San Francisco’s still undefeated, and now there’s a bit of NFL history to go with it. The 49ers beat Washington 23-17 on Monday Night Football at Levi’s Stadium, moving to 6-0 and picking up franchise win number 56 on Monday nights, the most of any team ever, breaking a tie they’d shared with the Steelers.
It wasn’t comfortable by the end, though. A game that looked basically over at halftime turned into a real fight once Washington’s offense finally showed up in the second half.
San Francisco jumped out early. McCaffrey scored twice, Kittle added a touchdown catch, and by halftime the Niners were sitting on a 20-3 lead, the kind of cushion that usually means a quiet rest of the night for the home team.
Then Mike Evans went down. He’d played through cracked ribs and a sore Achilles all week, and had already put up 94 yards on just three catches before re-aggravating that Achilles near the end of the first half. Helped off to the tunnel, ruled out at the break. Even without him, San Francisco didn’t lose a beat right away, Purdy led a drive full of quarterback sneaks down to the 1-yard line, and McCaffrey punched in his second touchdown to make it 20-3 heading into the locker room.
Without Evans stretching the field anymore, San Francisco’s offense went quiet in the second half, and Washington’s defense made them pay for it. Jayden Daniels led a rally that turned an easy win into a genuine fourth-quarter scramble, pulling the Commanders close enough that nobody in that building was comfortable anymore.
Came down to the last snap. Washington still pushing, and San Francisco’s pass rush finally got to Daniels one more time to end it, 23-17, after he’d already been flagged for intentional grounding earlier on that same drive just trying to dodge a sack. For a Commanders team that came in at 1-4-1, that’s actually a decent showing, even in a loss. Something to build on, probably.
Good news first: his Achilles is reportedly intact. NBC Sports Bay Area’s Jennifer Lee Chan reported he’ll miss some time but it’s not season-ending, and the hope internally is he’s back after the bye week. Nothing official on a timeline yet, though.
Rough break regardless, for an offense that’s already dealing with a pretty long injury list this year. Evans had sat out practice all week leading into the game but was cleared to play anyway, a gamble that almost worked before the Achilles flared back up mid-game.
Kind of buried under the injury news and the tense finish is a genuinely cool piece of franchise history. With this win, San Francisco now owns the most Monday Night Football wins in NFL history outright, 56, past the tie they had with Pittsburgh. Worth noting too, they don’t have another MNF game scheduled for the rest of this season, so that record just sits there for now until scheduling brings them back to a Monday slot sometime down the line.
Six games in, and the Niners are the last undefeated team left in a league that’s already thrown out plenty of upsets this year. Purdy’s been efficient running an offense built around McCaffrey, Kittle, and Evans when he’s healthy. Defense deserves real credit for Monday too, Shanahan’s talked before about this group growing into bigger moments as the year goes on, and a lot of that growth is coming from younger guys stepping up in exactly these kinds of close finishes.
San Francisco’s heading into a stretch that’ll really test how deep this roster actually is, especially at receiver with Evans out and Christian Kirk still working his way back from his own injury. For a team chasing a perfect record, Monday proved they can grind out a win even when the game doesn’t go the way it’s supposed to, which tends to matter a lot more in December and January than it does in October.
