John Lynch and Kyle Shanahan Explain the 49ers Injury Problem
More than anything, injuries ruined the 49ers 2020 season.
Of course, some of the injuries weren't the 49ers' fault. But they still have to find a way to reduce the injuries next season, because the 49ers were the most decimated team in the NFL in 2020. They must find a solution.
On Monday, I asked general manager John Lynch and head coach Kyle Shanahan what they can do to fix the issue. Both men gave long, detailed, generous answers, and I appreciate them.
Here's what they said:
ME: John, you said that you will have meetings this offseason to determine what if anything you can do to reduce the injuries and make sure this doesn't happen again. I understand there's been lots of bad luck and strange circumstances with a global pandemic, but do you have any initial thoughts of what can be done to prevent a season like this from happening again?
LYNCH: "It's a good question, Grant. I do think a lot of it is league-wide, but I think the question goes more to why was ours inordinately high? We're going to look for those same answers. We're going to look at everything. Now, it's not a departure from what we always do. We ask every department to take a hard look at themselves compared to the league, evaluate your staff, what can we do better? I do think there's a lot of things we do well. Our guys perform well and we give them a lot of vehicles to keep their bodies in tip-top shape. We give them gurus. There's a lot we offer. We're really proud of that.
"I don't have the answers. I gave you one theory -- I thought we got behind the 8-ball, because we got some guys that came in injured, and some of those guys didn't come back when they were supposed to. And that takes a toll on a roster. When you lose starters, all of a sudden the backups who were special teams players are now starting and playing special teams. Everybody's load goes up. You try to deal with that as best as you can. I just feel like we got behind early and never caught up. We kept saying, 'As soon as we start losing guys, we'll start getting guys back.' The problem is we never stopped losing guys. It was relentless this year, as were a lot of things."
SHANAHAN: "Whoever gives you a simple answer on that is just trying to come up with a simple answer. But there isn't one. It incorporates everything, and whatever your answer might be one year, it might not be it the next. I go with my own experiences -- how you practice reps-wise, how hard you do it, all that stuff, in season, out of season -- and I have a lot of opinions. Sometimes my opinion has been right on, and the next year it's completely contradicted. It's just random.
"And then you look into the type of players you have, the type of guys who bring in. Did you take too many risks that added up? You look at your training staff, your strength-and-conditioning program. All that stuff goes into what we discuss every year. The difference this year is how much do you want to incorporate that we did something that no one does have experience with? How are we going to talk about and factor in that we didn't do one thing throughout the offseason, and then we went to basically a two-week training camp? Because there were 14 days when we did not practice. We just walked through and talked.
"And then when we did have that 14-day training camp, some guys were on P.U.P. some guys had a tweak within the first four days which usually happens, and you shut them down. So half the guys only got four days of training camp. And you're trying to get everybody ready for an NFL game, so do you keep going through training camp or do you shut them down and get them ready for that game? Probably shut them down and get them ready for that game.
"Which means they're going to get hurt eventually because they're not ready to play. That's a fact. That's what the whole league had to deal with. That's why the whole league got hurt. We had more than the whole league, so it can't just be that. But it's also not just because John missed going to church a couple times. We don't have a good answer, but I promise you we will do everything we can to make it better in every area."
