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Three Reasons the 49ers Won’t Return to the Super Bowl Next Season

Let's get negative.
Grant Cohn|
Three Reasons the 49ers Won’t Return to the Super Bowl Next Season
Three Reasons the 49ers Won’t Return to the Super Bowl Next Season

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San Francisco 49ers

There are reasons to believe the 49ers will return to the Super Bowl next season, but there also are reasons to believe they won't.

Here are those reasons.

1. Health.

The 49ers were about as healthy as could be this past season. They didn't suffer a major injury to their starting quarterback or their starting running back for the first time in forever, and their roster almost was at full strength going into the Super Bowl. That probably was an aberration. It's impossible to say which players will get injured, but we do know that Dre Greenlaw is coming off a torn Achilles and could miss some or all of the upcoming season. In addition, Talanoa Hufanga is coming off a torn ACL, and lots of key players are 30 or older.

2. The NFC will be better.

Last season, the 49ers clearly were the best team in the NFC, but they didn't dominate the Packers and Lions in the playoffs the way oddsmakers expected the 49ers would. The 49ers trailed for the majority of those games. Next season, both Green Bay and Detroit should be better, considering they're young teams with cap space. In addition, each of the teams in the NFC West should be better, considering the Seahawks just upgraded at head coach, and the Cardinals and Rams are rebuilding fast.

3. The schedule will be tougher.

The 49ers will have to face the Chiefs, the Bills, the Lions, the Packers, the Dolphins and the Vikings, not to mention the Rams twice and the Cowboys. That's brutal.

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Grant Cohn
GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.

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