49ers lose to Green Bay without Brock Purdy and Nick Bosa

GREEN BAY, Wis. – Almost all of his 49ers teammates had already zipped up their bags and were heading for the buses, but Christian McCaffrey stayed in the cramped locker room at Lambeau Field. He sat seething, stone-faced, staring ahead after the Green Bay Packers whipped the 49ers, 38-10.

Figuratively, McCaffrey could have looked ahead down the stretch of this 49ers’ ongoing season of torture. The team is 5-6 now, and the road won’t get any 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 remotely similar to this one will almost certainly sink the 49ers, whose litany of big mistakes in Green Bay was too long to count on two hands.

“I just have to get better,” McCaffrey muttered.

49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan said, “We were all embarrassed.”

By point difference, 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 this week the 49ers — who were missing starting quarterback Brock Purdy, top defensive lineman Nick Bosa and All-Pro offensive tackle Trent Williams, among others — fall in 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. “That’s not an excuse. We didn’t have our quarterback. We won three games, so we don’t want to hear that. We came to play. They should have come to play.”

Instead of doing that, the 49ers defense opened up in the worst possible way. The Packers, en route to building a 17-0 lead, rushed for 125 yards in the first half alone. They converted six of their first seven third downs and looked absolutely unfazed by the extra blitz pressure that first-year 49ers defensive coordinator Nick Sorensen dialed up.

“The run defense was really disappointing,” Shanahan said. “We got out of holes too many times. Too many missed tackles. It 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 ended up missing more than 20 tackles in the game. The Packers ended up scoring nearly 40 points despite only 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’ highlights under Shanahan, a 37-20 drubbing of Green Bay in the 2019 NFC Championship Game. The 49ers lit up the scoreboard that day while only attempting 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 coming into Sunday ranked No. 21 in expected points added. But this epically poor performance, even though the loss of run-stopping defensive tackle Jordan Elliott to a concussion undoubtedly hurt the cause, revealed just how dangerously dependent the 49ers are on Bosa. The entire defense had crumbled the week before against the Seattle Seahawks after Bosa left with an oblique injury and looked downright inept for far too long in Green Bay.

Conversely, Sunday’s sparkling offensive performance makes Purdy’s value to the 49ers even more apparent. The young quarterback, out with a shoulder injury (Shanahan had no update on his potential availability next week), has provided a stabilizing force the 49ers sorely missed while taking this beating.

The 49ers fumbled five times and lost 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 horrible 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 cope with the loud Lambeau environment on the field.

“This league is predicated on defensive lines going upfield and dropping the ball,” 49ers receiver Chris Conley said. “We have to be more disciplined when we use our cadence. We have to keep repeating it. There’s no way around it. You have to lock in. You can’t make those mistakes.”

The most damaging mistake was Samuel’s drop, which turned into the pick McKinney returned 48 yards. The 49ers had been driving while only trailing 17-7, but that play set the Packers up to take a 24-7 lead.

“It seemed like a hell of a throw,” Shanahan said. “It was out of Deebo’s hands. It 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, as Purdy and Bosa’s return timetables remain unclear, was that the rest of the NFC West remains mired in mediocrity. Seattle beat the Arizona Cardinals to create a 6-5 team tie atop the division. Notably, the 49ers find themselves just one game behind the leading pack, so they’re still far from mathematically eliminated.

But they were definitely hurt when they left Lambeau.

“That’s about as bad as it gets,” Warner said. “It’s probably the worst thing I’ve been involved in. It’s embarrassing. You have 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 struggle,” he said. “It’s one game at a time. Every day you have to wake up, look at yourself in the mirror and get better whether you win or lose. Speaking for me personally, that’s what I’m going to do.”