Down, but definitely not out

The San Francisco 49ers sure know how to take a punch.

- Craig Massei

Isn’t that what a champion is supposed to do?

There is no easy way to get to the top in the NFL. It’s even more difficult to remain there. When you start playing for titles and sterling silver trophies, you take everybody’s best shot. And in this strange season of COVID-19 and the unforeseen, the shots just kept coming and coming at the defending NFC champions, a combination of blows that would put most teams down for the count.

You just had to know these proud and talented 49ers would start fighting back, that they were too good and too determined and have too many places still to go not to pick themselves up off the mat.

Then again, you really had to start wondering after San Francisco’s first two-game losing streak since 2018 settled in with surely the most embarrassing and bewildering defeat of the Kyle Shanahan/John Lynch era.

It’s still a bit difficult to fathom Miami 43, San Francisco 17 in Week 5, and probably still will be as the 49ers play out the season, a season during which losses like that and the one before it against Philadelphia — both home games against losing teams that San Francisco was heavily favored to win — could hang ominously over the team’s intentions of getting back to the Super Bowl, particularly with the murderer’s-row schedule the 49ers now have ahead of them.