A Team Will Need to Be Perfect to Beat the 49ers

Take a closer look at Deebo Samuel’s 74-yard touchdown, and you can see everything that makes San Francisco so dangerous.

Watch Deebo Samuel’s 74-yard touchdown during the 49ers’ 41–23 wild-card win over the Seahawks again. Pause it 1.5 seconds in, while Brock Purdy is whipping a fake toss to his right side. There are nine defensive players in plain view, six of them are barreling toward Christian McCaffrey, all at once entranced with and terrified by the proposition of his getting another touch.

Here it is, so you can follow along:

74 YARDS TO THE 🏡 FOR DEEBO SAMUEL ‼️

(via @NFL)pic.twitter.com/bh2E85i0BS

— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) January 15, 2023

Pause it again, this time after three seconds. Purdy completes his rollout and calmly looks downfield as a Seahawks linebacker, Cody Barton, runs at him with his hands in the air. Purdy, for those of you who plugged your ears for a majority of this broadcast, was the last player (262nd) taken in the 2022 draft. He’s the youngest player in NFL history to throw for at least two touchdowns and run for another in a playoff game. He is the first rookie to account for four total touchdowns in a playoff game. He started his first playoff game looking like a child on a surfboard and ended it looking like Kelly Slater.

Pause it at five seconds. Samuel gets his hands on the ball, and there isn’t a player on either side of him for four yards. He looks like a famous person wading comfortably through a concert crowd aided by personal security.

Pause it at six seconds and watch George Kittle use his body to legally box a defender out of the play.

Pause it at seven seconds, when Samuel looks around, seemingly giddy about how much room he has, enough that he can skip-hop a bit as he finds his route to the end zone.

Pause it at nine seconds and watch Brandon Aiyuk drive potential Defensive Rookie of the Year Tariq Woolen out of the play so Samuel can keep running. This is a former first-round-pick wide receiver scrapping like a barfly.

Pause it at 11 seconds when it becomes clear that no steroid in the world can be taken to help someone prevent Samuel from scoring at this point. Medina Spirit wouldn’t have caught him. Bodies fall behind him like cardboard tombstones on Halloween.

Pause it at 13 seconds and realize that Samuel wasn’t even running as fast as he possibly could.

Good luck trying to tackle Samuel. (And several other 49ers.) :: Cary Edmondson/USA TODAY Sports

Here, in a space of time shorter than your average TikTok video, was the cruel, unvarnished truth about this year’s NFC playoffs: You are going to have to be perfect to beat the 49ers. Absolutely stone-cold perfect. The rookie quarterback is more than good enough. The skill-position players are better than your defense. The defense is better than any other in the league. They block well, and not just across the offensive line. Everyone takes a turn. They create open space better than any scheme in football. They have more functional team speed than anyone else in the NFL. They are bigger, quicker, tougher, meaner, better coached and more efficient.

The Seahawks gave it their best effort and finished like an amateur golfer at the Masters. After the game, Pete Carroll said he was frustrated, because he thought the game was in their grasp. They won’t be the only ones to feel that way this postseason.

The 49ers can move on a team in so many different ways. They can come off the opening kickoff wielding a hammer and bludgeoning them to pieces. Their defense can crawl its way into the backfield and strip-sack you to death. Or they could do what they did Saturday against Seattle. It can look like a real race. It can look competitive. It can look for 30 minutes like both teams belong on the same field, in the same division, in the same playoff bracket. And then, like Eliud Kipchoge in a marathon, you turn around and they’re ahead by eight miles, cruising, smiling, waving to whomever can still see them off in the distance.

There are a handful of good teams in this year’s postseason field, but so few of them profile like the 49ers. We’ve seen the Bills falter. We’ve seen what the Chiefs are missing, in terms of a consistent, complementary running game that can take the stress off Patrick Mahomes when facing the league’s best secondaries. We know what the Eagles look like without Jalen Hurts, or without him at full strength. We have not seen the 49ers lose since Halloween. In that time period, we have possibly seen one or two games you could classify as bad or sloppy. We've seen 11 consecutive wins, which is the longest winning streak in the NFL. We’ve seen shutout wins. We’ve seen 38–10, 35–7 and 38–13.

We’ll save you the trouble of going back and watching all of them. Everything that makes the 49ers so terrifying was there in that 13 seconds against the Seahawks on Saturday. Who is stopping that?