A new kind of gameday experience

As he enters his 32nd season covering 49ers football, The Niner Report’s Craig Massei has attended virtually every 49ers home game of the 21st century. But never one quite like San Francisco’s 2020 season opener against the Arizona Cardinals. Amid the fallout from historic wildfires that burned throughout Northern California, the enduring effects of the novel coronavirus pandemic and pervading issues of social justice, the game experience at Levi’s Stadium — and throughout the NFL, for that matter — promised to be uniquely different than during any other time in the team’s illustrious 75-year history. And it was. Here’s a narrative chronicling the events and atmosphere surrounding the start of the most different and strange of all 49ers seasons.

- Craig Massei

As the freeway dips down from Sunol Grade into the Silicon Valley basin, Interstate 680 is unusually devoid of traffic, even for a Sunday morning.

But that’s not what immediately grabs your attention on the way to Levi’s Stadium. It’s the ominous gray sky that seizes the senses, not because morning gray skies are unordinary in the San Francisco Bay Area, but because the composition of this sky is much out of the ordinary.

These aren’t clouds that disappear into the East Foothills. This is smoke. Thick, hazy smoke, the residual of the hundreds of wildfires that have ravaged the Northern California region and burned more than three million acres throughout the state, representing more than 3 percent of California’s entire land surface.

It’s another 25-minute drive to Levi’s Stadium, but the visibility prevents you from seeing too far ahead. The horizon is filled with the billowy smolder, the kind that has enveloped the entire region since the fires turned worse during the previous week.

The 49ers and Arizona Cardinals are going to play football in this? It’s not exactly horrible conditions, but you’ve really got to wonder.

“It’s dark out there,” 49ers quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo said. “It’s not clouds. I mean, just with the smoke and everything, and there’s the ash falling all over the place. Send best wishes to all the families out there that are dealing with it. It’s tough times.”

The 49ers practiced in it throughout the week preceding their Sept. 13 opener against the Cardinals, including the Friday before the game with an Air Quality Index just past 150, which not only gave the skies above them a surreal quality, but is deemed unhealthy for everything and everyone that breathes.