The 49ers Finally have Reestablished their Standard

The 49ers don't merely win anymore. They annihilate teams.

And then after the annihilation, the 49ers players and coaches walk to the podium and calmly talk about living up to the standard they set for themselves. This is new.

The 49ers never talked about a standard during the first six years of the Kyle Shanahan Era when Jimmy Garoppolo was the quarterback. Maybe that's because Garoppolo didn't have high standards. Brock Purdy sure does, and the rest of the team does now, too.

Here's what former San Francisco Chronicle columnist Lowell Cohn had to say about the importance of a standard for the 49ers.

LC: "When I covered Bill Walsh when he was the head coach winning three Super Bowls, he would talk to the team and to the media, and he used the word 'standard' all the time. And it meant, 'We are the 49ers. We don't care who we play, we play to our standard. And if we play to our standard and behave to our standard, we will win.' What happened was you would go into the locker room, and Ronnie Lott would say, 'You know, in this game, I'm not thinking about Cleveland, I'm thinking about my standard.' And Steve Young said it all the time. He had a standard to live up to. There was Joe. There was Bill. There's the 49ers. In addition, in the locker room there were standard enforcers. If they felt a player was not playing to his standard or was not behaving to the standard, Ronnie, Steve, Harris Barton and others would say, 'This is not how a 49er plays or acts.' In order to be an elite, championship team, you have to have internalized that standard. So when I hear them talking about the standard this season, I feel they've finally arrived at the doorstep of a championship team. Because it's that important."