The Jock Blog is about to take a mighty two-week hiatus and won’t return until the week of August 11, leaving me with this week’s topic:
What kind of summer will the 49ers have?
The summer is not off to a rip-roaring start, as I was just saying to my good pals Trent Williams and Brandon Aiyuk as we played online Scrabble to occupy all their free time away from training camp.
A brief rundown of static interfering with the 49ers’ signal:
— Aiyuk’s ongoing contract beef, which has festered all spring and summer. We could argue about annual average value and Aiyuk’s relative worth, but the bottom line is that No. 11 has now missed two days of training camp with quarterback Brock Purdy and the offense, and we’ve seen this movie before with holdouts and hold-ins and the detrimental effect on sharpness and chemistry.
— Trent Williams newfound contract beef, which stayed out of the headlines all spring and summer, but is very real. One could make a case that Williams is the most valuable 49er of them all, with all due respect to Brock Purdy, Nick Bosa and Jake Moody when he’s lining up a PAT in the Super Bowl. So far, the signals from the 49ers and those around the building is that Williams will get the money he wants, and to be honest, a 36-year-old left tackle staying off his feet for a few days isn’t the worst thing in the world, but still . . . a leader and a titan in the locker room missing is not ideal.
— Ricky Pearsall, the first-round draft pick whose very name and position rattled the cages of Aiyuk and Deebo Samuel’s agents, is on a side field in Santa Clara nursing a hamstring injury. Like Aiyuk, he is missing valuable chemistry time and reps with Purdy, and his absence also further impedes coach Kyle Shanahan’s ability to judge just what he has in the kid outta Florida. Reports are that he will return Monday, but ‘hamstring’ are never a good word to bandy about in the NFL.
— Key defensive pieces Dre Greenlaw and Talanoa Hufanga are still rehabbing major injuries. We already knew that, but let’s add it to the pile.
Add all these ingredients to the Super Bowl Loss Hangover Stew, and it’s not how you draw it up in the lab, sports fans.
In particular, the Aiyuk and Williams cases are a stark reminder of the penthouse floor the 49ers have occupied these past few seasons, and the costs involved. The Niners are an elite team in the NFL, and it has been a blast watching John Lynch acquire Williams and Christian McCaffrey via trade, and draft Bosa and Samuel and Aiyuk and Fred Warner, and basically luck into Brock Purdy. (Hey, luck counts, as I was just saying to Beatles drummer Ringo Starr.)
The team has been on a glorious run — 48-19 in four of the last five regular seasons (forget COVID 2020), and 8-4 in the postseason that time. Latent 49ers fans and newfound 49ers fans across the nation have responded in kind, flooding visiting stadiums.
Those kinds of rosters don’t come for free.
When your roster is laden with Pro Bowlers, you have to pay a lot of Pro Bowl salary. Jed York’s wrist is sore from writing checks, and he needs to ice up and write a few more to Williams and Aiyuk before the whopper gets cut for Purdy next summer.
And the rub is, no Lombardi Trophy to show for it.
So the 49ers must pick themselves up, dust themselves off and start all over again. With a few storm clouds on the horizon.
As we used to write in the high school yearbook: Have a great summer, 49ers!