The 49ers’ losing streak hit three games with Sunday’s loss to the Bengals and their change of fortune after a 5-0 start comes with the trade deadline rapidly approaching.
The deadline is Tuesday at 4 p.m. ET, so there’s not much time to reach out for a similar lifeline to last year’s deal for Christian McCaffrey. According to head coach Kyle Shanahan, there also isn’t the same desire to shake things up this time around.
Shanahan said in his postgame press conference that the loss to the Bengals isn’t going to increase the urgency for a trade because “I truly believe we do have the answers.”
“No, none of this changes anything with the trade deadline, how we played today, or how we played these last three weeks,” Shanahan said, via 49ersWebzone.com. “When you sit and you watch tape, when it’s out there on the field, and I know how these last two weeks, especially, I felt, but I do believe we have the answers in our building. I believe we have good players. I believe we have good coaches. It’s up to me to get them to do better. I thought we started out pretty good, but there’s some things that we haven’t been able to hide here in these last few weeks. And that’s why we’ve got to continue to push them in every aspect because some people do go on these losing streaks, and they don’t have those answers, and you’re just living in hope.”
We’ll find out over the next two days if Shanahan was being honest about the team’s view of the deadline, but we’ll have to wait until Week 10 to see the 49ers take the field again because they have a bye week to use in a bid to figure out a better way forward.