49ers vs. Jets: Taking the team's temperature

I'm going to think of this game as a thermometer game. It's time we take the team's temperature and see where things stand.

The Jets game closes out the first quarter of the season. Football is weird like that. It feels like the season has just barely started, and we are already a full quarter of the way through. Don't get me wrong, there's still a lot of football left to play. Getting tired of football now is like the kid who holds his breath in a tunnel that is way too long for human lungs. He gets about a quarter of the way in before realizing that his wish won't come true because he can't hold his breath the whole way.

So, we need to see if the 49ers' collective faces are blue. After two huge games, the last game was clearly a letdown. But, did we lose because our lungs are gasping for air? Or, was it only a small pothole on the way to driving through that whole tunnel, breath intact?

Given the talent on this team, and particularly the coaching, I have got to believe that the 49ers are going to be just alright. But if things go wrong against the Jets - well, I won't over-react and declare that the end of the season, but that's how seasons go under in the NFL. Teams in this league cannot lose to worse teams. The season is just too short. If it happens once or twice, that's fine. But let's hope we don't even have to worry about it.

In some ways, I think this game is a turning point game. Last year, it was the Eagles game. That was the turning point of the season. If you think about it, that was probably the foundation for the rest of our success. There's a flip side of this, though. Remember that game against the Vikings a few years ago? Yeah, I just went there. I just brought that up. We were Favre'd in the most annoying way possible. That was a turning point game. Before that game, there was talk about us as playoff contenders. Well, historical spoiler alert, we didn't make the playoffs.

The differences between then and now are vast. I mean chasm-tastic. If Sunday's game is a turning point game, though, there is always that potential that it can go wrong. That's the beauty of this league. Any given Sunday, right?

Right.