Rain poured inevitably in Chicago this Sunday. First as revenge on the Chicago Bears for relaying their game field with a brand of ‘Bermuda grass’ they said would be more robust in adverse weather than the bumpy divot ridden bog that was there last week. The city’s gridironers keep promise-threatening to build a new arena, with a roof, because famously bears love being indoors. For now a new playing surface installed a week before first use would have to do. Ten minutes before kick-off for the season’s opening match, the workers were hastily repainting sidelines that had melted wonkily in the rain. There it was, a metaphor for the Chicago Bears and their turf troubles.

Their visitors, the San Francisco 49ers, could claim that rain as a pathetic fallacy all of their own. Leeds United’s kissing cousins have been through an off-season soap opera about want-away superstars and lines of succession, turning it Shakespearean just in time for the new season. The torrential rain beating down on the helmet of young starting quarterback Trey Lance was his welcome to a season observers think could derail if a tilt at the Super Bowl becomes backstabbing drama, but the 49ers offices, either front or back or maybe both, think everything will be fine because they’re all fine guys. “You know, I love our team right now,” said head coach Kyle Shanahan, at the start of the pre-season camp.

I wonder if Jesse Marsch had made a note of that before he tried stamping on transfer talk in Leeds with the same, “I love our team and that’s not changing” line. Shanahan was trying to get a message out in the middle of negotiations, in this case for the self-dubbed “wide-back” star and my favourite player on the four dash nines, Deebo Samuel. I feared the worst back in spring when Deebo edited his Instagram account, deleting eighty photos, changing his profile picture out of 49ers uniform to neutral, unfollowing the team account and removing their name from his bio. This always happens! Back in 2012, when Luciano Becchio was the last exciting player Leeds had left, I resolved to do all my writing about only him and he repaid me with nineteen goals. Then Neil Warnock swapped him for Steve Morison in January. Massimo Cellino pushed Ross McCormack away, Steve Evans squeezed out Jordan Botaka for the simple crime of being too much fun to watch. Watching Deebo Samuel’s distinctive twisting through opposition defences last season, during the Niners’ unlikely surge into post-season, plugged me into one delightful, understandable buzz in this hard to understand sport, when I was trying to understand it because some of these guys could be running our club one day. Then came his contract negotiations and an Instagram washout.

Happier news came just under a month later when Deebo re-followed the 49ers, and Instagram peace was followed by a new contract at the start of training camp, negotiated by Leeds United’s vice-chairman Paraag Marathe. This deal had to satisfy one of the most skilful athletes in the NFL ahead of his peak years, while keeping the 49ers within their salary cap restrictions. While reading about the intricacies of the eventual contract I’ve been coming up against paragraphs like this:

Chief negotiator Paraag Marathe was again the architect of this contract … There’s a signing bonus worth just north of $24 million (highlighted in blue [in a graphic] above in the PRTD SB column) — its cap hit is spread evenly over the life of the entire contract, including a void year in 2026 designed to stretch the hits out as far as possible. There’s then a fully guaranteed $9.2 million option bonus (highlighted in green above in the OPT BON column), which doesn’t kick in until 2023 but is amortized just like the signing bonus after that.

Right. Yes. Very clear. I wonder if Leeds United’s failure to sign Kalvin Phillips to a new contract last season was because Paraag got involved and Kalvin and his agent Kevin Sharp got their minds blown. Anyway, long story short, Deebo’s staying, everybody’s happy, especially me.

The plan now is for everyone to be just as happy about Jimmy Garappolo staying, or at least pretend to be. To catch this up: Jimmy Garappolo has been 49ers quarterback since 2017. Injuries have hampered him, as has — if you believe the haters — not being very good. Before the 2021 season, the 49ers bet all their future on his replacement, Trey Lance, giving away trading rights for loads of great players to make sure they got just him. Then coach Shanahan stuck with Garappolo anyway while he stank out the first half of the season, and just when calls to drop the duff yet handsome old guy — let’s call him ‘Rodrigo’ — and play the cool young kid — we could dub him ‘Joffy’ — were at their loudest, ol’ good looking hit form. The 49ers ended up, slightly confused, as beaten NFC Championship finalists, one win short of the Super Bowl. Garappolo took plaudits for the successes, although it was his screw-up on a vital play that helped end the season, and his San Francisco career.

When training camp was starting for this season Shanahan told the press that, at quarterback, “We have moved on to Trey.” They expected to trade Garappolo, and would have already if he hadn’t taken himself off for shoulder surgery. One of the NFL’s quirks is that quarterback is the most important position and, because of the crunch of paying that person astronomically within the salary cap, the backup is usually a low-salaried nobody. Ego, too, dictates that quarterbacks who are good enough to start are too good to be backup, while the franchise should show total faith in its choice as starter — creating competition for the shirt can be read as doubting the first choice. The job has symbolic implications. Lance’s teammate, Trent Williams, described Trey as being handed “the keys to the organisation”. He’s in charge. He’s 22 years old.

But the old boss, who will be 31 in November, never quite went away. He was at camp but on his own, not given a playbook or working with the team or involved in plans for the new season. He was just there, in a field, throwing the old pigskin, presumably getting that shoulder ready for a new team. Then the 49ers announced Garappolo was taking a big pay cut and, while the organisation was moving on to Trey Lance, it wasn’t giving up on Jimmy Garappolo yet. Even from a distance he was almost gruesomely pretty, and now he was looming up on Trey, a chiselled visage in the mirror that was closer than it appeared.

“It’s good to have him back in the building, the QB room again,” Trey Lance insisted as reporters gathered, fascinated, sniffing for tension. “Man, like I’ve said, he’s been a big brother to me since my first day in the league, since the day I got drafted. I know he’s got my back; I’ve got his back. And I’m excited to go through this year with him.”

Jimmy G was also sounding upbeat. “Me and Trey, honestly, I know a lot of stuff gets made in the media and shit like that, but we have a good relationship, man,” he said. “Everyone can say what they want and everything, but we went through it last year. It was very similar to this situation. It’s not like we haven’t done it before.”

That right there is the key for the 49ers. This is an unusual situation for any club, but the Niners are down with it because they did it all last year, albeit the other way around. Nobody stabbed anybody’s back! These are fine young men! Coach Shanahan loves this team! Trey backed Jimmy last year, now Jimmy’s gonna back Trey. There’s no reason why this should cause drama in the locker room. Sports Illustrated did edit its insider’s report that ‘Lance was a little annoyed in the immediate aftermath’ to read ‘I’d heard the news was, as you’d expect, a little complicated for Lance to take at first’, but that was definitely not a sign that anybody is quietly seething or feeling threatened. No threatened seething to be found here!

What will cause drama, though, is more games like Sunday’s opener, a 19-10 loss to the Bears on their rainy, puddle-strewn field, that plunged young Trey into self-analysing his first start after being given the keys to the castle.

“I made too many mistakes,” he said afterwards. “The defence kept us in the game. Had a big miss to Tyler Kroft in the end zone. I tried to throw a perfect ball, should’ve put it right on him, he was wide-open. Turned the ball over. Took a sack that knocked us out of field goal range that I shouldn’t have. Missed Deebo [Samuel] on third down. Missed another third down to Jauan [Jennings]. Just too many mistakes. A lot of stuff, for sure, to clean up for me. But man, excited. Still got my head up. Excited to get ready to go next week.”

The 49ers have a strong, cool roster. There are plenty of good players and, after the second half of last season, with Deebo renewed, the club is and should be thinking about going to a Super Bowl this year and winning it. All the statistical analyses of their team puts them among the favourites. Until, that is, you hit Trey Lance, the most important guy in the building, for whom there’s either not enough data to judge him, or enough data to condemn him out the gate, depending on how charitable you feel. Lance is mobile with the ball in his hand. They say he’s got great football intelligence. The problem most people see with him is that he can’t throw accurately, or at least, hasn’t thrown enough ball to look like he can. In three college seasons at North Dakota State, Lance only attempted 318 passes in total. (They count these things very carefully in gridiron.) Garoppolo attempted 515 just last season. Illan Meslier attempted nearly 1,100 passes in each of the last two seasons. That’s not even relevant, I’m just saying it. Meslier averages 386 throws a season, by the way. No touchdowns.

The 49ers accept that Lance is going to have to learn on the job and publicly they’re being excited about it. “I feel really good about what I think we have,” general manager John Lynch says about Lance. “But the answer is I don’t even know, because he hasn’t gone out there and done it as ‘the guy.’ We’re all sitting back and waiting. We think we have a real good idea of what we have in Trey, but everything else is just talk.”

And between every known-unknown of Trey Lance one can see Jimmy Garappolo peering, his all-star eyes flashing, the cut-stone chin just visible. The problem with being patient while Trey Lance learns how to be ‘the guy’ is that the other guys are so good, they need this guy to get them to the Super Bowl in his first season as starter. But if he can’t? Jimmy is waiting on the bench to step in, either to get the job done, or make an even worse mess of it, depending who you ask. (He is like Marmite to 49ers fans.) Either way, he is waiting, and that either helps Trey Lance relax by giving him a safety net, or increases the pressure by haunting him. ‘It’s just one of 17 regular-season games,’ wrote The Athletic’s 49ers reporter Tim Kawakami, in a positive piece about Lance owning his mistakes, maturely, against the Bears. ‘There is no way he’s anywhere close to getting benched for this.’ And yet Kawakami still feels the need to address that hypothetical benching, because it is in the air already, after one game. And it will be in the air all season, which will be exciting if you live for drama.

10-0 up at the start of the third quarter, Lance must have thought he’d got this. He could put his mistakes in a victor’s context, take the win, get back to training, assert his rights ahead of Jimmy G. Then the storm came back to Soldier Field, and by the end the TV companies were having to overlay lines for viewers to see what was going on. Lance could see it: he could see an important win slipping away from him and, at full-time, the Bears splashing gleefully belly-first into standing pools, as if their namesakes in nature had found a new watering hole to play in.

Football is fun pic.twitter.com/Yc9RZwUajw

— Chicago Bears (@ChicagoBears) September 11, 2022

The drama in the weird, rain-soaked opener was actually provided by one of these Bears. They could have won by a few points more, but as Trenton Gill got ready to kick for a field goal, he was given a big telling off for ‘unsportsmanlike conduct’ and told to move the ball fifteen yards back, out of range of the posts. His crime? Bringing a towel on the field to dry the patch of grass he was planning to kick from. He could have used a towel to dry his hands then used those hands to dry the grass, but for towel to meet grass was strictly forbidden. It’s a strange sport, in many ways. ⬢