San Francisco 49ers: Ranking the 10 most memorable plays of the decade
By Timmy Gibson
With the decade coming to a close, Niner Noise looks at the San Francisco 49ers and the 10 most memorable plays from 2010 through 2019, ranking them out from noteworthy to ones we’ll never forget.
The 2010s were an incredibly exciting decade for the San Francisco 49ers. In the early years of the decade, then-head coach Jim Harbaugh led the Niners as they returned to prominence, ruling the NFC and almost winning a Super Bowl in his time with the team.
Then of course, in one of the most universally hated front-office moves of all time, the 49ers parted ways Harbaugh, which led to multiple seasons of incompetence until the Niners landed Kyle Shanahan as their head coach.
Now in his third season with the team, Shanahan has finally turned the 49ers back into a Super Bowl contender as they close out the decade.
This decade is particularly important to me in my personal 49ers fandom as well. This was the decade when I truly became a 49er fan. These were the Niners teams I was first old enough to truly love. Working on this piece has been a labor of love for me, and I have been able to retrace my steps as I was engulfed in being a 49ers fan.
Before we take a look at the top ten, I want to point out that these are not the top ten best 49ers plays, they are the top 10 most memorable. And memorable is a subjective term. While I have tried my best to by as unbiased as possible in this ranking, memory is inherently biased. I fully admit this ranking is likely affected by things like recency bias, and at times, what a 13 year old was most likely to remember at the time.
And, no. This top-10 list isn’t going to be solely good memories, either. There are some hard memories in there, too, which also helps paint the picture of what the Niners went through over the decade.
But there are plenty of good ones to offset the bad.
With that as a backdrop, here are San Francisco’s 10 most memorable plays of the decade, starting off with one particular franchise quarterback, Jimmy Garoppolo.