49ers defeat Packers: Updates and reaction (2024)

San Francisco 49ers linebacker Dre Greenlaw sealed the 24-21 victory in his team’s NFC divisional round game against the Green Bay Packers Saturday night with his second interception of the game.

The 49ers advanced to the NFC Championship Game and will face the winner of Sunday’s game between the Detroit Lions and Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

San Francisco trailed Green Bay 21-17 with a little over six minutes to play. But 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy led his team on a 12-play, 69-yard drive that ended with running back Christian McCaffrey scoring his second touchdown of the game to put San Francisco ahead.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Fred Warner, the leader of the San Francisco 49ers defense, told his fellow stud linebacker Dre Greenlaw he would get a pick-six.

So when Greenlaw got the game-sealing interception Saturday, staving off an embarrassing upset and putting the 49ers in the NFC Championship Game, he had a prophecy to fulfill.

He dove in front of Warner, snagged the low throw from Green Bay Packers quarterback Jordan Love, rolled over a couple of times and landed at the 49ers’ 42-yard line. With just over 40 seconds left, the win was in hand, nestled securely against his arm brace. Levi’s Stadium erupted.

“I’m right there for the interception,” Warner said. “I see Superman Dre Greenlaw come out of nowhere and snag it. ‘Yes!’”

It was a clutch play on a night the 49ers defense looked anything but championship-caliber. Penalties, blown coverages, soft run defense and missed tackles left the 49ers vulnerable to one of the hottest offenses in the league. Packers running back Aaron Jones rushed for 108 yards, including a massive 53-yard run when the 49ers defensive line once again didn’t set the edge. Love was picking on Ambry Thomas and led two touchdown drives, both to give the Packers the lead.

But Greenlaw’s interception was the exclamation point on a defense that battled back from disappointment. Their resilience, even against their own mediocrity, kept the 49ers in the game while the offense struggled mightily. After Brock Purdy marched the 49ers 69 yards in 12 plays for the first fourth-quarter comeback of his young career, the game was left in the hands of the defense.

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SANTA CLARA, Calif. — You want to know who held Brock Purdy and the San Francisco 49ers accountable Saturday, with the clock running out, the rain coming down, Deebo Samuel out injured and the Green Bay Packers just a play or two from a monumental playoff upset?

You want to know who assigned responsibility and demanded that the 49ers fight through their game-long struggles? Who laid out all the potential consequences? That would be Purdy and every other member of the 49ers, who got themselves into this spot with one of their most baffling performances of this season.

They got the ball back with 6:13 left in the game after a Packers field-goal miss. They 49ers trailed by four points. They needed a touchdown. And they knew this was probably their last realistic chance to figure out how to avoid a horrendous loss in this divisional-round playoff game. So once the offense got into the huddle, Trent Williams gave a mini-speech.

“I just told them, hey, man, with six minutes left, this might be the last time we get the ball. And if we don’t do something with it, this could be the last time we’re in this huddle together,” Williams recalled. “So whatever you’ve got, just bring it. Bring it the next play and then bring it the play after that and then let the rest take care of itself.”

They all felt it. The 49ers were at Levi’s Stadium, set up as NFC favorites to get to the Super Bowl, and they absolutely felt it. What happened next: Purdy broke out of his funk and started completing passes, Brandon Aiyuk made a huge diving catch on third down, Purdy scrambled inside the Packers’ 10-yard line and finally Christian McCaffrey bolted in for a 6-yard touchdown that put the 49ers ahead at last. Then Dre Greenlaw finished off the 49ers’ 24-21 victory by intercepting Jordan Love’s ill-advised across-his-body heave in the final minute.

But oh yeah, the 49ers felt it. And nobody felt it more than Purdy. Almost an hour after the game, you could tell they still felt it — all the adrenaline, all the disappointment over playing so haphazardly in such a big game, all the significance and all the relief. The 49ers saw their playoff lives flash before their eyes Saturday … and thanks to those last handful of plays, they’re still alive with a berth in the NFC Championship Game at Levi’s on Jan. 28, facing the winner of Sunday’s Lions-Buccaneers game.

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SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Every game, San Francisco 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan scripts eight plays to begin the second half — four runs, four passes.

There’s built-in flexibility to how the plays are deployed, of course. Even if a run is next on the list, the 49ers can turn to one of their passes if the down-and-distance situation calls for it — or vice versa. But the bottom line is that there are eight plays, tailor-made for the given game’s opponent, that the 49ers are intent on running coming out of the locker room.

One of those plays in Saturday’s thrilling 24-21 divisional round win over the Green Bay Packers was a pitch-back run called “18 Mike.”

It’s one of Christian McCaffrey’s favorite calls. So when the star running back saw 18 Mike on the board leaving the locker room at halftime, he smiled.

“He told me coming out that on that play, he was going to score,” Shanahan said.

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SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The Packers were never supposed to make it this far, but this one is going to sting.

The final score says what it does — 49ers 24, Packers 21 — but Green Bay outplayed San Francisco on Sunday. Forget that, on paper, this was a No. 7 seed vs. a No. 1 seed. Those were two evenly matched teams that are two of the NFL’s best, both now and in the future. And unlike the last time the Packers played at Levi’s Stadium in the playoffs, a 37-20 49ers win that was far more lopsided than the final score indicated, Green Bay should’ve won this game but let it slip away.

The Packers dropped two interceptions, one by safety Darnell Savage and one by cornerback Keisean Nixon, both of which would’ve set the Packers up with prime field position and in Savage’s case, potentially another pick-six. Tackling woes resurfaced, most prominently when the 49ers went 71 yards in two plays thanks to back-breaking whiffs by safety Jonathan Owens on tight end George Kittle’s 32-yard catch-and-run and by Savage on running back Christian McCaffrey’s 39-yard touchdown scamper up the middle that gave the 49ers a 14-13 lead in the third quarter. Rookie kicker Anders Carlson missed yet another kick, this one a 41-yarder with the Packers leading by four with 6:18 remaining in the game, making it 10 of the last 12 games in which Carlson missed a kick. And after being arguably the NFL’s best quarterback since midseason, Jordan Love’s glass slipper turned into a pumpkin late in the game.

“I think part of the reason it stings so bad right now is we fully believed and fully expected to win this game,” said head coach Matt LaFleur, who has been eliminated from the postseason three times by his buddy Kyle Shanahan in four postseason trips. “Give San Francisco credit. They made more plays in some of those critical situations down the stretch. It’s a tough football team, but I felt like we had plenty of opportunities to kind of put the game out of reach and unfortunately just didn’t do enough.”

It wasn’t just late in the game when Love and the offense shot itself in the foot.

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SANTA CLARA, Calif. — “Get down! Get down! Get down!”

Dre Greenlaw’s game-sealing interception with 46 seconds remaining should have been a moment of elation for Kyle Shanahan and the San Francisco 49ers. Instead, it produced peak stress as Greenlaw got up and ran with the ball for another 12 seconds, ducking and dodging Green Bay Packers tacklers and risking a fumble in rain-soaked Levi’s Stadium.

Shanahan — and every other 49er — was screaming for Greenlaw to drop down and end the game.

“That was kind of like the whole day — all the guys that I would get really upset with are also the ones I have a lot of love for,” a relieved Shanahan said afterward. “They’re the ones who pulled it off to get a W.”

The topsy-turvy emotions of those 12 seconds nicely captured the 49ers’ 24-21 win over the Packers, a game in which the home team seemed to be in bumbling, preseason mode on one snap, then came back with a big play on the next.

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BetMGM just updated its Super Bowl odds following San Francisco victory over Green Bay:

• 49ers: +175
• Ravens: +190
• Bills: +550
• Chiefs: +800
• Lions: +850
• Buccaneers: +4000

The 49ers move on to the NFC Championship Game even on a night where a lot went wrong for every single phase of the game.

That's the type of win that every Super Bowl champion must at some point notch, it seems.

As mentioned on the broadcast, before tonight, the 49ers were 0-30 under Kyle Shanahan when trailing by 7 or more points in the fourth quarter.

Not a bad time to end that dubious streak.

And the 49ers look as though they are going to escape, as Dre Greenlaw's second interception of the day against Jordan Love gives them the ball back with 34 seconds to play.

Brock Purdy was 6-of-7 on that touchdown drive with his one incompletion coming on a George Kittle drop. Christian McCaffrey gives the 49ers the 24-21 lead with a 6-yard touchdown run.

The Packers have 1:07 and three timeouts to mount a comeback.

Brock Purdy's accuracy has been extremely erratic today in the rain.

This is his second-worst game in terms of off target percentage since playing the Cleveland Browns in week 6. Remarkably, he still has a chance to win this game.

Per the Fox broadcast, Green Bay running back Aaron Jones’ five-game streak with 100 or more rushing yards sets a franchise record in that category.

That is an incredibly impressive record given the Packers have had great rushers such as Ahman Green, Jim Taylor, Paul Hornung, Tony Canadeo, John Brockington and Clarke Hinkle.

Taylor, Hornung, Canadeo and Hinkle are all Pro Football Hall of Famers and Green leads the franchise in rushing yards.

Aaron Jones continues his streak of 100 yards rushing to five games with that last long run. The Athletic's Matt Schneidman recently wrote about Jones becoming a catalyst for the Packers' run to the playoffs and he's been just as effective in the two postseason games.

A season that had been marred with injuries has pivoted into maybe the best stretch of Jones' career.

The 49ers hadn't given up 100 yards to an opposing runner since Oct. 31, 2021.

Aaron Jones has 107 yards right now.