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What it Would Mean if the 49ers Lose the NFC Championship Game

The 49ers could beat themselves this Sunday in the NFC Championship Game.
Grant Cohn|
What it Would Mean if the 49ers Lose the NFC Championship Game
What it Would Mean if the 49ers Lose the NFC Championship Game

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San Francisco 49ers

The 49ers absolutely shouldn't lose the NFC Championship Game to the Detroit Lions.

The 49ers are seven-point favorites, and frankly that's generous for Detroit. If the 49ers play their best, they should cover that spread at home against a team that doesn't play particularly well outdoors.

But the 49ers haven't played their best since early December when they eviscerated the Eagles in Philadelphia. They just won a playoff game during which they got outplayed and outcoached for almost three quarters. And a month ago they lost to the Ravens while committing five turnovers.

Which means the 49ers could beat themselves this Sunday in the NFC Championship Game. Because they have a disturbing pattern of beating themselves in the biggest games.

Kyle Shanahan certainly has a troubling pattern of choking. Will he overthink his game plan and opening script? Will he make a mid-game adjustment or will he freeze during the crisis moment of the game like he did last year when he didn't challenge a crucial play?

If Shanahan loses to the Lions, people will begin to question how good of a coach he truly is.

Brock Purdy also has a troubling pattern of throwing interceptable passes in crucial games. Plus he has been forcing the ball downfield rather than checking down the past two months because he wants to prove he's a gunslinger. If he ignores the checkdows against the Lions and throws picks while trying to be a hero and the 49ers lose, people will question if he truly is a franchise quarterback.

Which means the 49ers have to win this game. Losing would be a freaking disaster.

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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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