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Fred Warner took the 49ers’ practice field at full speed, and the hoopla emitted a sonic boom.
There’ll be a tidal wave of intense speculation regarding Warner’s playing status over the next three days, before the 49ers lock horns with the Seattle Seahawks in Saturday’s divisional round playoff showdown. The rousing sights and sounds from Warner’s return to uniform — including a fiery pre-practice speech on Wednesday and the linebacker’s noticeably buoyant demeanor on the field — have only added fuel to the fire.
Left tackle Trent Williams, the 49ers’ 37-year-old sage elder statesmen, put Warner’s comeback bid from an Oct. 12 ankle fracture and dislocation into big-picture perspective.
“The fact that Fred even has a jersey on less than 100 days after what happened to him, that’s just uplifting,” Williams said at his locker on Wednesday. “Whether Fred takes the field in these playoffs or not, that’s motivation.”
Publicly, the 49ers have said for weeks now that a potential NFC Championship Game return for Warner is possible. Privately, Warner has attacked an even more ambitious timeline. He has circled this divisional round as his target date, and the superstar made sure to inform reporters that his involvement in practice this week is already defying the team’s timeline from just a few days ago.
“We’re taking it day-by-day,” Warner said. “I think they said last week that they weren’t going to open my window, and my window is now open. So we’re just taking it day-by-day.”
Warner has been buzzing in the 49ers’ locker room this week; it’s hard to spot him without a wide smile on his face these days. On Wednesday, he took that energy to the field, where the 49ers conducted a full-speed practice session following a restful Tuesday on which they held only a walk-through and just over three hours of meetings — half the usual amount.
Coach Kyle Shanahan has emphasized sleep for his team, which will have only five days between games (the Seahawks will have 13) and is playing on its third short week in four games. Since 1984, teams are 0-7 when entering a playoff game at a rest disadvantage of this magnitude.
But Shanahan did find the need to hold at least one full-speed practice session, simply because a purely restful approach failed miserably when the 49ers last played the Seahawks Jan. 3. Seattle suffocated San Francisco, 13-3, following a week in which the exhausted 49ers practiced only at walk-through speed.
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It all has the 49ers trying to walk yet another paradoxical tightrope. In need of both rest and refined practice time, they’re leaning on Warner’s return to inject pep into the entire roster’s step with the season on the line.
It’s been 94 days — or just over three months — since Warner was injured against Tampa Bay. An initial prognosis at the time of his injury came in at over four months, leading Shanahan to say Warner was done for the season. If Warner is able to return during the playoffs, the comeback will draw comparisons to those accomplished by 49ers Hall of Fame receivers Jerry Rice and Terrell Owens.
Rice tore his ACL and MCL in Week 1 of the 1997 season — also at Tampa Bay. He returned in Week 15 of that season, just about three and a half months after undergoing reconstructive surgery, and he even caught a touchdown against the Denver Broncos. But Rice did crack his patella during the return, and that shelved him for the rest of the season.
Owens, playing for the Philadelphia Eagles, broke his leg in late December 2004. He returned to catch nine passes for 122 yards in the Super Bowl seven weeks later, beating expectations of a 10-week absence.
“Those first six weeks when you’re non-weight bearing, those are all kind of the same,” Warner said. “And then after that, you can manipulate the way that you rehab going forward aggressively — safely, of course, to ultimately get back to this point.
“… It speaks to everybody that has been in my corner this entire time. The trainers, the strength staff, the plan they put together for me, helping push me along. It truly did take an army to help me to this point. God bless my wife, she was 8-9 months pregnant trying to take care of me when I was on that scooter. I’m blessed to be where I’m at.”
Warner’s wife, Sydney, gave birth to the couple’s daughter, Bella, on Jan. 4 — the day after the 49ers lost to the Seahawks to close the regular season. Since then, the 49ers beat the defending Super Bowl champion Eagles and scored new life for their own title prospects. They effectively have a mulligan against Seattle now — and a new-look defense for the daunting task ahead.
Eric Kendricks and Garret Wallow both took over linebacker positions, where Tatum Bethune and Dee Winters were injured, to great success last week. Philadelphia averaged only 4.3 yards per play against the previously struggling 49ers’ defense. Rookie safety Marques Sigle also infused a big speed upgrade into the safety position that he’d lost in October after Ji’Ayir Brown went down with a hamstring injury.
If Warner suits up Saturday, the 49ers will have four key defenders that they didn’t have Jan. 3. The Seahawks racked up 180 rushing yards on 39 carries that night. For all the offensive struggles the 49ers, it was actually a defensive failure against two very specific run plays which prevented the team from controlling any sense of game flow.
On Wednesday, 49ers defensive coordinator Robert Saleh mentioned those two plays from Seattle running backs — a 29-yard touchdown from Zach Charbonnet and a 20-yard conversion on third-and-17 from Kenneth Walker III — when outlining his blueprint for this rematch.
“We need to do better on third down, which means we need to do better on first and second down in terms of limiting the leaky yardage that we allowed,” Saleh said (the 49ers allowed the Seattle to convert 6-of-13 third downs). “It felt like after the first quarter, we settled in and played the run game very well. There were a couple of plays early, obviously the third-and-two that went for 30 yards and the third-and-17 that inflated the numbers more than we would’ve liked.
Saleh added that the 49ers were “fortunate” to give up only 13 points against Seattle.
In the days since that loss, new faces began popping up in key places on this rapidly evolving 49ers’ team. And with Warner back at practice, the team isn’t ready to close the door on the biggest potential shakeup.