If you’ve followed along with the 2025 NFL season, you might know what team I’m about to focus on here. If the conversation is about the cumulative effect of injuries on a team this year, that starts with the 49ers.
They already knew they were going to be missing Brandon Aiyuk for much of the season, and from that point have also sustained injuries to Nick Bosa, George Kittle, Fred Warner, Ben Bartch, Brock Purdy, and Ricky Pearsall, among others.
However, the subsequent return of many of these players has caused them to be surpassed in the injury accumulation department.
I don't think anyone debates that other teams have more/worse injuries. I highlighted the above line that is key in this discussion.
We have been generally healthy most of this season (a few issues early that we worked through), but it is this late rash of IR and medium-term injuries that becomes very painful right before the playoffs.
Wyatt and Parsons put a huge dent in our pass rush and DL depth (hurts the run D also).
Kraft and Fitzpatrick make our TE depth a huge risk. Assuming Whyle comes back, we still have lost our best blocking TEs and potentially our best overall receiver (Kraft).
Jenkins play was questionable before bowing out, but that still puts a worse player out there at C or G. Losing Tom (medium term) is losing our best OL, which makes shaky protection worse.
Jacobs has clearly not been himself for a while, but since he isn't on IR, that won't impact the numbers you showed.
Williams (medium term outage) has been playing our best safety all year.
Thankfully, Watson recovered. I would've put money down last week that he broke his collar bone after exiting the game.
The problem isn't so much the number of injuries, but the fact that we are getting hit with injuries to KEY players and coming at a time when they will impact the playoffs.
Would you rather be the 49ers that are getting healthy or the Packers that are dropping like flies the last few weeks?