by David Zizmor

SANTA CLARA–San Francisco 49ers head coach Jim Harbaugh has to study his corp of linebackers and get someone who can replace injured NaVorro Bowman.The fact of the matter is Bowman is so good that you really can’t outright replace him with one guy. So this could be a mix and match proposition. The 49ers need to figure out who can place him.

It’s not just Bowman, there’s Aldon Smith who did not play Thursday in Minnesota because there’s that suspension looming from the league regarding his TSA incident at LAX. The 49ers figured if they benched him the league would count that and he won’t be suspended extra long. Your looking at a linebacking corp with two men down. Patrick Willis is still in there but Smith and Bowman are two of the best linebackers in the NFL.

When you lose those two guys it’s tough to replace them, the Niners went into the draft and replaced those guys to take Chris Borland right offensive linebacker out of Wisconsin. Borland played a little bit he struggled a little and right offensive linebacker Dan Skuta has been with the team and did a decent job last year and he was in for Smith when he was out for five games during a three and half week stint.

They didn’t play at the level that the 49ers expected and that was partly because last year Smith was out and Bowman was still there. Bowman is arguably the best linebacker in the NFL. Even without Smith, Bowman is able to cover. Now it’s two guys out and it’s just that much more difficult. The 49ers are looking at which of their other linebackers on the roster would work best with Willis and Ahmad Brooks who are going to do their best job at replacing those guys.

That’s why the pre season helps for the 49ers, in this case they get four pre season games to figure out who would work out best.Hhopefully by the time the season starts they would have figured it out and the linebackers didn’t look particularly good and neither did the defense for that matter in this game against Baltimore. The Niners were not running the normal defense, they were doing a very vanilla plain version. You don’t game plan for teams in pre season by which I mean your looking at film and trying to anticipate their plays.

First 49ers game ever at Levis Stadium: Sunday August 17th will be the 49ers first ever game at new Levis Stadium and it will be fun to watch and it will be fitting because they’ve been working at this for so long and everybody is going to be paying more attention and in the pre season game nobody really pays too much attention of what the out come is.

What everybody is going to be most concern about is what the traffic is going to be like and all of the reports from the soccer game about a week ago was that the traffic is just awful. It was a complete disaster and the traffic flow in and out of the stadium was bad the public transportation was held up by a whole host of problems not the least were people trying to cross over the VTA tracks and delaying the light rail from moving.

This gridlock made it difficult for everyone trying to get to Caltrain which was suppose to be the easy way to transport in and out of the Stadium, they have to fix that. That was a San Jose Earthquakes game they didn’t sell tickets in the upper deck it was closed. This pre season game for the 49ers is probably going to going to be a bigger test now that it’s going to be the full house.

David Zizmor covers the NFL for http://www.sportsradioservice.com