Wil Lutz's 58-yard field goal drifted wide right with 1:18 left, and that miss will be the highlight clip. It's the wrong one. Denver lost 24-14 to San Francisco because its passing offense spent the afternoon going nowhere, and the final score is the most generous thing that happened to the Broncos all day.
Bo Nix attempted 42 passes. He completed 25 of them for 214 yards, one touchdown, no interceptions, a rating of 80.9, and 5.1 yards per attempt. That last number is the entire story of this game. Five yards a throw is not an offense. It's a punt that occasionally gets caught.
The receiving lines make it worse than the raw yardage suggests. Courtland Sutton finished with 1 catch for 4 yards on 6 targets. Evan Engram had 1 catch for 6 yards on 5 targets. Adam Trautman was targeted once and caught nothing. Denver's leading receiver on the day was rookie running back RJ Harvey, who caught all 10 of his targets for 68 yards and added two kickoff returns for 64 yards. When the checkdown is your leading receiver by 21 yards over the next man, the defense has won the down before the snap. Pat Bryant's 3 catches for 47 yards, including a 30-yarder, was the only genuine downfield work Denver got.
Jaylen Waddle caught the lone touchdown, a 13-yarder, part of a 5-catch, 35-yard afternoon. Tyler Badie chipped in two catches for 32. J.K. Dobbins carried 11 times for 40 yards and Harvey added 7 for 25. Denver ran the ball 20 times total and threw it 42. That distribution isn't aggression. It's resignation.
San Francisco, meanwhile, produced the one thing Denver never could. At 2:15 of the fourth, Brock Purdy hit George Kittle on a short left throw that became a 56-yard touchdown, with Eddy Pineiro's extra point good. That's what a functioning passing game looks like at the end of a game: one throw, one score, ballgame.
Purdy appears in this box score as the 49ers' leader in both passing and rushing, which is the tidiest possible summary of what San Francisco is right now. Christian McCaffrey, Deebo Samuel Sr. and Kaelon Black all show up as rushing leaders behind him. The 49ers moved to 4-0 without any single number screaming off the page. They didn't need one. They got the Kittle throw when the game was still live, and Denver answered with a 58-yard kick attempt that never had a chance.
Lutz's miss will get framed as bad luck, a long try that just slid. Ignore that. Denver settled for a 58-yarder because the offense had run out of ways to gain 20 yards. The scoreboard says 24-14. The box score says a team threw 42 times for 214 yards, watched its No. 1 receiver catch one ball, and handed its rookie back 10 targets out of pure necessity. Denver is 2-2, and that record is doing a lot of work it hasn't earned. This passing game as built will not hold up against a real defense, and the Broncos will be chasing .500 all winter unless someone other than a running back starts catching the football. San Francisco is 4-0 and looks like a team that knows exactly how it wins. I'll take that trade every week.
