Bad 49ers never competitive, lack any workable foundation

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Programming note: Watch 49ers Press Conference Live today at 11:30am on CSN Bay Area, and streaming live right here.

SANTA CLARA -- The San Francisco 49ers are 2-5, and this is no longer a small-sample-size matter, because there is a more disturbing statistic that, while it is not in common use, should be.

With Thursday’s 20-3 tunnel cave-in before a Seattle Seahawks team that no longer regards the 49ers as even the lesser half of a rivalry, San Francisco is a dreadful 3-4 in games where the standard is lowered from “winning” to merely “being competitive for even a little bit,” and there is now sufficient evidence to show that it isn’t going to change much.

Head coach Jim Tomsula, who is slowly but surely turtling from the growing onslaught of pointed questions about his team’s intrinsic value, knows it as well as anyone. He speaks in defense of his roster as being “good enough to win,” and “tight,” and “working (hard)” and being “all in,” but you cannot make four blowouts in seven games look like a workable foundation.

[MAIOCCO: Instant Replay: 49ers O-line hemorrhages in loss to Seahawks]

And yes, this was a blowout, kept within reach only because Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson decided to kill a couple of likely scoring drives by playing Brett Favre. They gained an absurdly low 142 yards, the lowest output in nine years. Quarterback Colin Kaepernick was sacked six times for the second time this year, and absurdly for a quarterback with his legs, 77 times in the last 17 games, an average of 4.6 per game. They had only 21:55 of possession time for a team that wants to play ball control football.

And Tomsula, who hinted at criticism by describing this hot mess as “unacceptable” before doing the standard coaching “it starts with me,” was as close as he has come to actually ripping players in describing the offensive line, and in particular the right side of the line, which has been a barely mitigated disaster all year long.

But that’s picking at nits when your foot’s been shot off. This isn’t going to be fixed. The amusements of noticing incremental growth on defense and spikes in Kaepernick’s allegedly fragile psyche and “they got back to Anquan Boldin” one week and “they got back to Vernon Davis” the next –- those are gone, flowered hats on a moose.

Seattle was vulnerable, and the 49ers never got close. So was Green Bay three weeks ago, and the 49ers were just fooling the audience then, too. A desperate search for positives has been reduced to the far more realistic, “What practical difference does any of that mean?”

This, what you saw tonight, is a slightly worse than usual version of what they actually are. Seattle owned them when they were good, and the Seahawks’ descent into average-hood has not kept pace with San Francisco’s full-tilt plummet.

The 49ers are now a shambolic illusion of a team, with an uninspiring defense, two-fifths of an offensive line, a quarterback who has undone all the good will he amassed in his first 31 games in the past 22, and a general distaste for what the front office has wrought going back to the largely useless 2012 draft.

They didn’t figure to win Thursday -– Seattle even in its present state is a significantly better team –- but again, THEY WERE NOT COMPETITIVE AT ANY POINT. Having a chance to win only 42 percent of the time is the stuff of Jacksonville Jaguars and Detroit Lions. And this is who the 49ers are now.

What is more, the fixes won’t be completed between now and New Year’s Day, or over one off-season. There is simply too much to do to resuscitate this operation, so no matter how you prioritize the team’s problem areas, you’re at best one-fifth correct. Blame Jed York, or Trent Baalke, or Jim Tomsula, or Colin Kaepernick, or the right side of the O-line, or the stadium, or the turf, or the traffic, or the drought. It makes no difference -– everyone’s right. There’s that much to do, that much to repair.

They will win again this year, because the flashes they showed against Minnesota, the New York Giants and Baltimore won’t just go away. But those are unreliable events, too infrequent to predict or even half-heartedly expect. The San Francisco 49ers are a bad football team, a 5-11, 4-12 caliber team, three years after a Super Bowl appearance. Complicate it all you want, but this is what you see, unless you willfully refuse to do so.

And if that is the case, you’re on your own.

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