San Francisco at Carolina

This game should be a defensive tug-of-war, as each team has shown inefficiencies on offense and each brings a complete team on the defensive side of the ball with few weaknesses. Carolina has struggled on offense, especially against the very good defenses they have faced this season. The top five defenses they saw this year were two games against New Orleans where they scored a combined 30 points, San Francisco for 10 points, Arizona with 6 points and vs. Seattle getting just  7 points. The Panthers' five games against top defenses shows just 10.6 points per game scored! This is also a team that failed to generate as much as 300 total yards of offense in seven games on the season. The good news is the defense held nine teams to 15 points or less, and no team topped the 20-point mark against them at home. From week four on, the 49ers have been iron clad on defense, allowing no more than 24 points in any game. On average over that span they allowed a stingy 14.9 ppg. If you look closely at the outliers here, San Francisco allowed a max of 24 points in their last 14 games, and Carolina no more than 20 in any home game. If the max numbers are hit on both sides (not likely), that gets this game to 44. So, it would take outlier defensive breakdowns on both sides to get this 3 points past the total. There's only one way to go here - play on the UNDER.