When Will the 49ers Get Their First Loss?

The San Francisco 49ers will lose a game. Eventually. Probably.

It doesn’t feel like that at the moment, as the 5-0 49ers were crowned king of all power rankings on Sunday night. What was pegged as a battle of two of the top Super Bowl contenders in the league quickly became a laugher, the latest in a string of fairly comfortable San Francisco victories over their long-time rivals from Dallas. The 49ers’ win over the Cowboys on Sunday was the most definitive of the season in terms of Post-Game Win Expectancy, clocking in at a 99.98% chance of victory for San Francisco. It’s not far behind in terms of DVOA, either, currently sitting as the fourth-best game of the season at 78.8% — and remember, opponent strength is only at 50%, so that number may well go up if Dallas continues to play well against opponents which are not all-consuming buzzsaws. 

Couple that with four other games, all above 25% in DVOA, and you have one of the hottest starts we’ve ever seen. Some of this was covered by Aaron Schatz in Tuesday’s DVOA commentary. At 51.6%, the 49ers have the seventh-highest DVOA through five games in the database, stretching back to 1981. They have the fifth-highest passing DVOA through five games, behind teams led by Dan Marino, Peyton Manning, John Elway and, er, Brad Johnson. Per our playoff odds, San Francisco now has a 66.5% chance of reaching the NFC Championship, a 45.3% chance of reaching the Super Bowl, and a 27.1% chance of winning the entire thing. These are insanely high odds for the second week of October.

You can go deeper if you stretch things back to the Beginning of the Age of Purdy, as the history books will surely remember it. You start to get some impressive streaks, both on the team level and the individual level, as people try to put into focus what Kyle Shanahan and his crew of infinite playmakers have done over the last ten months.

If you’ve watched a 49ers broadcast, you’ve heard announcers talk incessantly about Christian McCaffrey’s chase for the touchdown streak record. If he scores against Cleveland, he’ll tie John Riggins and O.J. Simpson with a touchdown in a record 15 straight games. Be prepared for the networks to double-dip on that one, too, as that’s the record including playoff games; if you limit things to the regular season, McCaffrey will have to keep scoring through Week 13 to catch LaDainian Tomlinson’s record 18. In between, the announcers can harp on Brock Purdy trying to catch Ben Roethlisberger’s record of 15 wins to start his career (which would be tied in Week 11 against Tampa Bay), just in case you are not fully, and I mean fully fed up with “Purdy: Elite or Not” talk just yet. 

And then there’s my favorite of the bunch, the eight straight games with at least 30 points. They’re one of just five teams to ever pull that feat off, joining the Greatest Show on Turf Rams (who lead the way with 14), Tom Brady’s 2007 and 2010 Patriots teams, and Peyton Manning’s 2012-13 Broncos. It’s like an NFL edition of “one of these things is not like the other”, only with the odd team out looking less and less out of place with each passing week.

So, yes, when you start flashing stats up and finding the Bradys, Mannings, Marinos and Warners of the world as your only neighbors, you’re bound to get just a little bit of juggernaut talk. The Philadelphia Eagles are also 5-0, but the noise around their fan base focuses more on their 24th-ranked red zone offense rather and less on fact that no one’s been able to beat them and they’re running a play so unstoppable that there are calls for it to be banned. No, it’s San Francisco fans who are setting themselves up for pride before the fall, wondering who on Earth could possibly stop the offense, flipping the calendar ahead and dreaming about rematches with the Eagles, and writing long articles talking about all the statistical records the team is on pace to break over the next couple of months.

The one thing every team on that list of top DVOA starts had in common is that all of them eventually lost. Some of them crashed and burned almost immediately – the 2009 Giants followed up their 5-0 start with four straight losses on their way to an 8-8 season and missing the playoffs entirely. Some fell at the very last hurdle, as fans of the 2007 Patriots will remember quite vividly. But winning games, it turns out, is really hard! Other teams are trying to win them too, which is frankly inconsiderate to teams trying to create long win streaks. All a hot start guarantees you is a place on the list of teams with hot starts.

“But the 1972 Dolphins!”, I hear you cry. Yes, the perfect season has been done, in a vastly different era in a season with fewer games and less parity. It was also, while we’re at it, done by the 1948 Browns in the AAFC, and by four different teams in the 1920s if we stretch our definition of perfect to “undefeated” rather than “won every game”. And yet, all anyone ever wants to talk about is the ’72 Dolphins, and the 17-0 season and Super Bowl VII, and the myth of drinking champagne together when the last unbeaten team falls.

Well, most of you reading this never saw the 1972 Dolphins. They’re a collection of highlight reels and John Facenda narrations and half-remembered anecdotes from back issues of Sports Illustrated, told and retold until fact has become myth. Alright. Fine. If we’re going to look at the 49ers’ odds of winning games over the next three months and compare them to a team most of you have never seen, we’re going to do this properly. Forget catching the Fish. We can ask whether, for the first time in over 100 years, a team has that dawg in them.

No one has ever broken a 100-year-old record in the NFL. This is partially because the NFL only started in 1920 and so there haven’t been opportunities to do so, and partially because most 100-year-old records are relics of a very different sport, and should be ignored in the same way the dead ball era isn’t comparable to modern MLB records. No one is ever going to match the 1921 Akron Pros record of 13 shutouts in a season, set against teams like the Rochester Jeffersons and Dayton Triangles. But there is one record that has been challenged and tested, yet has stood the test of time – a record the 49ers will break if no one is able to stop them this season. I present to you the list of the longest regular season undefeated streaks in NFL history, and the 1921-23 Canton Bulldogs.

This is a record that will fall someday. Brady and Manning took multiple cracks at it; MVP seasons from Cam Newton and Aaron Rodgers made it a chunk of the way there. Shanahan’s 49ers are just the latest team to make the ascent, and the first in eight years to get within squinting distance of the top. But no one’s managed to knock off Canton for over a century, as they stormed their way through the lesser competition of the day. As a matter of fact, no one stopped them back then, either, as the streak only ended because the team ran out of money and their assets and players sold to Cleveland, but that is a different story for another time.

It would take starting the season 15-0 to catch Guy Chamberlain’s men, but that’s beginning to get within the realm of possibility. The playoff simulations give the 49ers a 4.4% chance of tying that mark, a 3.5% chance of breaking it outright, and a 3.1% chance of going undefeated and finishing the 17-0 season.

So, who’s going to stop ‘em? Who will protect the honor of Link Lyman and Pete Henry? Well, I’m glad you asked, because the playoff simulation can help answer that, too.

DVOA favors the 49ers in every remaining matchup on the schedule, but there are some games there which are essentially toss-ups, which is why they come out with 13.7 wins on average.

The team most likely to beat the 49ers is, of course, the last team to actually do it. The Philadelphia Eagles are lurking there in Week 13, and there are few things in the world they’d like more than to shut the 49ers up. They’ve had to hear Deebo Samuel talk about how the 49ers only lost because they played with 10 people, and they’d like to point out that, hey, they had a 7-0 lead and a turnover at midfield before Purdy’s elbow exploded. Spot the 2022 Eagles a touchdown and the ball in the first half of the first quarter, and they were going to win most of the games they played. The Eagles home crowd might be slightly pumped for this one.

The Eagles also are a tough matchup for the 49ers defense specifically. Their offensive line is first in run block win rate and fourth in pass block win rate, meaning they can withstand the San Francisco rush long enough for A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith to challenge the corners one-on-one downfield. That hasn’t been as much of a problem this year for the 49ers as in the past – they’re second in DVOA on deep passes at -18.9% — but it’s still probably the best way to attack them. And if the get to play with a lead, that run game is still lethal, as Philadelphia is currently third with a 14.1% rushing DVOA. The Eagles are the last team on the schedule with at least a 25% chance of beating San Francisco by our current odds; they kind of serve as the backstop to prevent a deep 49ers run into history. And, for what it’s worth, there’s a 0.6% chance that the two teams meet at 11-0; Philadelphia may not be running as smoothly as San Francisco right now but they’re more than capable of figuring things out sooner rather than later.

According to the simulations, the team most likely to hand the 49ers their first loss is the Browns this week, in part because they just get first crack at it. There’s a bit of an asterisk, however, as we don’t know if Deshaun Watson is playing this week – and, at the moment, it appears that the Browns also don’t know if Watson will be playing. It’s the defense that’s the issue; Cleveland is a clear first in the league with a -27.5% defensive DVOA and a -26.1% pass defense DVOA. At the moment, San Francisco hasn’t faced a team ranked higher than sixth in either stat, though it should be noted that Dallas had the best defensive DVOA in the league entering Sunday night; they just got slammed down to eighth overall thanks to Brocktoberfest. A healthy Cleveland has the tools on the line on both sides of the ball to slow things down, with Myles Garrett and Za’Darius Smith providing pressure off the edge and four out of five offensive linemen ranking in the top 15 in ESPN’s pass block win rate. I just don’t know if they’re healthy enough to pull off the upset; Joel Bitonio is day-to-day, the running game has taken a dive since Nick Chubb’s injury, and P.J. Walker shouldn’t scare an NFL team in 2023. Their odds of stopping the 49ers’ 30-point streak seem fairly good. Their odds of handing them the first loss? Maybe not so much.

Moving down the list, Minnesota is probably an easier matchup than the simulations think right this moment because of the Justin Jefferson injury, and Cincinnati is probably a harder matchup than the simulations think because Joe Burrow looked healthier last week, though we would like to see that for two weeks straight before declaring the Bengals fixed. But it’s the Jaguars and the Seahawks who look like the biggest threats before the Eagles loom large in the background. Both are in the top 12 in DVOA, both should be well in the fight for playoff slots, both get the 49ers at home for the fierce home-field advantages of Lumen Field and, er, EverBank. The first Seahawks game could be a trap game, at that, coming just before the Eagles matchup looming in the background, and the second Seahawks game comes the week after. If I had to put money on the 49ers’ first loss, it would come in that Seattle-Philadelphia-Seattle trifecta, as tough a slate as the schedule-makers felt fit to give San Francisco.

Because yes, despite the hot start, despite what we saw on Sunday, and despite all the laurels and accolades this offense has gotten to this point, the San Francisco 49ers will lose a game. Eventually. Probably.