GREEN BAY, Wis. — Almost all of his 49ers teammates had already zipped up their bags and headed for the buses, but Christian McCaffrey remained in the cramped locker room of Lambeau Field. He sat seething, stone-faced and staring forward after the Green Bay Packers had whipped the 49ers, 38-10.
Figuratively, McCaffrey might’ve been peering ahead into the stretch run of this 49ers’ ongoing season of torture. The team is 5-6 now, and the road won’t get easier next week. The 49ers will travel back across the country to face one of the league’s best teams, the 9-2 Buffalo Bills.
Another performance that’s in any way resemblant of this one will almost certainly sink the 49ers, whose litany of big errors in Green Bay was too long to count on two hands.
“I’ve just got to be better,” McCaffrey murmured.
Said 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan: “We all got embarrassed.”
By point differential, this was the third-worst loss of Shanahan’s tenure, trailing only a 40-10 blowout against the Dallas Cowboys in 2017 and a 39-10 shellacking at the hands of the Los Angeles Rams in 2018.
Those were talent-deficient 49ers teams. It can certainly be argued that the 49ers of this week — who were missing starting quarterback Brock Purdy, top defensive lineman Nick Bosa, and All-Pro offensive tackle Trent Williams, among others — fall into the same boat.
But the Packers, who fell to the 49ers in last season’s playoffs, weren’t sympathetic to that.
“It’s the NFL,” Green Bay defensive back Keisean Nixon said. “It’s not an excuse. We didn’t have our quarterback. We won three games, so we won’t want to hear that. We came to play. They should’ve come to play.”
Instead of doing that, the 49ers defense opened in the worst way imaginable. The Packers, on their way to building a 17-0 lead, rushed for 125 yards in the first half alone. They converted six of their first seven third downs, looking absolutely unbothered by any of the added blitz pressure that first-year 49ers defensive coordinator Nick Sorensen dialed up.
“The run defense was real disappointing,” Shanahan said. “We got out of gaps too many times. Way too many missed tackles. That was one of the worst halves I’ve been a part of.”
The 49ers missed a staggering 10 tackles in the first quarter — the most by an NFL team over a single frame this season — and they ended up missing over 20 tackles on the game. The Packers ended up scoring nearly 40 points despite just 163 passing yards from their quarterback, Jordan Love.
In that way, this seemed like at least a modicum of payback for one of the 49ers’ pinnacles under Shanahan, a 37-20 drubbing of Green Bay in the 2019 NFC Championship Game. The 49ers lit up the scoreboard on that day while attempting only eight passes.
“Poor technique, poor execution across the board,” 49ers linebacker Fred Warner said. “We knew the challenge their running backs gave us going into the game, and we just didn’t execute.”
The 49ers weren’t a good run defense entering Sunday, ranking No. 21 in expected points added. But this epically bad performance, even though the loss of run-stopping defensive tackle Jordan Elliott to a concussion undoubtedly hurt the cause, exposed how dangerously reliant the 49ers are on Bosa. The entire defense had crumbled the week prior against the Seattle Seahawks after Bosa exited with an oblique injury and looked downright inept for far too long in Green Bay.
Conversely, Sunday’s bumbling offensive performance makes Purdy’s value to the 49ers all the more clear. The young quarterback, who was out with a shoulder injury (Shanahan had no update on his potential availability for next week), has supplied a stabilizing force that the 49ers dearly missed while they took this thrashing.
The 49ers fumbled five times, losing two to the Packers. Backup quarterback Brandon Allen also threw an interception when his pass clanged off receiver Deebo Samuel’s hands and to Green Bay safety Xavier McKinney in the second half. Allen had avoided an interception on a terrible pass straight into coverage in the first half but couldn’t avoid a giveaway later when Packers edge rusher Lukas Van Ness sacked him and forced a fumble.
The 49ers also committed nine penalties, many of which came at particularly damaging times. Remarkably, the defense drew flags for having 12 men on the field on consecutive snaps, and the offense seemed to consistently struggle to manage the loud Lambeau environment at the line of scrimmage.
“This league is predicated on defensive lines that jet upfield and get off the ball,” said 49ers receiver Chris Conley. “We have to be more disciplined when we use our cadence. We’ve got to keep repping it. There’s no way around it. You have to lock in. You can’t make those mistakes.”
The most damaging error was Samuel’s drop, which turned into the pick that McKinney returned 48 yards. The 49ers had been driving while trailing only 17-7, but that play set the Packers up to take a 24-7 lead.
“Seemed like a hell of a throw,” Shanahan said. “It went off Deebo’s hands. That was huge, because it looked like we were trying to get back into the game.”
Instead, the 49ers never got close. Their only consolation leaving Green Bay, since the return timetables of Purdy and Bosa remain unclear, was that the rest of the NFC West remains mired in mediocrity. Seattle beat the Arizona Cardinals to create a tie of 6-5 teams atop the division. Remarkably, the 49ers find themselves only one game behind that leading pack, so they’re still far from being mathematically eliminated.
But they were certainly wounded leaving Lambeau.
“That’s about as bad as it can get,” Warner said. “It’s probably the worst I’ve been a part of. It’s embarrassing. You’ve got to take it on the chin. Take it like a man and move on.”
That’s what McCaffrey was processing as he sat stewing in the corner of the locker room.
“There’s always a fight,” he said. “It’s one game at a time. Each day, you’ve got to wake up, look yourself in the mirror, and get better, whether you win or lose. Speaking for me personally, that’s what I’m going to do.”