Five 49ers roster questions week ahead of NFL cutdown day

SANTA CLARA — One week left, dozens of decisions still to be sorted through.By 3 p.m.next Sunday, coach Kyle Shanahan and general manager John Lynch must trim their roster from the 90 in training camp to the 53 who will open the season.Three days later, they will board a 16-hour flight to Melbourne, Australia.“I can’t even think about that yet,” defensive coordinator Raheem Morris said Saturday, after the team began its final week of practice stateside with position battles still to be determined.“There’s a lot of guys doing really good things.

… There are a lot of really good things on this football team and really hard decisions for our management, our coaches, everybody involved.”Some decisions will be easier than others.These are five questions 49ers brass will think about going into cutdown day:Not talking about the tackles, where the 49ers are as sturdy as any team in football with Trent Williams holding down the left edge and Colton McKivitz on the opposite side.But they just might need to look outside the organization for help on the inside.“No one’s really completely made it easy on us yet,” Shanahan said this week of the competition to start at left guard.“I still think we’ve got a lot more time to go, not a ton, but enough for guys to step up and do it.”It wasn’t necessarily a ringing endorsement of the field competing for the job that the 49ers decided to bring a fourth entrant into the mix Thursday night against the Chargers.Austen Pleasants started the game at left tackle but ended up taking almost as many snaps at left guard.

Connor Colby was considered the front-runner coming into camp but took most of his snaps at right guard as he seems to now be fighting for a second-string swingman position.Given the underwhelming showing from the other three and Pleasants’ late entrance to the battle, he might have been in pole position for the starting job in Week 1.But he left with a non-ACL knee injury that the 49ers needed t...