Pierre Garçon's injury the perfect metaphor for 49ers' season

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You may choose which sin you think the San Francisco 49ers are paying for this time, but the team just announced that wide receiver Pierre Garcon is going to undergo season-ending neck surgery and is being placed on the team’s injured reserve list.
 
Garcon, the team’s leading receiver in this lost season (40 catches in 67 targets for 500 yards and no scores), originally incurred the injury during the 33-10 loss to Philadelphia, on a 13-yard completion with 1:17 left in the first half. He returned briefly in the third quarter for one final incompletion, and then was shelved.
 
As metaphors go for the year, this will do as well as any.
 
Indeed, Garcon may have provided it himself when he said after the game, “You learn a lot by losing. When you’re winning you think you’re on top of the world, but you learn a lot more from losing.”
 
What the 49ers have learned, though, is that teams that lose are also teams that lose players. Indeed, when new quarterback/designated savior Jimmy Garoppolo is handed the keys in one, two or four weeks, he will find just how bereft his new huddle is of healthy and productive players.
 
Garcon signed a five-year deal before this season that can be undone after next year, so the neck problem is not contractually career-ending. It is still one more ways in which the new 49ers still have much of the old 49ers to shed before they can course-correct.
 
And Garcon, one of the few productive 49ers, will be noticed for his absence – this week against Arizona, next week against the New York Giants and throughout the rest of this forlorn year.
 
But as the bad luck continues to pile up for this already underclubbed team, he may end up as merely one more line in a litany of reasons why a bad team freefell to the top echelon on next year’s draft.

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