bills, Kansas City Chiefs, Detroit Lions, and others.
Of course, the 49ers could always win out, the Arizona Cardinals could lock up last place, and all of this is irrelevant. And considering the Cardinals were the ones who stood in the way of the 49ers getting the first pick in the 2019 draft (the 49ers were only one of two teams they beat that year), that seems rather fitting to happen now.
But it’s important to stress that winning is better in the long run. Forget schedules, draft picks, and all that. You want the 49ers to keep winning (well, smart winning, don’t injure your best players) because that’s the culture of that team.
But as a fan! Yes, give us the “easy” mode.