SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The San Francisco 49ers finally had their lone open date of the NFL’s 2025 regular season last weekend, and coach Kyle Shanahan heard plenty from friends and family about the prime position in which his team sits entering the stretch run toward the playoffs.

Despite a string of injuries, the 49ers (9-4) head into the final four guaranteed games on their schedule looking to return to the postseason for the fourth straight year, perhaps win a third straight NFC West Division title, maybe even earn the conference’s No. 1 seed — and a first-round bye — with some outside help.

Shanahan has no interest in thinking about any of that. His only concern right now is preparing for rookie quarterback Cam Ward and the Tennessee Titans (2-11), who will visit Levi’s Stadium on Sunday.

“Everyone tries to talk with me, and then I usually snap at them,” Shanahan said. “You can just as easily lose four games in a row as win four games in a row. I mean, four games are a long ways away, and there are a lot of things that can happen.”

The first hurdle in the closing stretch is one of the league’s bottom dwellers in the Titans, who sit in the cellar of an otherwise competitive AFC South. Tennessee is coming off its second win of the season after holding off the host Cleveland Browns — a fellow also-ran — last weekend and now relishes the chance to play spoiler against a contender.

“This is a good football team. They’re still trying to win their division,” said Titans defensive tackle Jeffery Simmons, a three-time Pro Bowl selection and one of the longest-tenured players on Tennessee’s roster in his seventh pro season. “So what better feeling to go up there to kill some dreams?”

The Titans haven’t won back-to-back games since November 2022, but interim coach Mike McCoy hopes the formula that was successful in the 31-29 win at Cleveland can carry over in California.

McCoy showed the players video clips Wednesday of complementary football with turnovers, blocked kicks and other key moments. The Titans made those kind of plays against the AFC North’s Browns while ending a seven-game skid. Tennessee has started five rookies in four games this season, with a total of 11 hitting the field last Sunday, and Ward has started all 13 games so far while throwing all 440 passes attempted by the Titans this season.

“It’s key for these young guys to understand in the business, you’ve got to start stacking wins as you go, and it’s week after week,” said McCoy, who is 1-6 since taking charge after Brian Callahan was fired early in his second season as head coach in Nashville.

“There’s always things you’re going to do to play better from the week before. There’s plenty of mistakes we made in the game you’ve got to clean up, but it’s important for these guys just to understand the importance of every week, and you’ve just got to build off the momentum you have one week to the other. Because it’s all about winning.”

The Titans have not won consecutive games since 2022, when they beat the Denver Broncos on Nov. 13 then defeated the Green Bay Packers four days later. The Titans are 11-41 since then.

They got their first win this season with lots of help from the mistake-prone Arizona Cardinals to pull out a 22-21 victory on Oct. 5, then followed that up with a 20-10 loss to the Las Vegas Raiders. Callahan was fired the next day.

“That’s the harder part about playing in this league is stacking wins, not having that, I guess, (feeling of) being comfortable with winning one game,” Simmons said.

Ward, the No. 1 pick of this year’s draft, will become the first rookie to start 14 games in a season for the Titans on Sunday, breaking a tie with Vince Young, who started 13 in 2006. The quarterback praised for his work ethic and burning desire to be great hasn’t seemed very happy with getting his second victory as a pro, and the Titans having to hold on after leading 31-17 in the fourth quarter is a big reason why.

Ward said he could see his mistakes while watching replays on the tablet on the sideline in Cleveland.

“There’s a way to win games, there’s a way to finish out games,” Ward said. “There’s a standard that you’ve got to play with every game to give yourself the best situation to win. But the biggest thing is you’ve got to expect to win every time you step on the field.”

Meanwhile, three-time Pro Bowl running back Christian McCaffrey has been putting up big numbers all season for the 49ers, but the touchdowns have really started to add up of late for the 29-year-old.

McCaffrey ranks fourth in the league with 13 touchdowns, with 10 of those coming in the past eight games. All of McCaffrey’s touchdowns have come in the red zone — one shy of Indianapolis Colts running back Jonathan Taylor’s NFL-leading total in that category — with nine of them coming from the 5-yard line or closer.

That has helped San Francisco rank No. 1 in the league over the past nine weeks by scoring touchdowns on 75.8% of its drives inside the 20-yard line.

“He’s always had a nose for the end zone,” 49ers left tackle Trent Williams said. “He’s always found a way to get in the end zone. He’s enabled the offensive coordinators to be able to do a large array of things with him and put him in different spots and get him in mismatches. That helps him a lot to get high touchdown numbers.”