49ers 41, Chargers 17: Jacob Cowing Went Eighty Three Yards Down the SoFi Sideline and the Whole Night Turned Into Something

Forty one points on Jim Harbaugh's defence in his own building. Three hundred and twenty one yards. A hundred and forty six on the ground. And a receiver who lost an entire year to a hamstring taking a punt to the house. I know it's August. I don't care.

Forty one to seventeen. In his building. On his defence. On a Thursday night in August in front of sixty two thousand people who came out to watch Jim Harbaugh be Jim Harbaugh again, and who instead watched the San Francisco 49ers hang forty one on the Los Angeles Chargers and make it look casual.

I spent all of last week telling you Thursday was going to be strange and that none of it would mean anything. I was half right. It was strange. And then somewhere around the middle of the second quarter it stopped being a preseason game to me and started being the most encouraging three hours this franchise has produced since January, and I've decided I'm not going to apologise for that.

Start with the play, because everybody is going to be talking about the play. Second quarter. Chargers punt. Jacob Cowing fields it, and instead of the little four yard fair catch shuffle we've watched from this return unit for two years, he takes one step, finds a crease that shouldn't have been there, and he's gone. Eighty three yards. Nobody laid a hand on him after the first fifteen.

You have to understand what that's for him. Cowing lost an entire season to a hamstring. All of it. He came in with the kind of speed that makes coaches talk in italics, and then he spent a year on a table instead of a field, and if you've followed this roster at all you know that's usually where the story quietly ends. Instead he stood there afterwards and called it a special moment, and Kyle Shanahan, who compliments almost nothing in August, called it a big time play.

Eighty three yards, from a man who didn't play a snap last year. That's the whole reason preseason exists.

Now the part I couldn't stop thinking about, which is the run game. A hundred and forty six rushing yards. Against a Harbaugh front. With Christian McCaffrey standing on the sideline in a hat after taking warmups and getting shut down with tightness, which after the state of the running back room is exactly the sentence that ruins my week.

It didn't matter. Sincere McCormick took six carries for fifty three yards and walked in from seven. Khalil Herbert punched one in from a yard out. Adrian Martinez, the quarterback, ran nine yards for another one. Three different men, three different rushing touchdowns, on a night when the back who's supposed to do all of that was in street clothes.

Sixty eight rushing yards for them. A hundred and forty six for us. That isn't a preseason fluke. That's one offensive line getting movement and the other one not getting it, for three straight hours, through four different sets of bodies.

Brock Purdy played one drive and I have nothing to complain about. Four of six for twenty nine yards, moved the ball, the drive stalled, they punted, he put his coat on. That's the correct amount of Brock Purdy in a game that doesn't count, and if you were hoping for more you haven't been paying attention to how Shanahan handles his quarterback in August. Mac Jones came in and went six of thirteen for eighty nine, which is fine. Nobody signed Mac Jones to be interesting.

Across the field, Justin Herbert took the opening series, threw one completion for nine yards to Charlie Kolar, and went three and out. That was his night. Trey Lance, who some of you still have complicated feelings about, went ten of sixteen for seventy three, which is a lot of completions for not very many yards and tells you roughly everything about how that offence looked.

De’Zhaun Stribling had four catches for forty six yards and most of them moved the chains. I've been loud about this kid since camp opened and I'm going to keep being loud about him. Everybody spent draft weekend telling us he was a reach, and the kid everybody called a reach has been the most reliable third down target on this roster for a month. Four catches, several of them on third down, in August, in a stadium that isn't his.

KhaDarel Hodge matched him with four for forty six, which is a nice thing to be able to say about the veteran they brought in this soon after he signed. Jordan Watkins caught three for forty one and took one in from seventeen. That's a receiver room where the front half is hurt and the back half went out and produced anyway.

The special teams unit had the best night of anybody. Beyond the punt return, Nick Martin knocked the ball loose on a kickoff return in the fourth quarter and Hodge fell on it. Eddy Pineiro hit from forty eight and forty five and didn't miss an extra point in five tries. If you've watched this franchise lose games in January because of a kicker and a return unit, and you've, then you understand why a quiet, clean, occasionally violent night from that phase of the team is worth more to me than any throw Purdy could have made.

Now the honest column, because I'm not going to pretend it was perfect. Adrian Martinez threw a ball into the flat in the third quarter and Junior Colson picked it and walked sixteen yards into the end zone untouched. Untouched. Nobody within five yards of him. That's the kind of play that gets a young quarterback cut in about ten days, and it was the only genuinely bad thing the offence did all night. Martinez then went out and scored twice more, once with his legs and once on the throw to Watkins, which is either resilience or a complete absence of memory, and at his age those are the same thing.

Credit where it's due, too, because Colson had lost his own entire season to a shoulder and that was his first live football in a year. Two men on that field came back from a lost year and both of them scored. Say what you want about August. That's a good night for football.

The Chargers beat themselves in a way that should worry them. Seven penalties, four of them on offence, and the flags kept landing on the plays that actually worked. An eighteen yard throw from Lance to Oronde Gadsden came back on an illegal shift. A Lance run came back. A twenty one yard run from Keaton Mitchell came back on an illegal formation. A Kimani Vidal run came back on another shift. Eight punts. Their left tackle went out in the second quarter and never came back. Harbaugh teams don't usually look like that, and if you enjoyed watching a Harbaugh sideline boil over about procedural penalties for three quarters, well, so did I, and I should probably examine that at some point.

So what does any of it mean. Nothing, technically. It's a preseason game. The starters played about a dozen snaps between them. McCaffrey didn't dress, George Kittle is still working his way back from the Achilles, Nick Bosa is being handled like porcelain, and most of the first team defence watched this in a headset.

Here's what I think it means anyway. This roster is deep in the exact places it hasn't been deep in years. The third and fourth running backs gained yards against real defenders. The fifth and sixth receivers caught the ball on third down. The return game, which has been a genuine liability, produced eighty three yards on one play. Every one of those is a September problem being solved in August, and for a team that has spent two seasons getting dismantled by its own injury report, depth isn't a luxury item. It's the whole season.

One and one in the preseason, which means nothing, and the full picture of who's healthy and who isn't is on the depth chart page. Week 1 is at the Rams in Melbourne on the tenth of September, which is still the strangest sentence in the Australia trip, and the whole year is laid out in the season schedule hub. Everything else lives on the 49ers hub.

But for one Thursday night in Los Angeles, in a building belonging to the coach who used to be ours, the 49ers were faster, tougher, better coached and considerably more fun than the other team, and a kid who spent a year on a training table ran a punt eighty three yards. Enjoy it. We don't get many of these in August.

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