SANTA CLARA – The 49ers have plenty of reasons for wanting to beat the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday at Levi’s Stadium.
It’s a chance for the Red and Gold to win consecutive games for the first time this season and hang onto the NFC West's top spot. It’s also an opportunity for the 49ers to move back above .500.
Payback, according to left tackle Trent Williams, shouldn’t be among those reasons.
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After practice Thursday, Williams said the 49ers will be best served by moving on from the past and focusing on the present.
“When you think about the reality of it, we can beat them by 100 [and] we’re not popping champagne, confetti’s not going to fall,” Williams explained. “It can never be an even or a payback situation, so why even carry that grudge?
“Football is 90 percent mental, 10 percent physical. If your mind is clouded with stuff that has nothing to do with Sunday, you run the risk of not being everything you want to be.”
The Chiefs obviously have had the 49ers' number in recent matchups, winning four of the last five showdowns between the two squads -- including heartbreaking losses in Super Bowl LIV and Super Bowl LVIII.
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Fans and radio sports talk shows in the Bay Area have been leaning hard into the payback/revenge theme most of this week, which is typical and not surprising.
Inside the 49ers’ facility, however, the players are trying to approach Sunday’s game as just another on the NFL schedule.
“That was the Super Bowl. Obviously we wanted to win and it didn’t go our way,” 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy said. “Now it’s 2024, a regular-season game. It’s the next opponent for us. This is the 2024 Niners going against the 2024 Chiefs.”
Make no mistake, the 49ers players still are stinging from the Super Bowl loss in overtime to the Chiefs in February.
There were multiple instances in that game in which San Francisco felt it could have taken control and captured its sixth Lombardi Trophy, only to watch the Chiefs celebrate back-to-back Super Bowl victories.
49ers tight end George Kittle said that moving on from those postseason losses is easier said than done.
“I do a pretty good job of flushing stuff. Flushing Super Bowl losses? Not the easiest thing to do,” Kittle said. “If you let stuff linger and you let stuff effect you like that, you can’t be the player that you want to be. I just try my best to tune out whatever noise is being said on the outside.
“Coach [Kyle] Shanahan had a really good team meeting the other day. It’s like, ‘you can’t live in the past. You can’t look into the future. You have to just look for the moment at what you’re in now.’ This is a different game, a lot of similar players but technically a different team. We’re a different team a little bit, too.”