The San Francisco 49ers traveled to Green Bay with their season, if not their very soul, on the line. After a 38-10 beatdown, the 49ers' vague postseason hopes are officially over. Whatever pulse left in the heart of this team is the twitching remnant of a team not worth remembering. Time of death: 6:27 PM local time, Green Bay, Wisconsin.
San Francisco is now out of it, despite having more than a month of football left and trailing the division lead by only one game. A team with this much opportunity and this much cache requires a special kind of mediocrity to doom themselves in November. It can't simply be that they lost an important game by a huge amount while providing no resistance. It's the presence of an enduring through-line, one that can be traced from the very first snap of the season all the way to Thanksgiving week, that points directly into the ground. If there was slack in that line, anything to suggest a turn of fortune, it's not visible to the naked eye. Just a long, painful string of ineptitude that's punctuated this season of 49ers football.
It pains me to say all this, because there are so many reasons you could almost say that this loss was a fluke, an aberration, an inevitable bump in a sports team's trajectory. When your starting quarterback is out, it's hard to win NFL games. And beyond just Brock Purdy, the list of incapacitated 49ers goes on and on: Trent Williams, Nick Bosa, Charvarius Ward, Javon Hargrave, Mitch Wishnowsky, Dre Greenlaw, Brandon Aiyuk, Talanoa Hufanga, Kevin Givens, Khalil Davis, Jacob Cowing, Darrell Luter, Jon Feliciano, Elijah Mitchell, Drake Jackson, Ambry Thomas, and while we're being comprehensive I'll include Tatum Bethune and Curtis Robinson. If you're just rejoining us, welcome back. I hope you made popcorn.
Winning without your best players isn't easy, and that's understandable. As much as it's tempting to dogpile backup QB Brandon Allen or question why Kyle Shanahan didn't start the much more dynamic Joshua Dobbs, Allen wasn't the reason the Niners lost tonight. In fact, you could almost make the argument that Allen (17/29, 6.9 AVG, 1 TD 1 INT) played better than Jordan Love (13/23, 7.1 AVG, 2 TD 0 INT) up until Love added a garbage time TD toss. Those stats won't explain a 28 point differential that buried San Francisco. That requires looking at a defense led by a coordinator in Nick Sorenson whose seat has suddenly become scorching hot.
The rushing stats for Packers RB Josh Jacobs, easily the game's MVP, don't look otherworldly, either. 26 carries for 106 yards (4.1 per rush) and a long of 18 yards don't exactly seem backbreaking, to the point where his three touchdowns might almost appear to be stat padding. But that's only because it took a single quarter for Green Bay to put down the 49ers. Jacobs recorded 58 of his 106 yards in that quarter, breaking 10 (ten!!!) tackles in that frame. Actually, the stats will bear out some of those broken tackles belonging to his teammates, but Jacobs was the tip of a spear that broke San Francisco's back early and often. Compare that to San Francisco's entire offense in that span, which recorded three plays for 3 yards.
Of course, no matter how poorly a first half goes, you can always right your wrongs with a bit of make-up at the end, and steamroll your way into a second-half comeback. That's what the Seahawks have spent so many years doing to San Francisco, where a 13-3 lead with two minutes left to go in the second quarter is almost an invitation for Seattle to drive down the field with the game on the line by the end of it. And that's exactly what San Francisco gave themselves the option to do with a 5 and a half minute drive near the end of the first half. The 49ers, however, are a team that politely declines such opportunities, almost begging Green Bay to add another touchdown after a series of defensive lapses culminated in this:
Christian Watson may never beat the Marquez Valdes-Scantling allegations pic.twitter.com/p4XLVmqC5N
— Christian D'Andrea (@TrainIsland) November 24, 2024
Dramatics aside, the 49ers at no point came remotely close to capitalizing on the few opportunities they gave themselves. In fact, quite the opposite. Every time they had an opportunity to turn the tide of the game, they threw it away in the most agonizingly avoidable manner possible. Green Bay did their part to keep the Niners in the game, as Jordan Love threw directly at defenders twice in the middle of the game. Both times, the San Francisco's defensive backs simply dropped it. Love also fumbled snaps twice, resulting in... positive yards and a fourth down conversion. And when San Francisco let Josh Jacobs rush past midfield near the end of the half, Green Bay mailed in their efforts to deliver a finishing blow, resulting in the previous dropped touchdown. Any of these mistakes in isolation might be enough to cost you a game against a good team. The 2024 San Francisco 49ers are not a good team.
Let's put aside the 20 missed tackles that San Francisco's humiliating defense gave up, about a game's worth of flubs and foibles in every quarter. The offense's overall execution was atrocious. Dominic Puni racked up three penalties in the first half, three of the four pre-snap offensive penalties against San Francisco. It took 23 and a half minutes for the 49ers to gain a single first down. Brandon Allen slipping and stumbling around the turf before getting smacked into a sorta-fumble-sorta-interception giveaway that iced the game was the epitome of San Francisco's day, and he wasn't even the worst player on the offense. That distinction might just go to Deebo Samuel, who caught one pass on four targets and whose inability to box out a middle defender caused a pass to slide right through his hands and into the waiting arms of Green Bay safety Xavier McKinney. Perhaps he, himself, wasn't as "locked in" as he could've been.
But at least he did his best to make up for it on special teams, where out of halftime, he returned a kickoff all the way inside Green Bay's 10 yard line. But TE Eric Saubert committed one of three consecutive special teams penalties, backing up San Francisco all the way near their own red zone on a drive where they would not score. The complete inability of special teams to not only fail to get out of their own way, but to seemingly decline the occasional game-changing plays that characterize the third phase, have been perhaps the clearest example of San Francisco's structural failings. Good coaching is the foundation on which positive (or even neutral) special teams play relies on. The 49ers, meanwhile, consistently get called for penalties on returns, play loose with the football, and tonight called for a fair catch inside the 10 yard line on a 51-yard punt, because at no point in this wretched season have 49ers been able to defend two gunners at the same time. But hey, at least Jake Moody made his field goal attempt.
If help isn't coming on offense, the defense can't capitalize on mistakes or stop the run, special teams is guaranteed to lose you ground every game, and you're last in your division because you gave away games to each of your division rivals, maybe it's time to do some serious reconsidering on where this team stands and what's going to propel it to the highest level of success in the future. Currently, strategic decisions are not being made to give San Francisco the best chance to win. If they were, Jordan Mason would get more than one carry for 16 yards only to immediately be subbed out for a wobbly Christian McCaffrey that ran 11 times for 31 yards. But hey, I'm not the one making critical decisions on the sidelines or in the organization. The people who do? They guided this team's season into the ground right as it was supposed to be getting good.