The 49ers didn’t look very good on Sunday, Trey Lance didn’t look very good on Sunday and the result was a sloppy 19-10 loss to a Chicago Bears team that isn’t supposed to sniff the playoffs.
What went wrong? Well there’s the obvious. The 49ers committed 12 penalties for 99 yards and committed two turnovers, including a backbreaking fourth quarter interception that led to a Bears touchdown on the following drive.
There was also the 49ers conservative approach on offense, specifically with Trey Lance, who was not exactly airing it out on Sunday. Former 49ers quarterback Steve Young believes that Kyle Shanahan got caught being too careful with his young QB.
“Kyle was not expansive with the game plan for Trey,” Young told Tolbert & Copes on Wednesday afternoon. “It wasn’t like here’s your coming out party. Not it was very, very careful, very reserved. Got to the 10-0 lead. At halftime Kyle probably thought to himself ‘perfection.’ Everything’s fine, let’s go close this down and then they got jammed up.
“It makes you wonder. I don’t know how you felt about Trey’s appearances last year. Not only were they few and far between, which to me if you were really grooming him you could’ve found spots for him to make more appearances. And then when he did appear, it felt like there were 15 quarterback runs. Like you never got the sense that they wanted to test the quarterback part of it.
“Let’s let the processing, the things that we have high confidence on, let’s get going. I think it was very kept. There’s no question that Kyle wants to be very, very careful here and he got caught at it. And I think he would probably admit it. ‘I wanted to be careful, get a lead, get our defense to squash ’em, and get out of town.’ And they got jammed up.”
Lance did have a chance to make things happen in a more expansive way once the 49ers fell behind, but that also coincided with a mansoon, that made throwing the ball difficult.
“He got that chance at the end with a driving rain storm, brutal conditions, he did have that opportunity to go win the game,” Young continued. “Because that didn’t happen we can hold that and say that was an opportunity, it was a tough one, I get that, but that happened. And he’ll learn from that.
“The first half, to your point, I don’t know that he got a chance to get into a groove and I got to believe that’s how Kyle wanted to roll with it and unfortunately got jammed up with it.”
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.
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