Kyle Shanahan Says the 49ers Didn't Get Worse This Offseason

Unless the 49ers trade Brandon Aiyuk or Deebo Samuel before the season starts, their roster is essentially set for 2024. Is it better or worse than last year?

Shanahan gave an interesting answer to the question after the draft.

"I think when you get close to a Super Bowl and you don't win it, I think there's always more pressure," Shanahan said. "Especially from outside in because you're going to hear about it more. So I think everyone has a certain expectation for the season and things like that because you always want to do better the next year and there's not a lot of room to do better. There's only one more game. And so like everyone wants to get their mind to that spot. But every team's different each year too. And so you go into a year and the main thing is you don't want to get worse. You always try to get better, but you don't want to get worse. And when you do have players that have played a lot of good football over these last three to five years, it becomes a problem because you’ve got to pay guys and it's harder to keep carrying that. And that's why we went in a free agency like you have to make a lot of hard decisions, but we're not ready to take two steps back so eventually we can take three steps forward or however that is, but you don't know if that's possible. So you try to make your free agent decisions that way. You try to do the Draft that way. And I feel we're in a position that hopefully I don't think we did get worse. I think we've tried to keep it to where we're there."

TRANSLATION: It's almost impossible for the 49ers to be better than they were last season, so their goal this offseason was to not get worse, and Shanahan hopes they accomplished that.

Maybe on paper the 49ers aren't worse than they were last season, although the losses of Arik Armstead and Dre Greenlaw could hurt them. But they certainly aren't better than they were last season, and teams either get better or worse. They never stay the same.

While the 49ers tried their best to maintain, other teams got better, teams such as the Lions, the Eagles, the Packers, the Rams, the Cardinals and the Chiefs. Which means the 49ers back slid relative to their competition.

They should have tried to get better.