Without knowing for sure whether this is actually true, we can still surmise that the Washington Commanders felt better about losing Monday night's game than they did about their delightfully grotesque tie against the Giants in Week 5. And we are almost certain the San Francisco 49ers felt worse in victory. Their record stayed spotless, but in making their escape, they caught a glimpse of the grim future that is in their front yard.
If you chose to avoid last night's Commanders–49ers game in the shadows of Hell's Substation, you are finding out today what happens when the scoreboard lies, and also when it becomes permissible to lie about the scoreboard. The practical truth is that the 49ers won 23-17, and remain one of the NFL's three undefeated teams. The victory broadened their lead in the NFC West to half the schedule—a margin of three games over the barely tenable Seattle Seahawks after six weeks of action. The math here is nearly unassailable, but hold on a moment while we assail it.
By losing, the Commanders managed not only to drop from 1-4-1, the fourth-worst record in the sport, but to complete a second consecutive week of winless football from the entire NFC East. Those divisional rivals pulled together to lose six games outright and tie a seventh in humiliating fashion. This is the first time an entire division has gone without a single team winning in back-to-back weeks since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970, and almost certainly the first time ever, though we suspect nobody is bored enough to give that research a go. Only one team in the division, the New York Giants, has a winning record, and none of them have a positive point differential. After six weeks, the NFC East has fashioned itself as a hideous homage to the American League West, the new standard for no standards at all.
But this is where the logic ends. The 49ers are 6-0 with a bullet, and that bullet is aimed right at themselves. Brock Purdy is currently near the top of the MVP race, which would make him the first quarterback since the invention of the forward pass to win the MVP with no wide receivers. Mike Evans left Monday's game with a recurrence of the Achilles tendon injury that has been literally nipping at his heels all year, and generally seems like he is testing the notion of being "day-to-day" to unreasonable limits. He will miss some time going forward, but it isn't a tear. Yet.
Still, Evans's absence after halftime essentially cratered the 49ers offense, which produced a single field goal and three first downs in the second half—all very NFC East, in short. Aside from a single 35-yard completion to George Kittle as part of that field goal-producing drive in the third quarter, Purdy learned mostly what happens when you run out of wideouts, a trend that began in the offseason with the loss of Ricky Pearsall and has continued through the season to date. Without Evans, the 49ers receivers on Monday were Brandin Cooks, Jordan Watkins, Jacob Cowing, and Malik Turner; those four combined for two catches and 35 yards.
Conversely, this was a better outcome for Washington than last week's, even after you allow for the carping about the way they mishandled the end of the first half. It looks worse in the standings, but what was very nearly a 20-point comeback that fizzled at the very end sure beats authoring a genuine national embarrassment due to their spectacular inability to understand the basic tenets of time. Even people who know less about football than you do were laughing at QB Jayden Daniels' clock management and demanding the firing of head coach Dan Quinn for permitting that misunderstanding. It was among the worst non-loss results in the sport's history, an undiluted triumph of institutional schadenfreude that was impossible to misunderstand just for the volume of the abuse. By contrast, Quinn merely having to bat down an assertion that he didn't know the down in his postgame presser last night feels like a step forward.
This latest Commanders clock blooper was important mostly in that context. Last night's game looked already lost, even at 13-3, as the Commanders duffed a fourth-and-2 from the 49ers' 13 in the second quarter. The real issue here is not Troy Aikman's clucking disapproval over Daniels throwing away the ball on fourth down, but the fact that the Commanders have no discernible offensive line. That, much more than an inability to read a large digital clock, is probably why Daniels has been so skittish in clock-minding situations. His decision-making has been definitively impacted by the other team's largest players standing on his chest, and not any more positively than you'd expect. The fact that Daniels and his team seemed to have their act reassembled down the stretch suggests that in fact they can be taught. And yes, we know that sounds too generous to the lads, but the second half happened, too, and under the rule of "the last thing we saw is the only true thing," the Commanders finished on an up-note.
The 49ers are probably going to be all right, provided you don't think of them as a Super Bowl favorite; a fully staffed 49ers receivers room would change that, but there's no indication that's coming anytime soon. General manager John Lynch has to get back on the phone again to look for solutions in a rapidly diminishing market. The Commanders, for their part, are going to trade, cut, and fire a bunch of people sooner rather than later, and will probably be right to do it. A win is actually a win, and a loss is still a loss, but the vibes are still the vibes, and they shall be respected, at least until it's time to start playing the games again. After all, the delegation of blame never has a bye week.
