If you want to make a 49ers fan’s blood pressure spike like the temperatures in the Bay this week, you don’t talk about Brock Purdy’s contract, Kyle Shanahan‘s clock-management, or the team’s errant trade for Trey Lance.
No, you say two simple, powerful, and seemingly maddening words:
“Offensive line.”
It’s the part of football that is, for most fans, a complete mystery — a series of grunts and shoves and bodies piling up. The secrets of a zone run or a pass-pro slide are known only to a crazy few with bad backs, oversized t-shirts, dirt under their mangled fingernails, and a permanent dent on their foreheads.
Yet even a 5-foot-5, 150-pound pencil pusher understands that a bad offensive line is an incurable disease for a football team.
Despite that, for years, the Niners have treated