Head coach Kyle Shanahan is receiving his share of the blame for the San Francisco 49ers' offensive struggles this season. The one player receiving the brunt of the blame, though, is Jimmy Garoppolo. That's often the case with any starting quarterback. If an offense struggles, fingers will typically point toward that position.
Garoppolo struggled in the Week 3 loss against the Denver Broncos. The quarterback used his strange offseason of not practicing with the team nor attending meetings, waiting for the 49ers to trade him, as an excuse. But the offense is nothing new to Garoppolo. He was the starting quarterback during the previous four-and-a-half seasons. So fans didn't want to hear excuses for an uninspiring effort in Denver.
Shanahan acknowledges that the Week 3 performance wasn't Garoppolo's best.
"Always with the quarterback, when you struggle, he's probably going to get too much blame," Shanahan added while speaking to NBC Sports Bay Area. "I mean, just as an offense, we didn't play well at every single position, so to put that all on Jimmy, I think, is very unfair. I think it goes with the whole offense.
"There was times we had a chance to play well, but we missed that opportunity. To me, it started with everybody, with the penalties and turning it over there in the second half."
The 49ers finished the game with three turnovers compared to zero by the Broncos. That is a recipe for disaster. Yet, somehow, San Francisco lost by only one point.
"When you turn the ball over three times in the second half, and you have a safety in the second half, there's four drives [that were missed opportunities]," Shanahan said.
San Francisco looks to turn things around on Monday night against a very familiar foe—the reigning Super Bowl champion Los Angeles Rams. A 2-2 record would be much better than falling to 1-3.
"No one wants to be 1-3," Shanahan said. "I don't want to be 1-2, especially when I believe we should be 3-0, so that's the hard thing that you've got to sit with. That's what takes a couple of days to get over after a tough loss like we had last Sunday night.
"That's why I can't wait for Monday to come. We want it to get here faster because we're ready to go out there and change how we've been feeling these last seven days."
