How the 49ers were one of the luckiest teams ever last season

When opponents lined up to kick field goals against the San Francisco 49ers in 2025, something strange happened: they missed. A lot.

Opponents converted just 66.7% of their field goal attempts against San Francisco, according to Warren Sharp, which was the worst mark any team has allowed since at least 2002. To put that in perspective, the NFL average last season was 86%.

The numbers get even more surreal when you account for distance. Adjusting for where each kick was attempted relative to league-average conversion rates by distance, opponents missed 6.54 field goals over expected against San Francisco. No team in the NFL was even close.

The misery was distributed evenly across the schedule, but a few kickers stood out as particularly generous contributors to San Francisco's invisible advantage.

Seattle Seahawks kicker Jason Myers, who finished second in the NFL with 41 made field goals in 2025, was the worst against San Francisco. Myers missed two of his four attempts against the 49ers in Week 18, which was the most field goals he missed in a single game all year.

Arizona's Chad Ryland was victimized twice. He went 2-for-3 in Week 3 and 1-for-2 in Week 11 for a combined 3-for-5 (60%) across his two matchups with the 49ers. Then there was Blake Grupe of New Orleans, who made just one attempt in Week 2 — and missed it entirely. A 0-for-1 line is easy to dismiss in isolation, but in the context of a team that saw opponents go 0-for on seemingly routine kicks all season, it fit the pattern perfectly.

By the final whistle in January, at least eight different kickers had gone 50% or worse against San Francisco in games where they had multiple attempts.

This is a strange phenomenon that is likely part luck and part skill. There isn't a lot of talk around what the 49ers' special teams unit was able to do on field goals, but the results clearly resulted in misses from opponents. And it wasn't as if the missed kicks affected the 49ers' record much, as San Francisco still finished 12-5 with a plus-66 point differential that ranked ninth-best in the league.

This article originally appeared on Niners Wire: How the 49ers were one of the luckiest teams ever last season