The 49ers went into Sunday with their chances slim at best. No Brock Purdy, Nick Bosa, Trent Williams, Charvarius Ward or a host of other players.
The 49ers were supposed to lose this game. But even with the odds stacked against them, they somehow made even more a meal out of it than could have been expected. It was a 38-10 loss that might spell the end for this season for a 49ers team at 5-6 and last in the NFC West with a road game in Buffalo up next.
Run game destruction: Tackling woes + Josh Jacobs goes
The Packers established the tone of this game from the jump. It would be a game dominated by a committed Packers run game with Josh Jacobs wreaking havoc.
In the first half alone, Jacobs forced the 49ers to miss 10 tackles, the most in the NFL in a game according to the fox broadcast. He was omnipresent.
Jacobs suffered from cramps late in the third quarter but later returned to pummel the 49ers for his third touchdown of the day.
On the other end, the 49ers could not get anything going in the run game. They had four yards on the ground in the first half. Four. It improved in the second half, but the number of plays lost to penalties and a fundamental struggle to move bodies made it moot.
Jacobs ran 26 times for 106 yards and three touchdowns. Christian McCaffrey ran 11 times for 31 yards. Oh, and McCaffrey fumbled and turned it over at the start of the fourth quarter. That was the 49ers' third turnover of the game to the Packers' zero.
There are many other things that went wrong, but those were chief among them. To win this game, the 49ers had to run well and not turn it over. They had a -101-yard and -3 touchdown differential in the run game, and a -3 turnover differential. You can't win doing that, let alone without your most important players.
Penalties, special teams + generally unserious play
Another area of failure in this game was on special teams. Is there anyone on the planet surprised by that? The 49ers held on just about every opportunity they had on returns, the most damning of which was an 87-yard kickoff return by Deebo Samuel... negated by a hold from Eric Saubert.
In total, the 49ers had nine penalties, and three of them were on special teams returns that cost them north of 100 yards.
But that wasn't all. Both teams wasted multiple opportunities.
Early on, Brandon Allen should have been picked off by Quay Walker. It was dropped. At the end of the first half, Christian Watson dropped a touchdown.
The through line between these two teams was their collective lack of seriousness. The Packers had chances to run away with the game. The 49ers had chances to pull closer. But San Francisco, with their key players out, didn't have that margin for error.
They couldn't afford dropped interceptions from both Ji'Ayir Brown and Renardo Green, or any of the special teams disasters that they had. They certainly couldn't afford Deebo Samuel having a drop over the middle of the field that turned into, for all intents and purposes, a game-losing interception.
It's evident that this special teams unit is pathetic, and that this team continues to have crucial penalties at key times. Those issues — when they are recurring, and they are — typically fall on the coaching staff.
Credit for Brandon Allen
There isn't all that much positive to take from this game. The young safeties in Brown and Malik Mustapha played well (Renardo Green didn't). So, too, did Brandon Allen.
There was a lot of criticism of Kyle Shanahan for starting Allen over Josh Dobbs. It's understandable, because Allen fumbled on his first drive and didn't exactly look like a dynamo.
But Shanahan trusts Allen because he knows the offense, and if we're being honest, he was kind of slinging it Sunday. It's a question of trusting your scheme versus trusting the roulette wheel spin that is Josh Dobbs, a man who struggled massively to get play calls in in training camp.
Allen was not the problem. And that might be meaningful if (as may be the case) Brock Purdy does not play next week.