Takeaways: 49ers Finally Prove They Can Win From Behind

Three games, four teams left. And we’ve got a lot here, plus the lead on the Bills coming later this morning. Let’s get right to it …

The San Francisco 49ers really showed me something Saturday night. Now, if they look sluggish out of the gate, or for an extended period again next Sunday, maybe I’ll go back on this. But what I saw against the Green Bay Packers—on a sloppy track at Levi’s Stadium and with the rain coming down—illustrated two things about this San Francisco team we hadn’t necessarily seen before.

The first would be that the 49ers didn’t seem to have their ‘A’ game Saturday night. There were extenuating circumstances that led to that, and yet, they found a way to get through it, which is significant for a team that hasn’t always reacted well to playing on someone else’s terms.

The second is that, yes, San Francisco finally came from behind late, with the 24–21 win being the first game in Kyle Shanahan’s seven years as coach where the 49ers won a game after trailing by seven points or more entering the fourth quarter. (They were 0–30 in such situations going into Saturday’s game.)

“Earlier this year, we played some really close games,” quarterback Brock Purdy told me over the phone postgame. “We’ve had opportunities to finish at the end, and we’ve fallen short. Tonight, really, in all aspects, we needed the defense to get a stop. They did. (The special teams) got their kicker to miss, and then we had an opportunity to get up and go up. For us, it was like, Alright, now’s the time. We have to do this as a team and push through whatever that lull is at the end of the game when we need to come back.

“We have too many good guys, too many good players and too good of a team chemistry to not be able to pull through.”

Finally, the 49ers did. And as Purdy broke it down to me, the biggest key he could pinpoint was how Shanahan and the coaches, in the driving rain and with a hot Green Bay team playing inspired ball, went back to the basics.

Yes, the weather had something to do with that. But moreso, it was the adjustment everyone had to make in the first quarter after losing Deebo Samuel on his second catch of the game. Samuel went down fighting for more yardage; he was evaluated for a concussion and cleared; but he tweaked his left shoulder (the same one he injured in Week 6) along the way, and it was bad enough to where he came out for the second half in street clothes.

“Going into the game … in the run game, we actually had Deebo involved pretty heavily,” Purdy says. “When he went down, it’s like, Alright, we know we have to change it back up and sort of go back to basics. Ray-Ray [McCloud III] came in. J.J. [Jauan Jennings] played his position a couple of times. Those were the things that were a little different. Deebo, obviously screens and the quick game, you give him the ball, he makes explosive plays.

“When he’s not playing, it’s tough to get those plays, but at the same time we have playmakers like George [Kittle] and BA [Brandon Aiyuk] and J.J. and Christian [McCaffrey].”

When it mattered most, everyone stepped up, again, not trying to trick or deceive Green Bay, but instead coming right at the Packers with core plays.

“We had gone through a lot of plays throughout the game that we had dialed up going into the game,” Purdy says. “At the end, we were like, Alright, we can run our base plays that we’ve been running all year. They’re going to be there. Sure enough …”

They were.

On a third-and-5 from the 49ers’ 47-yard line, Purdy converted with a strike into a tiny window to Aiyuk (“He did a great job getting inside leverage,” the QB says). Two plays later, Purdy found Chris Conley, with Samuel out, on an out-cut the QB knew the vet had run well all year for 17 yards. There was a catch and run to Kittle after that and a 9-yard scramble for Purdy, when the throw to McCaffrey he anticipated wasn’t there. Plus the quarterback had to bounce the play back outside with the pocket clogged with Packer rushers.

And, finally, there was McCaffrey cutting back and bursting through untouched for the go-ahead, 6-yard score, on a staple short-yardage play that preceded the defense clinching (with the rush chasing Jordan Love from the pocket and leading to a diving pick by Dre Greenlaw).

Of course, a lot of it wasn’t the least bit pretty on a night that wasn’t, either. But it did show the Niners had a couple of clubs in their bag that folks on the outside doubted they would.

Which is a pretty good sign for where the team is going into its third consecutive NFC title game, with losses the past two years coming when something went awry—a dropped pick two years ago, and Purdy’s injury last year—and the 49ers couldn’t reset fast enough.

All of which only makes them well aware of the opportunity in front of them.

“Last year happened,” Purdy says. “It sucked. We all thought we had a team to go all the way and do it. We didn’t get an opportunity to. Now, we’re back. It’s been a quick year. We’re all excited for this opportunity. We weren’t trying to think too far in the future. We knew, Green Bay coming in, it was going to be a good game. To be able to pull through at the end like that was huge. Now for us to now focus on the NFC Championship.

“We’re all drooling over this opportunity.”

And, after how last night went, San Francisco is more ready for it than ever before.

There’s this really interesting perfectionist dynamic to the Baltimore Ravens right now. Maybe it’s because of how their season has gone, and how some of their biggest games within it (routs of the Detroit Lions, Seattle Seahawks, Niners and Miami Dolphins) played out. Or maybe it’s just the makeup of the team.

Either way, after the Ravens knocked out the Houston Texans, 34–10, linebacker Patrick Queen told me there were two plays still on his mind. Neither went Baltimore’s way.

The first was a third-and-8 midway through the first quarter when C.J. Stroud scrambled from the pocket and looped a throw down the right sideline to Devin Singletary for 26 yards. Queen took responsibility for it. “I had to plaster,” he says, “I got to be better.” The second came at the end of the first half, when Stroud found Nico Collins on a dig for 29 yards to convert a third-and-13. Queen explained the rush didn’t get home fast enough.

“We know what we can do,” Queen says. “The plays that we gave up, we gave up. They didn’t earn that. That was all stuff that we did, that we didn’t control on our end. Really, when it comes down to it, other than those plays, they didn’t have anything. That’s why we’re so angry when we do give them up.”

It sounds like bluster. It really isn’t. It’s just the truth.

Those two plays accounted for 56 of the Texans’ 213 yards, with another 17 coming on a final, garbage-time drive. So while a lot of the flowers thrown the Ravens’ way were directed at Lamar Jackson (and rightfully so, he was outstanding), the story of this particular win wasn’t just about the quarterback—it was of a complete team.

In fact, dig a little deeper, and you’ll see how the Ravens’ defense actually kept things under control while the offense and special teams had their first-half hiccups: Jackson was sacked three times and Baltimore gave up a 67-yard punt return after a yielded score.

The key for the defense was simply clamping down after each of the aforementioned plays—neither led to a single point for Houston.

In the second half, as Jackson and the offense got hot, the defense only tightened, allowing only 51 yards and three first downs between halftime and the Texans’ final possession. That only bolstered Queen’s feeling: The only thing that could beat his Ravens was the team itself.

Through halftime, and Jackson’s much-discussed speech, the defense sat back and watched the quarterback try to raise the bar for the offense, knowing there was another level out there for the whole team in the second half.

“We were pretty much chilling on our end, but we knew the job wasn’t finished,” Queen says. “Those points, we could have erased off the board. They shouldn’t have had them. The offensive line was ticked off, knowing that they could have done better. That’s what you saw in the second half. That’s why Lamar said what he said."

Which is why this one ended up looking a lot like the games against Detroit, Seattle, San Francisco and Miami, with Baltimore eventually exerting its strength and its will.

And most of all, doing it together, as a complete team that can win every which way.

“I haven’t been inside other locker rooms, but just from being in our locker room, it’s electric,” Queen says. “Everybody loves each other. We’re all playing for each other. We all want for each other the same common goal. We got guys that probably won’t be here next year. What we talk about is basically saying, Let’s go do this for each other so we have something to remember."

Whether they will or not, of course, remains up for debate. But whether they’re capable sure shouldn’t be.

The crux of the Las Vegas Raiders’ hire of Antonio Pierce as their full-time head coach is mostly that owner Mark Davis listened to his players. And while Davis has been accused at times of doing that a little too much (especially for an owner who isn’t in the building that much), in this particular case, given how the past three years have unfolded, it’s understandable.

Davis certainly harbored regret in not listening to his locker room—one that had been through a lot together—after Rich Bisaccia led the team through a series of off-field disasters (Jon Gruden, Henry Ruggs III, Damon Arnette) in 2021. The players were mostly unified in their belief that Bisaccia should get a full-on shot in ’22. Instead, Davis hired Josh McDaniels as head coach and Dave Ziegler to replace Mike Mayock as GM.

Which may be why Davis changed course early this year, in meeting with players (such as Maxx Crosby, Josh Jacobs and Davante Adams), and acting on their assessments of where the franchise was and where it was headed. That first led to the Halloween ouster of both McDaniels and Ziegler, which was seen internally as a few weeks in the making. Then, it led to Davis examining closely how his players were rallying around an interim coach.

So that’s one factor that put Pierce in the catbird seat. The other was, simply, the market. There aren’t a ton of guys out there (absent the team taking a big swing on Bill Belichick, Mike Vrabel, Jim Harbaugh or Pete Carroll) with the head coaching experience Pierce got through the second half of this season. Really, it was Dallas Cowboys DC Dan Quinn, Los Angeles Rams DC Raheem Morris and Pierce.

And that read of the market left the team’s search committee—made up of Davis, board member Larry Delsen, president Sandra Douglass Martin, SVP Tom Delaney, and advisor Ken Herock—digging deeper into its GM search than it had into the coaching search.

In fact, in the end, the Raiders conducted just two interviews of outside candidates for the head coaching job. One was former Minnesota Vikings coach Leslie Frazier. The other was former Seattle Seahawks defensive coordinator Kris Richard. (Those two in-person interviews also satisfied the Rooney Rule, allowing for the team to hire Pierce before the window to interview people with other teams opens this week.)

Now, the Raiders will turn their attention to the open GM job, with interim GM Champ Kelly and Colts assistant GM Ed Dodds (who interviewed well in 2022, and again this year) as the presumptive leaders for that job.

One tell could be that the Raiders brass did have a meeting/second interview with Kelly—this time with Pierce present—on Friday after officially installing the new head coach. But I’ve heard Dodds is still in really good shape on this one, and Las Vegas did resolve at the start to make these hires separately, which would mean Kelly and Pierce weren’t viewed as a package deal.

The plan is for the search committee to meet again to discuss the GM candidates, Sunday.

The relationship that could be key to Belichick landing (or not landing) in Atlanta this week is with Rich McKay. And while we’ll go further back than this in a second, it was a change made a year ago by owner Arthur Blank that set the stage for it. Last January, the Falcons team announced a restructure. McKay moved from president to CEO and was put in charge of the football side. Greg Beadles was named president to lead the business side.

McKay’s role expanded, too, to oversee Blank’s other sports properties. (He also owns the MLS’s Atlanta United.)

That setup, a year later, might need more adjusting, because it’s hard to see Belichick being comfortable with any sort of arrangement where he’s reporting to McKay. Mostly because, well, those two haven’t been on the same page over the years, with the former Patriot coach’s (often open) disdain for the NFL’s competition committee that McKay has long chaired.

You don’t have to look far to find Belichick’s comments on that group. He’s directed reports to the competition committee in the past, saying they think they “have all the answers.” In 2017, Belichick got specific on what he suspected was their effort to rid the game of kickoffs.

“We want more touchbacks, but is that really solving the problem here as it’s been presented by the competition committee? I think you know how I feel about it,” Belichick said. “We’ll see how smart some of that really is to address the problem that we think is being addressed. It seems like football, we have a pretty good game here. Been that way for a long time. The kicking game is a great part of our game.

“But we have a lot of people that feel like the game has to be changed, so we’ll have to see how all that turns out.”

McKay, of course, has been prominent among those “people” for years, and worked with Belichick confidants Thomas Dimitroff and Scott Pioli in Atlanta, which did little to slow the coach’s skepticism towards the intentions of McKay’s group.

So can Blank broker a setup that works for both guys? I think that well could determine whether or not he lands the greatest coach of all-time.

While we’re on Belichick, it’s at least interesting how extensive the Falcons and Los Angeles Chargers searches have been—and smart, too. Because of contract language the Patriots gave Jerod Mayo a year ago, New England had no search. As we explained above, the Raiders didn’t have much of one either before installing Pierce.

The merit in that, of course, is that those teams can now move forward, and tell anyone, believably, that they have the utmost conviction in their pick.

Conversely, the Falcons, who’ve been linked to Belichick since the moment they fired Arthur Smith, have interviewed (or put in slips to interview) 15 candidates. The Chargers, similarly linked to Harbaugh, have also interviewed 15 candidates.

So why waste everyone’s time?

Well, first of all, it was never a certainty that either team would be able to satisfy every last ask that coaches like Belichick and Harbaugh would have for the job. But maybe more poignantly, it’s never dumb to use this period of time to gather information on best practices across the league. And by bringing in experienced head coaches and young assistants alike, both Atlanta and Los Angeles are getting a wide range of perspectives on how things are being done with other teams.

It also gives the owners a nice phone list for the next time. If Harbaugh or Belichick come aboard, they probably won’t be around for a decade.

The Cowboys are getting roasted for keeping Mike McCarthy, but I’m not sure it’s warranted. Let’s just take this résumé as a blind item, if you can do that, and make your judgments from there.

• He takes over an aging team and goes 9–7, 10–6 and 8–8 in the three years prior to his hire, making the playoffs once.

• Year 1: During the COVID pandemic, the team goes 6–10. As a result, the coach shuffles a few things—most notably firing Mike Nolan as defensive coordinator and bringing in Quinn.

• Year 2: The win total doubles and the team goes 12–5. A mismanaged wild-card loss raises the temperature, though that loss came to a 49ers team that nearly made the Super Bowl.

• Year 3: The team goes 12–5, this time winning a playoff game and ending Tom Brady’s career in the process before bowing out, again, to the 49ers.

• Year 4: The team again goes 12–5, but this time implodes in the wild-card round, losing to a loose, talented and young Packers team.

• Over the final three years of the four-year period, the team finishes first, third and first in scoring, and Dak Prescott has a career year with McCarthy taking over the offense from Kellen Moore.

• McCarthy won a Super Bowl with the Packers.

Now, would McCarthy get fired if he worked for anyone but the Cowboys? With a week of perspective draw … Maybe, but I also can’t imagine that a move to keep the coach would be met with the sort of scorn that Jerry Jones’s move to keep McCarthy was last week.

I’m not here to tell anyone why McCarthy’s the next coming of Tom Landry. But I think for an owner who’s patient—and Jones historically actually has been—it wouldn’t be hard to get to a place where you’d want to stay the course, so long as the team in question wasn’t wearing stars on its helmets. But because these are the Cowboys, most people tend not to think rationally.

Want a side by side? Compare McCarthy to Kevin Stefanski, who I think has done a great job in Cleveland and was hired the same month McCarthy was. The Browns coach has 12 fewer wins, one fewer playoff appearance, and the same amount of playoff wins as his counterpart in Dallas. No one’s talking about firing him, nor should they be. What’s the difference between the two? I think that’s obvious.

Brian Callahan is in high demand, and anyone who’s been around the Bengals offensive coordinator knows why. So I’d say it’s not surprising at all that he’s gotten through the first round of interviews in Tennessee, Carolina and Atlanta, in the first year he’s been seen as a candidate for, more or less, every job.

Now, obviously, there’s a lot of talent in his unit. With that established, he’s coached Joe Burrow (who swears by him), been able to balance touches-egos in a loaded skill group with Ja’Marr Chase, Tee Higgins and Tyler Boyd, overseen the complete, on-the-fly overhaul of an offensive line and, this year, managed a major quarterback injury in keeping his group competitive with a backup who was starting for the first time.

Add to that his pedigree (his dad is Browns line coach Bill Callahan), the fact that he came up coaching and having to earn the respect of quarterbacks such as Peyton Manning and Matthew Stafford, and you’ll understand why a lot of Callahan’s colleagues would approve of him landing one of these jobs. Including his current boss.

“He’s as ready for this as anyone can be,” Bengals coach Zac Taylor texted Sunday. “He’s made an enormous impact on our team, and I’ve learned a ton from him because of the experience he brought to our team from other places he’s been and the success he’s had over his career. Whoever hires him won’t regret it, and we will have big shoes to fill.”

With so much going on, there’s plenty of material for the quick-hitters this week. And I’m not gonna make you wait for them …

• The Patriots will conduct interviews with Los Angeles Rams assistants Nick Caley and Zac Robinson on Monday and Tuesday for their open offensive coordinator job. And while both have Patriot ties, this is, indeed, a sign of how open-minded Jerod Mayo is going to be filling out his staff. That’s not to say Mayo won’t have trusted lieutenants (Belichick’s sons have strong relationships with Mayo, and both have job offers from him). But it is indicative of how Mayo has not locked himself in on any ideas in any phase of the game. And why Bill O’Brien took the OC job at Ohio State rather than the chance to compete for a job he already had.

• As we said last week, the Patriots are going to take their time in adding to the top of their scouting department. One name I could see being a factor is Pioli, who was the Patriots’ VP of player personnel for nine years through the first phase of the dynasty.

• I think the Panthers are definitely one team that hires their GM before their coach, and I believe, as we’ve said all along, the smart money has them pairing incumbent assistant GM Dan Morgan alongside someone with a cap-analytics background such as Kansas City’s Brandt Tilis. How their jobs would be titled will be interesting, but it does play into the idea that the GM job, as it’s traditionally been set up, has gotten pretty heavy, and should be split up.

• My sense is that Stefanski will fill Cleveland’s open offensive coordinator spot with someone that he feels like can get the most out of Deshaun Watson—which is also what ownership and front office want. That’s why I thought O’Brien could be intriguing before he wound up in a different part of Ohio. It’s why I’d also think Titans OC Tim Kelly, part of Vrabel’s staff last year, might make sense, too. Watson played great under Kelly, and the two had a strong rapport.

• Love’s finish will be costly for the Packers—and I’d expect Green Bay to pay the price to lock up their 25-year-old field general for the long term, to address what I think they’d agree is the kind of champagne problem that Green Bay’s had for the last 30 years.

• Ditto for the Lions and Goff, for what it’s worth.

• The same way the Vic Fangio defense got hot a couple of years ago, I think you’re going to see an uptick of teams looking to run the Ravens’ scheme on that side of the ball. Mike Macdonald could get a head coaching job as a result. Free agent Wink Martindale and Michigan’s Jesse Minter are two more who can run it, as could Baltimore associate head coach Anthony Weaver.

• If the Falcons–Belichick thing doesn’t work out, and other big swings (such as Harbaugh and Vrabel) don’t either, Bills OC Joe Brady would be one to watch. He finished a strong second for the job when Smith was hired in 2021.

• Three names I’ve heard for the Raiders OC job: Shane Waldron, Kliff Kingsbury and Luke Getsy.

• Any day now, Eagles.