The 49ers Could Not Run And Could Not Stop The Run
San Francisco out-gained Tennessee by 43 yards, held the ball five and a half minutes longer, converted nearly half its third downs, turned it over zero times and scored thirteen points. Everything that went wrong Thursday night happened at the line of scrimmage, in both directions.
Two days on, the Tennessee game reads worse in a spreadsheet than it did in the stadium, and it reads worse in a specific way.
San Francisco out-gained the Titans 322 net yards to 279. It held the ball for 32:48 against 27:12. It converted 9 of 19 third downs against Tennessee's 4 of 12. It committed seven penalties for 48 yards, two fewer and nineteen fewer yards than the Titans. It did not turn the ball over, and neither did they.
It lost 19-13, and it scored those thirteen points on 322 yards, which is one point for every 24.8 yards gained.
A preseason result is not evidence of anything and nobody in the building will look at the 19-13 again. The line of scrimmage is a different matter, because that is where a 90-man roster gets sorted into 53, and Thursday it went badly in both directions at once.
The run game, with the denominator printed#
Four running backs carried the ball 23 times for 52 yards. That is 2.3 yards a carry.
- Sincere McCormick, No. 35: 10 carries, 38 yards
- Khalil Herbert, No. 40: 6 carries, 18 yards
- Patrick Taylor Jr., No. 32: 5 carries, minus 5 yards, one touchdown
- Zamir White, No. 30: 2 carries, 1 yard
The team line of 28 for 84 looks better than that, and it is better than that, because it includes the quarterbacks. Adrian Martinez, No. 4, ran twice for 18. Kurtis Rourke, No. 14, ran three times for 14 before his ribs sent him to a hospital, where X-rays found no break and he was released. Take the quarterback scrambles out and the men whose job is running the football gained 52 yards on 23 attempts.
Taylor's line is the one that stops you. Five carries for minus five yards, and a touchdown, which is a sentence that could only be written about a goal-line back on a night when nothing else worked. He scored. He also lost ground on the majority of his attempts, and 23 carries is a small enough sample that one back going backwards moves the whole number.
Twenty-three carries is not a verdict on anybody. It is barely a quarter of a normal week's work split four ways. What it is, for a club that has to cut roughly 37 men by September 1, is most of the live evidence any of these four will get before the decision, because the second and third preseason games will be split the same way.
The other side of it, which was worse#
Tennessee ran 31 times for 167 yards. That is 5.4 a carry.
San Francisco's backs averaged 2.3 and its defense allowed 5.4, and both halves of that were produced against the other team's backups, in a game where neither side's regulars played meaningful snaps. The Titans gained more than twice as much per rush as the 49ers did while carrying it three more times.
The passing halves ran the other way, and hard. San Francisco threw for 238 yards to Tennessee's 112, on 28 completions in 44 attempts, with no interceptions and no touchdowns. Rourke was 12 of 14 for 101 before he left. Martinez was 16 of 30 for 159 after he came in. A 53 percent completion rate on 30 attempts and an 86 percent rate on 14 are not comparable samples, and the honest version is that the club got eighteen minutes of the quarterback it wanted to see and then two and a half quarters of something else.
Joey Slye kicked four field goals for Tennessee, from 39, 55, 53 and 58 yards. The 58-yarder with 2:23 left decided it. Nine of Tennessee's nineteen points came from a kicker on a night its offense converted a third of its third downs.
What this does and does not say about the offensive line#
The gamebook has the starting five: left tackle Austen Pleasants, No. 62; left guard Robert Jones, No. 65; center Drake Nugent, No. 66; right guard Connor Colby, No. 75; right tackle Brandon Parker, No. 60. Every offensive regular sat, which is why that line exists at all.
Carver Willis, No. 74, the fourth-round rookie out of Washington who came off the concussion protocol on August 10, played at left tackle rather than at the left guard spot where he had been taking second-team reps. Doug Kramer Jr., No. 58, signed on August 10 when the club released Nick Zakelj, played center behind Nugent.
Here is the limit, and it is a real one: the club published no participation report for this game. No official snap counts exist. That means nobody outside the building can say how many snaps any of those men played, in what combinations, or against which of Tennessee's defensive units. Anyone telling you a specific 49ers lineman played a specific number of snaps on Thursday is either inside the building or guessing.
So the line's night has to be read through the team numbers, and the team numbers say two things that do not agree. The protection was good enough for two quarterbacks to complete 28 of 44 with no interceptions and for a passing game to out-produce Tennessee's by 126 yards. The run blocking was not good enough for anybody to gain three yards on the ground.
That matters because the argument this camp has actually been having is about pass protection at left guard. It has been Colby's job, then Jones's job on the only published Saturday alignment, with Willis and Brett Toth behind them and Toth in the concussion protocol since August 8. Thursday did not settle that argument. It suggested the club may be arguing about the wrong half of the position.
The spot nobody has been promoted into#
The 53-man projection has carried an open offensive line spot since August 8, the day Toth's concussion took him off the board. It has been deliberately empty ever since: 52 named men and one hole, rather than a name promoted to make a counter read correctly.
Thursday was the first live football played since that hole opened. It produced 52 rushing yards on 23 carries and did not obviously fill it.
Two preseason games remain, at the Chargers on August 20 and at the Raiders on August 27. The roster is set on September 1.
This piece stated, in two places, that San Francisco's roster is set on September 1, once as the deadline by which the club has to cut roughly 37 men. The NFL's 2026 cutdown deadline is 3 p.m. PT on Sunday, August 30, and waiver claims are awarded at 10 a.m. PT on Monday, August 31. The published date was two days late and fell on the wrong day of the week, which matters to a reader planning around cut day. It does not change the argument, which is that 23 carries is most of the live evidence any of these four backs will get before the decision.
DS
Sources: ESPN box score and team statistics for Tennessee at San Francisco, August 13, 2026, read August 14, and re-checked August 15. Rourke's X-ray result and his release from the hospital via NBC Sports Bay Area and CBS Sports, August 14. Official gamebook starting lineups via the 49ers beat file. Club transaction releases of August 10 for the Kramer signing and the Zakelj release. Jersey numbers verified against the club's published roster.
