Predicting 49ers final 5 games to make a playoff run
Week 16: 49ers vs. Commanders
Saturday, Dec. 24 at 4:05 p.m. ET
The NFL sort of messed the Niners up on this one.
Normally, when a team plays its Thursday night game, it won’t have to play again for at least 10 days, maybe even 11 if it’s lucky enough to score a Monday Night Football matchup.
Yet in this case, the 49ers got drawn a bit of a short straw as they’ll be among the 11 NFL games happening on Christmas Eve, with only three contests (Packers/Dolphins, Broncos/Rams, and Bucs/Cardinals) taking place on Sunday, which is Christmas Day.
That means things could get a little weird.
The good news is the Niners get to host the Washington Commanders on Saturday afternoon and don’t have to fly across the country after losing a day of their mini-bye week. The bad news is that the Commanders, led by quarterback Taylor Heinicke, have been a pesky opponent since Carson Wentz went down after six games.
Under Wentz, the Commanders were 2-6. Under Heinicke, Washington has lost just once (and tied the Giants in Week 13), improving to 7-5-1 on the year. And while they are in last place in the NFC East, the division currently features all four teams sitting at .500 or better and there’s an outside chance all of the teams could make the playoffs.
The Commanders are the reverse Seahawks. Their defense is pretty strong (10th in points allowed, sixth in yards), despite missing EDGE Chase Young for the whole of the 2022 campaign so far. But the offense isn’t, struggling to score (24th in the NFL) and gain yards (21st), with neither their yards per attempt on the ground (4.0, 26th) nor through the air (5.6, 26th) providing much of a spark.
And there’s a real case to be made that they’re lucky not to have a worse record. Five of their seven wins have been by one score or fewer, and one of the wins that wasn’t — a 32-21 win over the Eagles in Week 10 — is deceiving because Washington scored on a fumble recovery on the game’s final play to run the margin of victory to 11. The other was against the Texans.
I’m wary of this one because of how long the winning streak has gone in my predictions and also how much of these wins depend on Brock Purdy just playing safe football.
Still, this one potentially has the all-important playoff implications, which means you got to like the home team.