Why the 49ers Loss to the Philadelphia Eagles was so Meaningful

If the 49ers can't beat the Philadelphia Eagles, who the hell can they beat?
Of course, the 49ers can beat those two New Jersey teams. But those two teams are the absolute worst.
We know the 49ers couldn't beat the Arizona Cardinals at home when Jimmy Garoppolo, Nick Bosa, Dee Ford, Richard Sherman, Emmanuel Moseley, Dre Greenlaw and Raheem Mostert were healthy. Sure, the 49ers had lots of injuries against the Eagles. But the Eagles had lots of injuries, too. And the Eagles essentially have one player on offense -- their quarterback, Carson Wentz. They got beat by one player on offense. And Week 1, they got beat by two players on offense -- Kyler Murray and DeAndre Hopkins.
That's very bad.
The loss to the Eagles is tremendously meaningful in a negative way. And I'm not trying to be negative -- I'm trying to be honest and realistic. And I'm saying this: Who the hell can the 49ers beat? If Sunday night's game were boxing match, it would have been a contender losing to a bum. The 49ers are a contender and they lost to a bum. So you have to say, "How good is that boxer?"
Or in this case, how good is this football team?
The team that we thought the 49ers should be would have won all four games despite the injuries. But now what we're learning maybe they're not the team we thought they are. Maybe a 2-2 record is appropriate. You can't say they're 2-2 but they're really a 4-0 team. No, they're 2-2 and they lost to one mediocre team and one horrible team.
Which leads me to my final question: Who the hell are these 49ers?

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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