It’s been an up and down season for the 49ers thus far. With an offensive play-calling whiz in Kyle Shanahan at the helm, there have been questions as to why his unit has failed to produce.
San Francisco is 20th in the league with 20.7 points per game, but the offense has been particularly quiet in the second half. The 49ers are averaging 7.6 points in the second half this season. That’s the seventh-lowest figure in the NFL.
Kyle Shanahan joined Tolbert & Copes on Thursday to discuss all things 49ers and assessed why the team has performed so poorly in the second half.
He acknowledged the team has struggled after the break, but said there isn’t “one answer to it.”
“I can go to a number of plays. I can go into number of situations,” Shanahan said. “I mean, you look at us last weekend. Our first two drives in the second half we scored on. So we went down there, had a field goal. The next drive we went down, we had a touchdown.”
After that, it was disastrous.
Shanahan pointed out that the 49ers were able to continue to move the ball downfield, but the drives all ended in turnovers.
“Our third drive we got into the minus five-yard line and ended up having a safety on third down,” Shanahan said. “Our next drive was a two-minute drill down three scores and I think we drove about 50 yards and had a fumble. The next drive was another two-minute drill. We drove it all the way to the red zone and threw a pick.
So we didn’t punt once in the second half. We had two scores and then three turnovers. So that was very bad.
So what was it? I mean, it’s not that we couldn’t move the ball. It’s not that we were going three-and-out a bunch and not functioning, it was that we didn’t get it done.”
He believes the 49ers have left a lot of points off the board in general, saying that they need to be better in the first half, too.
Their overall consistency has been lacking. That said, the head coach found cause for optimism from the offense the last two weeks.
“I think we just haven’t gotten as consistent as we need to be,” Shanahan said. “I do think we were taking a step in the right direction. Even though we lost, I thought offensively we had [improved] these last two weeks. I did feel better about it.”
The issue, though, is that he said the defense has had two of its worst performances over the last couple weeks as its nursed injuries and played uncharacteristically poor, while the offense made too many mistakes to compensate for those deficiencies.
Despite those inconsistencies, Shanahan’s 49ers will enter the bye 4-4 if they can beat the Rams on Sunday. It would leave them at 3-0 in the division.
Listen to the full interview below. You can listen to every KNBR interview on our podcast page at knbr.com/podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Catch Tolbert & Copes weekdays from 2 p.m. – 6 p.m. on KNBR 104.5 / 680 and streaming live on KNBR.com.