49ers defeat Lions to advance to Super Bowl (2024)

The San Francisco 49ers scored 27 consecutive points in the second half, storming back from a three-possession halftime deficit to defeat the Detroit Lions 34-31 and advance to the Super Bowl.

San Francisco will face the Kansas City Chiefs in Las Vegas on Feb. 11 in a rematch of the 2020 Super Bowl. The 49ers are looking for their first Vince Lombardi Trophy since 1995.

For two quarters, it looked like it would be the Lions advancing to their first Super Bowl. Detroit played a nearly perfect first half, taking a 24-7 lead behind a strong ground game (touchdowns by Jameson Williams, David Montgomery and Jahmyr Gibbs) and a Malcolm Rodriguez interception.

But San Francisco scored on its first five possessions of the second half, flipping the game on its head. Brock Purdy passed for 267 yards and ran for 48, and Christian McCaffrey rushed for 90 yards and two touchdowns.

The final two quarters of Detroit’s season were marked by a series of mishaps.

Gibbs, the rookie running back, lost a fumble that helped set up San Francisco’s game-tying touchdown late in the third quarter.

The Lions failed on two fourth-down attempts — passing up a field-goal attempt that would have tied the game at 27 with 7:32 to play. San Francisco immediately drove for a touchdown that extended its lead to 10 points.

By the time the Lions scored in the second half, it was to cut the deficit to 34-31 with 56 seconds left, leaving time only for an onside kick. But 49ers tight end George Kittle recovered the loose football and San Francisco ran out the clock.

Brock Purdy has been typecast by many as the prototypical game manager. A passenger more than a driver. A beneficiary more than a benefactor. A loss preventer more than a victory retriever. The game manager label is basically a pejorative in modern quarterback discourse.

But Sunday, the 49ers needed something more. Their season was on the line. Their championship hopes were slipping away.

Purdy became who they needed him to be: a playmaker, a difference maker. In the second half, he was 13-for-16 passing for 174 yards and a touchdown. No interceptions. His 49 rushing yards was the best evidence he wasn’t merely a passenger in this historic comeback. He was driving.

“I thought it was the difference between winning and losing,” head coach Kyle Shanahan said of Purdy’s scrambling. “He made some big plays with his legs, getting out of the pocket, moving the chains on some first downs, some explosives. He competed his ass off today. Wasn’t easy for any of us. He kept grinding. He was unbelievable there in the second half.”

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SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Ben Johnson and his Detroit Lions offensive linemen and running backs were having the time of the their lives in the first half of Sunday’s NFC Championship Game. Johnson, the offensive coordinator who may soon be a head coach elsewhere, got San Francisco’s defense off balance with motion, and then smashed the 49ers with running plays. The Lions ran for 148 yards in the first half, at 7 yards a pop, to take a 24-7 lead at halftime.

In the back of his mind, Lions coach Dan Campbell knew the 49ers would stand up. He just never imagined that his team would fold and lose 34-31.

“They’re a heavyweight team that’s done it, that’s lived it … with too many good guys, you knew they were going to make a play,” Campbell said. “You have to be able to answer back and we weren’t able to do that. … And that’s very uncharacteristic of us. We’ve always been able to get our momentum back. … We just couldn’t quite get over the hump.”

The Lions gave up 27 straight points, and for some reason, ran the ball only eight times for 34 yards in the second half. There were some costly drops, some questionable decisions by Campbell on fourth down and an inability on defense to stop quarterback Brock Purdy from extending plays with his legs.

But the reason the Lions lost this game was because their offense went from dominant to dormant.

“We felt like we were in a rhythm and we were really rolling,” center Frank Ragnow said. “It’s frustrating. We weren’t able to keep it going.”

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SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The dichotomy between winner and loser, there on the field as the events of the night concluded, was a sight to behold. For one team, pure elation. A season continued. A trip to Las Vegas booked, and the Lombardi Trophy within reach. But for the game’s loser, it was as if time froze, right then and there. The finality of it all had not yet registered. It might not for some time. The perfect encapsulation of the beauty this game offers, and the numbness it leaves behind.

The Detroit Lions — yes, those Detroit Lions — came oh-so-close to their first Super Bowl appearance. But this wasn’t their night. And it won’t be their season.

“When you lose that way, it’s hard,” Lions coach Dan Campbell said, face red at the lectern, answering questions after his team’s 34-31 loss to the San Francisco 49ers in the NFC Championship Game. “You feel like you get your heart ripped out. … You wish you could keep going together, but that’s not the reality.”

The reality these Lions are left with is not one they expected, even if others didn’t expect them to make it this far. They touched down in the Bay Area looking to extend what had been a magical season, reaching new heights and exorcising demons along the way. It started in the offseason. The Lions believed they were ready to contend with the NFL’s elite. In many ways, this season — and even this game — proved that.

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Dan Campbell went for it twice on fourth down and failed when his Lions were in field-goal range, generating all sorts of discussion regarding his strategy after the 49ers overcame a 17-point halftime deficit for a 34-31 victory.

The first time, Detroit faced fourth-and-2 from the San Francisco 28-yard line while leading by 14 points with 7:03 left in the third quarter. Instead of trying a 46-yard field goal for a potential 17-point lead, the Lions passed incomplete to Josh Reynolds, who dropped the ball beyond the first-down marker.

The second time, Detroit faced fourth-and-3 from the San Francisco 30 while trailing by three with 7:38 left in the fourth quarter. Instead of trying a 48-yard field goal for a potential tie, the Lions threw incomplete. This time, the pass was not close to being caught.

After the game, I asked two in-game strategists and a former head coach for their opinions on the decisions. It’s probably a good thing they were not all in the same room. A fired-up exec weighed in by text unsolicited. The coach at one point used the word “ignorant” to describe one strategist’s justification for the decisions.

“I agree with all of Campbell’s calls,” one of the strategists said. “(Kicker Michael) Badgley is a below-average, journeyman kicker and not automatic. (Jake) Moody (of the 49ers) already missed one. (Buffalo’s) Tyler Bass missed last week. Fourth-and-2 to 3 is more than 50 percent make. The second decision is more palatable for a field goal to tie if you have a stud kicker you feel good about. On the first one, Reynolds needs to make that catch.”

That last comment set off the former head coach.

“To say the guy might miss the kick is ridiculous,” the coach said. “The guy might drop the ball, and the ball might get batted, and a defensive lineman might beat a guard and hit the quarterback. Whatever you do, you have to execute. If you decide to kick the field goal, you have to make it. The 49ers’ first field-goal miss was fourth-and-10. Guys have been making or missing field goals forever. But the percentages of kicking the field goal are good.”

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SANTA CLARA, Calif. — How’d the San Francisco 49ers feel when they entered the locker room at halftime of Sunday’s NFC Championship Game, trailing the Detroit Lions 24-7?

“Embarrassed” might be the best descriptor — especially for a 49ers defense that had looked utterly helpless over the first 30 minutes, allowing 148 rushing yards on 7 yards per carry to the Lions.

“We had a gut check,” 49ers safety Tashaun Gipson Sr. said. “There was a lot of yelling in the locker room. (Defensive coordinator) Steve Wilks was over here yelling. We needed a little wake-up call. We got punched in our mouth.”

During halftime, the 49ers offense and defense retreat into separate corners of the room. The rowdier conference was certainly in the defensive corner, where Wilks told the unit that he’d shift to more man coverage in the second half after the Lions had scorched through essentially every zone look the 49ers had given them in the first half.

“I wouldn’t say it was anger,” Gipson said. “It was more so guys needed to (step) up. Coaches knew the type of guys we have in here. That first half, the Lions imposed their will. They ran however they wanted. They threw whatever they wanted. It’s just something I’ve never been a part of with this defense, and we’ve had some rough patches this year.”

Halftime ended with both offense and defense congregating in the middle of the locker room, where linebacker Fred Warner delivered a simple message to the entire team.

“Fred said, ‘We got 30 minutes left,'” 49ers offensive lineman Aaron Banks said. “‘You want to go to the Super Bowl or not?’”

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SANTA CLARA, Calif. — “I will be back here. I will be back here. And I will be back with motherf—ing vengeance.”

George Kittle said those words, captured by NFL Films, four years ago as the clock wound toward a defeat to the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIV. On Sunday, it was Kittle who grabbed an onside kick that essentially sealed a 34-31 comeback win that not only sends the San Francisco 49ers back to the Super Bowl but sets up a rematch with the Chiefs.

The 49ers are indeed back in the big game as Kittle promised, but whether they are arriving as an avenging force like he envisioned is another matter.

The road to this year’s Super Bowl has been far different — and far more difficult — than it was in the 2019 postseason when the 49ers practically coasted to Hard Rock Stadium in Miami. That was especially true of the NFC Championship Game in which they jumped out to a 27-0 lead on the Green Bay Packers and rolled up 285 yards on the ground.

On Sunday, it was the 49ers who looked like they might get trampled.

They trailed 24-7 at halftime with Brock Purdy throwing a second-quarter interception while the defense, for the second straight game, got pushed around at the line of scrimmage and whiffed on tackles at the second level. The Detroit Lions had 148 rushing yards in the first half alone.

“It was embarrassing. We kind of felt helpless,” defensive end Nick Bosa said. “We didn’t want to go down as failures. And we know that our defense was way too good to play like that.”

Four years ago, Bosa was a rookie whose role was to be seen and not heard. On Sunday, he was one of the loud voices in the locker room. He said spent the first few minutes of the break lying on his stomach with a heat pack on his back “just screaming nonsense.”

Pressed for details, he said his message was that all it would take was a couple of small adjustments to stop the running game and to knock Lions quarterback Jared Goff, who was an efficient 13-of-20 for 145 through two quarters, off his mark.

That was the team-wide tone as the 49ers took the field for the second half — discontent, defiant and, according to coach Kyle Shanahan, “extremely pissed.” It was one thing to lose in the playoffs, he said, but another to get shoved around in their own building.

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The Detroit Lions rode the trademarked bravado of Dan Campbell’s decision-making to 14 total wins this season, winning the franchise’s first playoff game in three-plus decades and coming two quarters away from clinching a Super Bowl berth in Sunday’s NFC Championship Game.

But the final two quarters of their season fell apart at the seams, with the biggest nail in the postseason run’s coffin coming on a failed fourth-down conversion with 7:32 to play.

“I just felt really good about us converting and getting our momentum and not letting them play long ball,” Campbell said after the game. “They were bleeding the clock out, that’s what they do, and I wanted to get the upper hand back.”

The spread for Super Bowl LVIII has already moved three times in less than an hour at BetMGM.

The 49ers opened up as 2-point favorites against the Chiefs and the line quickly moved to the 49ers being 2.5 point favorites. Now, the line has moved toward Kansas City and San Francisco is a 1.5 point favorite.

The Lions' magical run has come to an end. In the end, the Lions didn't make enough plays to win this game. A dropped interception and several passes, failed fourth-down conversions — a product of Dan Campbell's aggressive nature — and a stagnant second-half performance helped the 49ers erase a 24-7 deficit and advance. They're set to face Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs. The Lions, meanwhile, are left to watch their magical season come to an end, one game shy of the Super Bowl.

This one will sting for a while, considering how close the Lions got to a game they've never played in before. Nothing in this league is guaranteed, and the Lions were on the brink of a Super Bowl appearance — only to watch a 17-point lead vanish in just one quarter. That said, the Lions believe they're built to be back here soon. This was their first shot with this group, and they made it this far. Their window of contention is now open. We'll see what comes of it.

The raging Brock Purdy discourse has a new chapter to dissect. Has Purdy cemented his status as an elite quarterback in this league? For the second straight playoff game, Purdy was sensational when it absolutely mattered most. Today, he needed to deliver for a much longer stretch than last week, since the 49ers had fallen so far behind in the first half.

But Purdy did that, delivering with both his arm and his legs during an epic second-half comeback that'll live forever in San Francisco's illustrious history — which includes top-notch postseason performances authored by Joe Montana and Steve Young. Purdy enjoyed some luck, too — Brandon Aiyuk caught a deep pass that clanged off Detroit DB Kindle Vildor's helmet to spark the charge. But after that, Purdy locked in with lethal accuracy to all parts of the field and 51 yards of scrambles that'd make even Young proud.

This was sensational, and it's a perfect prelude to Purdy against the Chiefs' Patrick Mahomes in Super Bowl LVIII.

The Lions took a huge step in their development this year by winning 12 games in the regular season and advancing to the NFC Championship Game.

But being up 24-7 at halftime and seemingly in control, only to fall apart in the third quarter and eventually lose 34-31, will sting in Detroit for a long time. It took the Lions 32 years to return to a conference championship game, so they know nothing is a given.

And they will certainly wonder: What might have been against the Chiefs in the Super Bowl?