Why 49ers' season-opening loss to Vikings should have been expected

So you expected what, really?

Team on the come up goes across the country, plays superior team in its home opener and performs skittishly. Kind of the way you’d figure.
 
It was this with the 49ers on Sunday in Minnesota, as they took a rudimentary but not demoralizing 24-16 beating at the hands of the Vikings in their season opener, as well as absorbing a helpful but demonstrative education on the gap between a playoff contender and a Super Bowl contender.
 
Jimmy Garoppolo got The Face roughed up a bit, throwing three interceptions and amassing a substandard 45.1 passer rating into one of the game’s best defenses. Kyle Shanahan’s ability to make a wedding meal out of chicken nuggets failed in the face of missing his best running back (Jerick McKinnon) and wide receiver (Marquise Goodwin, who injured his quad muscle early and did not return).
 
The defense, still early in what coaches like to call The Process, found the conundrum of Adam Thielen one problem too many. The 49ers didn’t force turnovers, but they did demand six punts from the Vikings’ Matt Wile, so if nothing else, they weren’t boat-raced as they have been in the past.
 
And the kicking game (Robbie Gould) was the dominant offensive feature of the day, as is typical of the franchise in this decade.
 
In short, the 49ers looked like what they have been the past several years, only with a better sense of themselves. They were not confused or dispirited -- they just weren’t good enough, and everyone knew that when the schedule came out in April. The Vikings are baddasses. The 49ers are trying to learn how to be.
 
So yes, they did what you would expect them to do if you see them with a clear eye. This was a game in which they learned what can and cannot be done against a very good team, and they found out why people see them as a coin-flip team -- hovering between 7-9 and 9-7 but not yet a budding power.
 
And even then, that assessment is more guess than work.
 
Week 1 typically is full of false positives and negatives (see Bucs-Saints for pure improbables and the Ravens scoring 47 points as an absurdity). Week 2 gives a better sense of who’s who and what’s what, and Week 3 separates most of the wheat from most of the sleet (and yes, we changed a consonant due to family considerations).
 
But the 49ers didn’t do anything that aggressively altered the world view of them Sunday. Garoppolo was not going to go undefeated forever. The defense was better, though not yet impactful. And Gould is going to be the most dynamic 49ers offensive player for awhile yet.
 
As. Expected.
 
The loss of Goodwin, though, is the one wild card. He was Garoppolo’s most reliable receiver last season and figured to be so again through the early part of this year. Also, Pierre Garcon’s first touch Sunday featured him coming off the field with a hip issue (he did come back), so without Goodwin as well as McKinnon, the 49ers' offense simply might not have enough weapons to make Garoppolo’s ascent toward Canton quite the cakewalk the true believers wish it to be.
 
But that won’t be known until Goodwin’s condition is assessed more completely, a better sense of what the Lions do and what adjustments the 49ers can make to widen their portfolio. The game was what you thought it would be, and the season still is a million miles long.
 
That will change soon, one way or another. I’d give it at least two more weeks if I were you.