Predicting the 2016 San Francisco 49ers Week 17 Starting Lineup

The San Francisco 49ers enter the 2016 NFL season with plenty of questions and roster spots up for grabs. While predicting what the starting lineup will look like in Week 1 is a challenging task, Niner Noise takes it a few steps further and tries to see how things will look at the season’s end.

Training camp for the San Francisco 49ers is just a few days away, and the team is gearing up for a new era under head coach Chip Kelly.

Unlike the majority of seasons under former head coach Jim Harbaugh, there are more than a handful of roster spots and positions to be had. Questions abound regarding what the 49ers depth chart will look like, who starts and who doesn’t make the cut.

Roster predictions and depth charts are a big part of the narrative up to, and including, training camp. But the majority of these speculations for starters and backups focus on what the team will look like in Week 1 at the very start of the season.

We’ve already gone that route before, as seen in this pre-camp two-deep depth chart, so let’s change it up a bit and predict the starting lineup in Week 17 — the very end of the regular season.

Why go this route?

Well, it’s simple. It follows the narrative about players either rising to the occasion throughout the course of the regular season or it opens up the door for guys to fall by the wayside. For example, how many people predicted quarterback Blaine Gabbert would be the team’s starter over Colin Kaepernick at the end of 2015?

There is a nearly impossible factor here — one which can’t totally be worked into the equation, unless it exists already: injuries. So we won’t predict any injuries for players projected to start.

And we won’t dive into special teams either. There isn’t enough drama there.

As for the rest of the positions? Let’s take a look.

Next: Safety