could affiord to spend time thinking about our NFL teams?
(Columnist slowly, tentatively raises his hand.) ...
• Before you start setting money aside for Rams playoff tickets, this word of caution: The 49ers made a huge acquisition this week without needing to make a trade. Christian McCaffrey is healthy again. He hasn’t played yet this season and went on injured reserve Sept. 14 with bilateral Achilles tendinitis, after being slowed by a calf injury in training camp. He’s expected to make his season debut this Sunday against Tampa Bay. ...
• For the record, McCaffrey has played against the Rams twice as a 49er. In 2022 at SoFi, shortly after San Francisco acquired him from Carolina (in part to keep him away from the Rams), the former Stanford star ran 18 times for 94 yards, caught eight passes for 55 and scored twice. Last year in Inglewood, he ran 20 times for 116 yards and a TD. He was inactive when the teams played on the final day of last season in Santa Clara because the 49ers already had the division title sewn up.
If his impact is as much as I think it will be, the Niners (4-4) are about to separate themselves from the pack and the Rams (4-4), Cardinals (5-4) and Seahawks (4-5) are maybe — maybe — in the hunt for a wild-card spot. ...
• Not all games on the schedule are created equal. These are the ones to watch:
For the Rams, Nov. 24 against Philadelphia, Dec. 8 against Buffalo (both at SoFi), Dec. 12 against the Niners in Santa Clara, and the week 17 and 18 games (date TBA) at home against the Cardinals and Seahawks. For the Chargers: a Monday night game Nov. 25 at SoFi against Baltimore — the Harbaugh Bowl — followed by road games Dec. 1 at Atlanta and Dec. 8 at Kansas City, a Sunday night game. ...
• Will the 8-0 Chiefs still be undefeated by then? There are at least 11 teams rooting hard against them: The nine teams they still must play (Denver twice, Buffalo, Carolina, Cleveland, Houston, Pittsburgh, Jacksonville and the Raiders and Chargers), Baltimore (which at 7-3 still has playoff seeding to think about), and the surviving members of the 1972 Miami Dolphins, whose status as the only start-to-finish undefeated and untied team in NFL history is again in jeopardy. ...
• Little remembered fact, though: Those 17-0 Dolphins aren’t the only undefeated team in pro football history. The 1948 Cleveland Browns of the All American Football Conference were 14-0. The 1929 Green Bay Packers were 12-0-1, the Canton Bulldogs of the then-infant NFL were 10-0-2 in 1922 and 11-0-1 in 1923, and the Akron Pros were 8-0-3 in 1920 in the first season of the American Pro Football Association (which, two years later, was renamed the National Football League). ...
• And consider this as you look at the remainder of their schedule: The Chiefs have won six of their eight games by a touchdown or less (and one of those “lopsided” wins was 28-18 over the 49ers in a rematch of last February’s Super Bowl).
What that stat tells me is not necessarily what you might think. Good teams find ways to win close games. Bad teams find ways to lose them, and then rationalize that they came oh, so close. ...
• (I didn’t mean to mention USC here, honest. It just slipped out.) ...
• It was a little surprising that Chargers’ general manager Joe Hortiz didn’t make a move to add receiving help to his 5-3 team at the deadline, especially when a familiar face was available. Mike Williams, deemed expendable by the Jets, instead was traded to Pittsburgh on Tuesday.
“We like our guys,” Jim Harbaugh said in the immediate aftermath of the deadline, which passed without a Chargers move. The attitude here: We’ll see, even with the understanding that Harbaugh and Hortiz know their personnel better than any of us do. ...
• We were talking about games to watch? Here’s a Sunday afternoon game that has nothing to do with the NFL but may be one of the most compelling matchups of the fall: Nov. 24, women’s basketball, defending NCAA champion South Carolina at UCLA, 1 p.m.
How’s that for a measuring stick?
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