The San Francisco 49ers are 5-5. They are far from out of postseason contention, but they have also missed plenty of early-season opportunities to solidify themselves atop the NFC standings and allow themselves to cruise into the playoffs. Instead, it will likely come down to Week 18.
After several close losses, it's worth wondering how the Niners could have avoided this position. NFL analyst Ben Baldwin of The Athletic shared some graphs showing each team's fourth-down tendencies so far this season and showed San Francisco has been extremely conservative.
Head coach Kyle Shanahan has always been a fairly conservative coach with most game management decisions. He has consistently passed on attempting to generate a drive late in the first half and aired away from going for it on fourth downs. However, it momentarily seemed like he was beginning to get more aggressive after Brock Purdy took over at quarterback, but he has since regressed to previous tendencies.
This year, the Niners have gone for it on fourth-down in roughly half of the situations where it improved their win probability by at least 1.5%, which ranks in the middle of the pack around the league. However, in toss-up situations, the Niners are one of just four teams who have gone for it less than 5% of the time, ranking 31st in the league.
Baldwin's model does not take into account the specific personnel on a team, which makes the projections imperfect. However, a closer look actually makes the 49ers rank even more perplexing. Given San Francisco's prevalent special teams struggles, the average gains from a punt or field-goal attempt have likely been far less than the league average. In other words, according to this model, you would expect the Niners to come in as overly aggressive since it is likely overrating the quality of the special teams group.