SANTA CLARA – Deebo Samuel marveled at Steph Curry and the Warriors as he sat courtside Tuesday night with fellow 49ers wide receiver Ricky Pearsall at Chase Center.
“That game was lit up, like I was at a football game, for real,” Samuel said. “The crowd was loud, intense. Curry put the nail in the coffin at the end. It was a great game, for sure.”
Two days earlier, Samuel and the 49ers survived their own late-game theatrics. Samuel’s passion to win boiled over into a sideline spat with long snapper Taybor Pepper, who rushed to Jake Moody’s defense after a third missed field goal – and before Moody’s winning kick in a 23-20 walkoff in Tampa.
“We’re all one in here. We have each other’s back, no matter who it is,” Samuel added in cliché fashion at his locker Wednesday. “That’s the culture John (Lynch) and Kyle (Shanahan) built and what we feed off.”
Samuel, neither in his press conference nor his own podcast, did not relive nor expand on Sunday’s late-game confrontation. After all, he was not exiled nor suspended for his swipe at Pepper’s neck.
Shanahan did not condone that move, but he also has Samuel’s back for reasons other than to avoid more chaos: Samuel’s intimidating presence may be the best thing he has going for him as a sixth-year veteran.
He’s essentially become a boom-or-bust player. It can be a love-hate look whenever the 49ers force him the ball.
They’d love to see more touchdowns, and his only scoring catch came on a 76-yarder last month against the Seattle Seahawks, who visit Levi’s Stadium this Sunday.
They’d hate to see more run-game cameos that are easily predictable and thus stymied. Of his 26 carries, eight have been stopped for 1 yard or less.
But he still is Deebo. And you’re not.
He still can be a physical brute on the field who demands the ball in crunch time. He just doesn’t have to be their No. 1 all-purpose weapon like he was in his 2021 All-Pro “wide back” year.
Such is the luxury of welcoming Christian McCaffrey back onto the field, plus the emerging presence of Pearsall and Jauan Jennings, the latter duo each making two catches on Sunday’s winning drive instead of Samuel or others. George Kittle earlier made his team-high seventh touchdown catch.
Ah, but when it comes to being an in-house, on-field enforcer, Shanahan added this caveat: “You can’t throw whatever type of punch that was. You can’t do that.”
“… Deebo wasn’t saying anything bad to the kicker,” Shanahan added. “And Taybor was overprotective of the kicker, which I like his intentions, but he misinterpreted it and he got too close to Deebo, which was irritating to Deebo.”
To Pepper’s credit – and Moody’s — the rare yet explosive exchange did not influence how they executed their job on the winning snap and kick, from 44 yards.
“My job is to give the best ball every time, whether it’s a game-winner or a PAT. My mindset can’t be different because the game is on the line,” Pepper said. “I’m sure a lot of people were thinking the situation was different because of everything that happened, but nothing was different for me.”
Added Shanahan: “To watch him kind of graze Pepper and fall into Jake and it just looked like that he’s punching Jake because he missed a field goal, that could have been avoided. I didn’t mind at all what Deebo said to Jake and Jake didn’t mind it either. But regardless of what happens, you don’t throw a punch.”
Samuel’s tough-guy side defines his NFL reputation, and not just because he’s been in other scuffles, like last season’s pregame melee in Cleveland.
That’s translated in games to tremendous yards after the catch. Just not so much this season. He is averaging a career-low 8.28 yards per catch, down from 8.78 last year (10th in NFL), 8.8 in 2022 (sixth), 10.0 in 2021 (fourth), 12.06 in 2020 (first), and 8.3 in 2019 (12th).
His health hasn’t helped. He missed a game (Week 3 loss at Los Angeles) because of a calf strain, he bowed out of another after four snaps (Week 7 loss to Kansas City) because of pneumonia that would hospitalize him two nights, and he played 50-of-64 snaps Sunday despite rib and oblique injuries that had him practicing in a no-contact jersey.
Samuel is off the injury report this week. The second-place 49ers (5-4 overall, 1-2 NFC West) need him and all players to stay fighting mad to sweep the Seahawks (4-5, 0-2).
Flashback to Tuesday night’s Warriors game, in which the organization and fans welcomed back Klay Thompson with the Dallas Mavericks to Chase Center. Samuel admired Curry and the Warriors’ passion to excel and take down whatever foe stood in their way.
“It’s crazy. I’m over there talking to Ricky, watching (Curry) play, that consistent running,” Samuel said. “I don’t know how he runs around the court all game the way he does and how the team feeds off his energy. With him and Draymond, it’s just crazy.”
The craziest storyline all year with the 49ers centered around Pearsall, a first-round draft pick who survived a gunshot wound through his chest Aug. 31 in a San Francisco attempted robbery.
Taking Pearsall back to San Francisco on Tuesday night was not something Samuel took lightly. He is a captain, after all, even if Sunday’s scuffle with specialists called his actions into question.
“The only thing (Pearsall) asked me was I by myself,” Samuel said of Tuesday’s Warriors game. “I said, no, I don’t really go nowhere by myself; I had my two brothers with me. When he got there, he’s looking around, talking about Kyrie (Irving), Curry, and how excited he was just to be there.”
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Samuel’s been a long-time fixture at Warriors games since arriving as a 2019 rookie. Now he’s the one trying to mentor rookies.
“I want to be the person they always can lean on and talk to about anything,” Samuel said – in a much softer, less irate tone than he used on Moody, a second-year kicker who survived and then thrived in a pressure-packed situation with more to come.
