Overmatched and outplayed
Hell Week: Blowout by Pack a logical conclusion
34, 49ERS 17
Welp. The 49ers’ week from hell didn’t get any better Thursday night.
A few days ago, players and coaches had expressed a degree of pleasure that, after a humbling loss in Seattle, they would get the chance to get back on the field in a bid to forget about the Seahawks.
Now? The 49ers have 10 long days before their next game, an eternity to dwell on not only two consecutive losses, but also the dismantling of their oncecompetitive roster.
“We know the challenges we have,” head coach Kyle Shanahan said. “We’ve got to try to turn this around in the second half.”
The 49ers got handled by the Green Bay Packers in a game that didn’t look competitive on paper and was even less so on the field. The 3417 snoozer was the 49ers’ fifth loss this season, and fourth at home.
The list of things that have gone wrong for the 49ers in the days leading up to the game is so long that it borders on ridiculous:
⏩ The 49ers’ damaged roster boasted exactly zero
offensive players who had touched the ball in the 49ers’ victory over the Packers in the NFC Championship Game in January.
⏩ Close to $ 80 million in salarycap space was tied up on the 49ers’ injured reserve list.
⏩ The 49ers were finally forced to admit their mistake with a high draft pick, when the team waived receiver Dante Pettis, a 2018 secondround pick, on Tuesday.
⏩ A positive coronavirus test and contact tracing made more players unavailable, shut down the team’s facility in the midst of game preparations and could end up leading to penalties against the 49ers, if they are found to have broken protocol.
Kind of an inopportune time to have Aaron Rodgers stroll into your stadium, with payback on his mind.
It’s a funny thing about a surefire Hall of Famer, who has long been highly motivated against a team that failed to draft him with the No. 1 pick in 2005, but Rodgers has a spotty record against the 49ers. He is 46 against the team for which he rooted as a child, with three playoff losses, and he came into Thursday’s game 14 in the Bay Area, where he played college ball for Cal. Only when he has faced a bad 49ers team has he had great success.
And, because of injuries and the virus, the 49ers who that took the field Thursday weren’t a threat. The historically bad week felt like something dropped out of the Jim Tomsula era. Almost like a message from the past, set adrift in a bottle by Terry Donahue at Newport Beach and only just received.
The team that took the field was the kind of 49ers squad on which Rodgers can feast. And fueled by the memory of January’s brutal 3720 NFC Championship Game loss, as well as a 378 2019 regularseason embarrassment at Levi’s, Rodgers didn’t lack for motivation.
The Packers, coming off a loss to Minnesota on Sunday, looked like the playoff team everyone expected. The 49ers frustrated Rodgers twice last year by getting frequent pressure on him with their ferocious defensive front. That didn’t happen Thursday. Moreover, there was no Raheem Mostert to rip through the Packers’ shoddy run defense, as Mostert did in January when he ran for 220 yards and four touchdowns.
The Nick Mullens who took the field Thursday didn’t look like the quarterback who played so well on the road against the New York Giants, or the one who got fans ready to hand him the starting job in garbage time at Seattle.
Instead, he looked a little more like the Mullens who was overwhelmed against the Eagles. He threw a secondquarter wobbly duck that was intercepted by the Packers and led to Green Bay’s second touchdown. He came close to throwing interceptions at the end of the first half and again on the first offensive play of the second half. He lost a fumble in the third quarter.
It’s hard to fault Mullens, though. The playmakers he expected to have weren’t available. According to the Fox broadcasters, Shanahan had planned for 85% of the passes to go to rookie receiver Brandon Aiyuk. But when Aiyuk landed on the COVID19 list, because of contact tracing after Kendrick Bourne tested positive, Shanahan had to rip up that game plan. It’s challenging for a backup quarterback to create chemistry on the fly, even with as good a gameplanner as Shanahan pulling the strings.
The 49ers’ smart young coach seems to be aging dramatically before our eyes. It could be the gray in his pandemic beard. Or it could be trying to game plan for a team that has lost almost all of its frontline starters. He spent Wednesday night trying to devise ways to plug holes that continued to open on his roster.
But the coach isn’t wringing his hands over the 49ers’ coronavirus plight.
“It’s not just the NFL, it’s the planet,” he said. “I knew that sometime we would have to deal with it.”
The 49ers are 45. They play at New Orleans ( 52) a week from Sunday, and then have a muchneeded bye.
“We have three days off, which is something that’s needed pretty bad,” Shanahan said. “And we’ve got one game in the next 24 days.”
They eventually will get some healthy bodies back, but not all the key ones. From Thursday’s vantage point, it’s hard not to see the season slipping away.
But at least the week from hell is almost over.