The 49ers got their 2014 season off to a winning start on Sunday with a 28-17 win over the Cowboys, allowing them a chance to smile after an offseason that didn’t offer much reason for happiness.
There were suspensions and arrests to go with offensive struggles in the preseason. There’s also been persistent speculation about coach Jim Harbaugh’s future in San Francisco that culminated with a Sunday morning report from Ian Rapoport of NFL Media that the coach was losing the locker room.
Harbaugh said after the game that he doesn’t “trust the report” because he believes his players would come to him if there were those kinds of problems within the team. He went on to praise his players for focusing on the game in spite of all the other things going on with the team.
“It’s very encouraging. There’s been a lot of rhetoric on a lot of different topics. And a lot of opinion,” Harbaugh said, via the San Jose Mercury News. “I think this game was about steel in the spine and when it comes to 49ers players, that’s where they excel. They’ve got titanium in the spine.”
All of the other noise isn’t likely to go away, especially with defensive tackle Ray McDonald’s domestic violence arrest likely to be spotlighted by the release of the tape of Ray Rice knocking out his wife in an Atlantic City elevator pushing the topic back into the forefront. The 49ers showed Sunday that they can block the noise when it comes time to take the field, though, and that should slow some of the gloomiest predictions for their 2014 results.