49ers wide receiver Emmanuel Sanders is a savvy NFL veteran on the field. He also displayed some of that veteran experience off the field Thursday in his press conference before practice.
Sanders has already been to a pair of Super Bowls. He was a rookie with the Steelers when they went in the 2010 season, then he went again with the Broncos following the 2015 campaign.
The 32-year-old said he’s already visualizing how the game is going to go with more than a week left before kickoff.
“I’ve already been visualizing everything. I’ve been visualizing everything,” he said. “As a team, we’ve been visualizing talking about how it’s going to be after we win it. Because, like I said many times, you’ve got some people that say, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m happy to be in the Super Bowl.’ And you’ve got some people who say, ‘Yeah, cool, NFC Champions.’ But at the same time, we still have one game left and we have to go handle business.”
As a follow up, Cam Inman of the Bay Area News Group wanted to know if Sanders was visualizing a specific score. The 10-year veteran didn’t take the bait.
“No. Imagine I give a Super Bowl score prediction, all of your pens would start moving,” he said.
That’s probably the smart move by Sanders. While the 13-3 49ers certainly have reason to be confident after a pair of playoff blowouts put them in the Super Bowl, they face a Kansas City Chiefs team that narrowly lost in the AFC championship game a season ago before plowing through the AFC playoffs with relative ease this year.
Bulletin board material is the last thing the Chiefs need.
Sanders’ visualizations are riddled with optimism, but it’s undoubtedly the smart move to keep the extent of that optimism to himself.
