It often feels like not a day goes by without some new story about how San Francisco is in crisis. From Fox News to The New York Times, the national media is laser-focused on highlighting every step of the city’s supposed descent into crime-fueled anarchy.
But the killing of Banko Brown, a 24-year-old Black, unhoused, transgender man, by a Walgreens security guard in downtown San Francisco on April 27 has drawn virtually none of this kind of attention. Even as other incidents of crime in the city, like the killing of tech mogul Bob Lee, made instant international headlines, Brown’s death has remained a local story. Yet anyone looking to understand the real crisis in San Francisco—and the interlocking crises of housing, racism, and transphobia in America—needs to know about what happened to Banko Brown.
In the security-camera footage capturing Brown’s last moments, he’s clobbered to the floor by Walgreens security guard Michael Earl-Wayne Anthony. When Brown manages to stand up, he backs out and away from the store entrance, where Anthony shoots Brown from a few feet away.
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Anthony claimed Brown attempted to steal $14 in snacks and soda and then threatened his life. He said he shot Brown in “self-defense,” and cited the recent approval by Walgreens executives of a “hands-on” security approach. (Walgreens has since cut ties with the security firm that employed Anthony.) Though Brown can be seen fighting Anthony’s attempts to subdue him earlier in the footage, he is clearly retreating from the scene at the moment Anthony shoots him. He was unarmed. No one has come forward to corroborate Anthony’s version of events, and the idea that the footage shows him acting in self-defense has drawn deep skepticism even from establishment media outlets.
Nevertheless, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins declined to press charges against Anthony, saying that the threshold for self-defense had been met.
Banko Brown was at the beginning of his life. He had a community that loved him. He was a community organizer with the Young Women’s Freedom Center, an outreach group for women and trans youth. His friends described him as sweet and funny.
But Brown was Black, poor, and trans—a member of three of the most vulnerable and criminalized groups in San Francisco. At every turn, the city made his life more difficult.
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Let’s start with housing—the largest expense in San Francisco, where the majority of residents are renters. It is the second-most-expensive place to rent a home in America.
There are 7,754 unhoused people and at least 61,000 empty homes in San Francisco, according to the city’s most recent figures. That means that there are enough vacant units to house San Francisco’s entire unhoused population nearly eight times over. (Recent tech industry flight has undoubtedly increased this number.) But, as the city relentlessly gives itself over to the very richest, poor and working-class San Franciscans are left to subsist on the scraps that remain.
Brown was one of those struggling to survive in this environment. He was reportedly either unhoused or in an insecure housing situation for at least 10 of his 24 years. As The Guardian’s Sam Levin reported, “Banko was recently growing desperate—stuck on [a] housing waitlist, turned away from shelters, sleeping on BART.” Through a megaphone to a crowd at a recent protest, Brown’s friends at the Young Women’s Freedom Center said: “Banko deserved to live…he deserved housing and to have his basic needs met.”
Brown was also suffering from the abandonment and criminalization faced by many queer people and people of color in San Francisco. In America’s queer capital, the city’s own reporting says transgender people are 18 times more likely to be homeless than non-transgender people. (The San Francisco Police Department has misgendered Brown since his death.) Black people are likewise overrepresented among unhoused people, and if you exist at the intersections of Black and trans, the numbers are against you.
Brown had the misfortune of trying to survive at a moment when San Francisco’s harshness towards its most marginalized residents is growing. In 2021, San Francisco Mayor London Breed declared a public health emergency in the Tenderloin, the downtown neighborhood a few blocks away from the Walgreens where Brown was killed. Breed used the very real opioid epidemic as a pretense for the emergency declaration, which unleashed showers of money on the local police. The overdose death toll was also used to justify $68 million in public funding handed to Urban Alchemy, a local nonprofit security company that has been involved in a string of violence and sexual assault scandals. (Breed closed one seemingly effective strategy to combat overdoses–a safe-injection site, where drug users could seek help and sterile needles—in December 2022.)
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And this past April, Breed and California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that San Francisco would welcome National Guard troops and members of the state’s Highway Patrol as yet more layers of security to stand watch over the city’s central districts. These old, reactionary tactics from the drug war will certainly claim more low-income drug users as victims.
In September 2022, the Coalition on Homelessness sued the city on behalf of all unhoused San Franciscans, citing “the City’s egregious failure to support affordable housing for San Francisco residents.” In written declarations to the court, ex-staff members of Breed have testified around requests such as the mayor’s desire to have unhoused people removed from her sightline. Mentioned in the case are text messages showing Breed asking police officers to remove specific unhoused people from the streets. A sample: “Man sleeping on bench on Hayes St. near Gough. Can someone come asap, I am in the area having lunch.”
Contributing to the instability are self-deputized neighbors on apps like Nextdoor who frequently attend homeowners association meetings. These are the constituents Breed bends most quickly for. Prior to Breed’s election, Black activists held a banner reading “LONDON BREED DOESN’T CARE ABOUT BLACK PEOPLE” outside one mayoral debate. Breed, who is Black herself, was likely not too troubled by this. Even if she was broadly unpopular with Black residents, it wouldn’t mean much for her political fortunes: Once 20 percent of the city’s population, their numbers bottomed out at 5 percent a decade ago.
Breed now has backup from the district attorney’s office for these moves. In early 2022, she and her supporters focused their sights on the campaign to recall reformist District Attorney Chesa Boudin. Boudin and Breed were not friendly, and when Boudin was ousted after a recall campaign largely funded by out-of-state donors, Breed replaced him with Jenkins, a leader of the recall campaign who had promised to be “tough on crime.” (Friends and family of Banko Brown have pointed out that Jenkins’ refusal to prosecute Anthony sends the message that it is alright to kill unhoused people in San Francisco.)
That said, rulers like Breed know that progressive optics play well in Bay Area politics, but they won’t fight the housing affordability crisis with the most obvious, materially meaningful solution: cheap or public housing. Instead, Breed follows her benefactors from the real estate and security industries, who hawk dressed-up forms of punishment and surveillance to make life miserable for poor people, like new metal barricades meant to discourage sex workers in the Mission district, or “navigation centers,” temporary shelters for unhoused people that are demolished and moved every few years, and keep the city from building permanent low-income housing.
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Last week, Walgreens agreed to pay San Francisco $230 million to pay for the opioid bombs the pharmacy dropped in the city. Breed says the money will be used to fund anti-addiction initiatives. Her record indicates it will more likely go to ending the lives of people with addictions, as she funnels money into punitive drug war tactics, hiring police instead of drug counselors, and forcing drug users into locked-down “conservatorship” facilities that disability justice activists have compared to the asylum system of the 1900s.
Brown’s supporters are working to end the conditions that murdered him. After leaving a May 16 meeting of Banko Brown supporters in the city’s Mission district, organizer Jemma DeCristo told me that “Banko Brown had no access to food or safe secure housing,” in a city “where London Breed continues to give millions and millions more to the SFPD, and equally violent proto-police security forces” like Urban Alchemy.
“She may as well have pulled the trigger herself,” DeCristo said.
Michael Earl-Wayne Anthony may have fired the gun that killed Banko Brown on April 27, but politicians who put property values over the lives of people like Brown loaded that gun. Brown was killed because life is dangerous for people who are Black, transgender, and unhoused. He was killed because of negligence from local government heads, who use tough-on-crime rhetoric to justify throwing public money at policing, surveillance, and cruel sweeps of homeless people from sidewalk to sidewalk, all while millions of dollars earmarked for low-income housing sits unused. Breed has a seemingly endless budget for policing. Brown didn’t even have a bed when he was killed.
The forces that caused Banko Brown’s death are ultimately not found on the streets. They are found in the halls of power, in a city overflowing with wealth that refuses to use that wealth for the public good. That—not the scaremongering propaganda you see on television—is the real crisis in San Francisco, for anyone who cares to look for it. That is why Banko Brown is dead.
Exposed: The Human Radiation Experiments at Hunters Point is a special report by the San Francisco Public Press, an independent non-profit news organization focused on accountability, equity and the environment.
In September 1956, Cpl Eldridge Jones found himself atop a sunbaked roof at an old army camp about an hour outside San Francisco, shoveling radioactive dirt.
Too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam, Jones never saw combat. Instead, he served in the cold war, where the threats to his life were all American.
The previous year, Jones was one of thousands of US troops directly exposed to radiation during aboveground nuclear weapons tests in the Nevada desert.
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Now he was being exposed again, this time to lab-made “simulated nuclear fallout”, material that emitted some of the same ionizing radiation as the atomic bomb. The exercise at Camp Stoneman, near Pittsburg, California, was one of many in a years-long program conducted by a key military research facility, headquartered at a navy shipyard in a predominantly Black working-class neighborhood in San Francisco.
A review by the San Francisco Public Press of thousands of pages of government and academic records, as well as interviews with affected servicemen, sheds new light on the operations of the US Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory at San Francisco’s Hunters Point naval shipyard. A new series launched on Monday in collaboration with the Guardian reveals that between 1946 and 1963, lab scientists knowingly exposed at least 1,073 servicemen, dockworkers, lab employees and others to potentially harmful radiation through war games, decontamination tests and medical studies.
The analysis reveals the lab conducted at least 24 experiments that exposed humans to radiation, far more than past official reviews acknowledged. Safety reports also note dozens of accidents in which staff received doses in excess of federal health limits in effect at the time.
Researchers at the lab tracked the exposure of workers trying to clean ships irradiated by an atomic bomb test. Soldiers were ordered to crawl through fields of radioactive sand and soil. In clinical studies, radioactive substances were applied to forearms and hands, injected or administered by mouth. Top US civilian and military officials pre-approved all of this in writing, documents show.
The records indicatethat researchers gained limited knowledge from this program, and that not everyone involved had their exposure monitored. There is also no sign the lab studied the long-term health effects on people used in the experiments or in surrounding communities, either during the lab’s heyday or after it closed in 1969.
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Radioactive samples were placed on forearms, where beta radiation could cause burns. Photograph: American Industrial Hygiene Association Journal
The navy’s San Francisco lab was a major cold war research facility with a unique focus on “radiological defense”, techniques developedto help the public survive and armed forces fight back in case of an atomic attack. It was one node in a nationwide network that encompassed universities, hospitals and national labs that had permission to handle dangerous radioactive material. As one of the first such institutions under the control of the Pentagon, it was among the military’s largest and most important research hubs.
In a sign of the era’s laxmedical ethics and safety standards, lab directors advocated taking risks with human subjects without seeking informed consent or testing first on animals, according to the documents.
These shortcuts appear to have contravened the Nuremberg Code, a set of ethical guidelines established after the horrors of Nazi experiments in concentration camps. Top civilian and Pentagon officials debated these principles. While some at the Atomic Energy Commission advocated strict rules, they were not consistently applied.
Scientists later acknowledged they were ignorant of the long-term effects of their work.
“We were aware of the signs, the symptoms and the damage that would be caused” by high levels of radiation, William Siri, a prominent University of California, Berkeley, biophysicist who cooperated with the lab to set up at least one experiment involving human exposure, said in a 1980 oral history. “But down at the low end of the dose range, no one was sure, and unfortunately no one is sure even to this day as to whether there is a threshold and what the very low levels would do.”
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One scientist developed a keen interest in elite athletes, who he theorized would be most likely to survive a nuclear conflict. In 1955, he negotiated with the San Francisco 49ers to use football players as subjects in a medical study. Letters between the lab and the team show researchers had formulated a plan to study body composition by having the men drink water laced with tritium, an isotope of hydrogen, and receive injections of radioactive chromium-51. Many years later, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory investigators failed to find contemporaneous records confirming the experiment proceeded as planned, though a lab employee claimed he had witnessed it.
‘Ethically fraught’
The lab’s work and decades of warship repair left the shipyard, which the navy vacated in 1974, one of the most polluted sites in the country. The Environmental Protection Agency deemed it a Superfund site in 1989.
Today, the 450-acre (182-hectare) parcel anchors the biggest real estate construction project in San Francisco since the 1906 earthquake. More than 10,000 housing units, hundreds of acres of parks and millions of square feet of commercial space are proposed.
Critics say the navy has long downplayed a possible link between the pollution and poor health outcomes in the surrounding Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, which became majority Black by the 1960s, a transformation powered by the lure of shipyard jobs. Critics say the failure of the military to make the area safe amounts to environmental racism.
Eldridge Jones served in the army’s 50th chemical platoon, participating in exercises that exposed him to radiation. He says his health issues may be related to research organized by the navy’s San Francisco laboratory. Photograph: Sharon Wickham/San Francisco Public Press
In the Pentagon’s response to detailed questions about the radiation lab’s research program and human exposure toll, navy spokesperson Lt Cdr Courtney Callaghan acknowledged the experiments as “a matter of historical record”, but declined to address their scientific merit or ethical significance.
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“The navy follows strict Department of Defense policies and responsibilities for the protection of human participants in DoD-supported programs and any research involving human subjects for testing of chemical or biological warfare agents is generally prohibited,” she said via email. She added: “The navy cannot speculate on possible internal deliberations or motivations of medical researchers more than 50 years ago.”
Despite enjoying access to vast resources, the lab produced little in the way of valuable research, according to scientists who worked there and outside scholars. “It was fantastic,” former lab researcher Stanton Cohn said in an oral history interview in 1982. “We could buy any piece of machinery or equipment, and you never had to justify it.” In the end, he noted: “We did a lot of field studies and got nothing to show for it.”
While routinely exposing humans in these “ethically fraught activities”, the lab often behaved like an institution in search of a purpose, said Daniel Hirsch, the retired director of the Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has studied the shipyard in detail. Hirsch and other critics said the lab demonstrated a remarkable disregard for radiation’s hazards and a cavalier attitude toward human health, even by the permissive standards of the time.
Thousands of servicemen participated in nuclear weapons tests, including Operation Teapot in Nevada in 1955. Photograph: National Nuclear Security Administration’s Nevada site office
The 1955 opening of the lab’s “huge $8,000,000” bunkerlike headquarters building was front-page news that drew “some of the nation’s top civilian and military nuclear experts”, the San Francisco Examiner reported at the time. But today, the lab has been largely forgotten.
In the early 2000s, journalist Lisa Davis revealed the enormous quantities of radioactive material the navy and scientists left at the shipyard and recklessly dumped at sea. This report expands on her brief mention of the lab’s medical and occupational experiments exposing people.
While lab scientists did sometimes publish in scientific journals and lab imprints, the navy destroyed voluminous piles of original documents after the facility closed.
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Medical experiments on human subjects
Remaining files such as interagency memorandums, experiment proposals and technical papers indicate that human exposure was accepted up and down the chain of command, from Washington DC to the San Francisco docks, where as early as 1947 the navy knew that airborne plutonium was wafting off contaminated vessels.
The ships had been battered by atomic weapons tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean and then towed to San Francisco, where hundreds of civilian shipyard workers were exposed in a vain attempt to clean them.
The agenda then expanded to medical experiments on human subjects. Lab officials told the Pentagon in 1959 that they employed “minimal quantities of radioactive tracer material” in clinical studies, implying their techniques were safe, even though no one knew if this was true.
In the mid-1950s, the lab developed what it called synthetic fallout: dirt or mud laced with the highly radioactive but short-lived isotope lanthanum-140, meant to mimic the poisonous material that could drift over US communities after a nuclear explosion. The lab exposed hundreds of troops and civilian personnel to this hazard in field exercises at military bases on the east side of San Francisco Bay, in rural Alameda and Contra Costa counties.
Men in minimal protective gear clean a roof at Camp Stoneman in Contra Costa county in 1956. Photograph: Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory
The synthetic fallout’s radioactive ingredient could cause cell damage to internal organs if inhaled. Jones, the former army corporal, said troops in his unit sometimes worked without adequate protective equipment.
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“Nobody had to go up on to the roof, and nobody had to do all this stuff by hand,” he said. “There were better ways to have done it. These scientists, they want the result and they don’t care about the people who are doing it for them.”
Some study participants had radioactive dirt rubbed on their forearms to test the effectiveness of cleaning methods. Others were ordered to crawl on their bellies through fields covered in it, to simulate the doses soldiers would absorb while fighting in a fallout zone. In 1962, lab officials acknowledged that wind and rain carried the pollution away, potentially exposing unsuspecting members of the public.
After a team from the lab detonated bombs laced with isotopic tracer elements underwater in the summer of 1961 around San Clemente Island, near San Diego, state game wardens working with researchers caught a radioactive fish, indicating unintended and potentially widespread ecological consequences. They brushed aside the discovery by noting that fish are typically gutted and presumably made safe before being eaten.
Across a wide array of activities, lab documents describe participants as volunteers. But Jones disputed this. “In the military, they tell you what to do, and you do it,” he said, adding that if he declined or resisted, he risked discharge or imprisonment in the stockade.
“We had to work in areas with a great deal of radioactive fallout and no one ever gave us an opportunity to opt out,” said Ron Rossi, who served with Jones in the army’s 50th chemical platoon at the Nevada test site. “It never occurred to us to even ask – just did what we were told to do.” Rossi spoke with the San Francisco Public Press in 2021 and 2022; he died last year, at age 89.
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Studying responses to nuclear disasters was part of the mission of the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory. In 1955, navy hospital corpsman HN Stolan demonstrated protective equipment and Geiger counters. Photograph: San Francisco Examiner photograph archive at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
Later Pentagon admissions support the veterans’ accounts. “There is little doubt that members of intact military units, which were sent to test sites to perform missions commensurate with their organizational purpose, were not given the opportunity to volunteer,” wrote navy V Adm Robert Monroe, a former director of the Defense Nuclear Agency, one of the successors of the Manhattan Project, the top-secret second world war atomic bomb project, in 1979.
Hundreds of thousands of so-called atomic veterans were ordered to participate in Pacific island or stateside above-ground bomb tests, or served in Japan near Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The US government has, inconsistently, compensated many of them, as well as nuclear weapons workers. But many occupational or medical experiment participants have gone unrecognized despite clear signals they were in harm’s way.
In correspondence with superiors at the Atomic Energy Commission and the Pentagon, as well as in a journal article, scientists described the amount of absorbed radiation as relatively low. But since their detection equipment was crude and unreliable, these could easily be underestimations. At other times, scientists acknowledged grave risks, while permitting participants to receive exposures past their own suggested limits.
At least 33 times, the lab documented radiation doses “in excess of” evolving weekly, monthly or annual federal “maximum permissible exposure” limits, according to annual “radiological safety progress reports” from 1956, 1958, 1959 and 1960, obtained from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission through a Freedom of Information Act request and from the Department of Energy’s Las Vegas archive.
No evidence could be found that federal civilian nuclear regulators or the lab’s military supervisors imposed any discipline for safety lapses that violated federal regulations.
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Hazards persist
The navy’s San Francisco lab was one of many research centers and hospitals across the country that exposed people to radiation and other hazards for scientific purposes. That makes it a demonstration of “the ways that people have been seen as disposable, to science or to the military”, said Lindsey Dillon, a University of California, Santa Cruz, assistant professor of sociology who is among a handful of academics familiar with the lab’s history.
“I do think it should shock and anger people,” she added. “They knew that radiation was not healthy.”
The navy has spent more than $1.3bn to remove toxic and radioactive material from the site. Cleanup is poised to stretch through the 2020s, thanks in part to a contractor fraud scandal: two supervisors at an environmental engineering firm hired by the navy to clean up the shipyard received prison sentences after pleading guilty in federal court to faking soil samples. Retesting and several lawsuits are ongoing.
Illustration: Reid Brown/San Francisco Public Press
Military officials say these problems are surmountable and their remediation efforts will pay off.
“The navy’s work at the former Hunters Point naval shipyard has been and is focused on identifying contamination and ensuring public health is protected during cleanup and into the future,” a spokesperson for the Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command, the service’s office overseeing the shipyard cleanup, said in an email.
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The navy had been alerted to the radioactive pollution problem as early as 1984. Yet for decades, public health advocates and community activists said the navy misled neighbors about health risks, an assertion supported by a 2020 city-commissioned scientific panel from the University of California, San Francisco, and UC Berkeley.
Beginning in 2019, an ongoing biomonitoring survey led by Dr Ahimsa Porter Sumchai, a physician and neighborhood native whose father worked at the shipyard, has detected traces of radioactive elements and heavy metals in the urine of people who live and work nearby. Some of them are workers at a UCSF lab-animal complex on former navy property that once housed rats, mice and other creatures used in radiation experiments. They have filed workers’ compensation claims alleging that exposure to radioactive and toxic pollution from the shipyard made them sick.
Several elected officials who have enthusiastically backed the housing development, including former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who represents San Francisco in Congress, and outgoingmayor London Breed, expressed concern about environmental exposure without specifically addressing the lab’s history of human experimentation.
In an email, Pelosi spokesperson Ian Krager called the shipyard “a neglected and contaminated neighbor to the Bayview-Hunters Point Community” and noted that the federal government had invested heavily in the cleanup.
The military built its leading radiation lab in Hunters Point after ships from Pacific atom bomb tests returned ‘hot’. Photograph: National Archives and Records Administration
He said Pelosi’s priorities were “fighting to ensure the health and safety of Bayview-Hunters Point residents; requiring a transparent cleanup process that involves the community; holding the fraudulent contractor accountable; and insisting the navy fulfill its responsibility to fully clean up the shipyard”.
Shamann Walton, who represents the Bayview and adjacent neighborhoods on the city’s board of supervisors, has called for the city to halt the development until all the pollution is gone. “We do have a say in determining whether or not any land is transferred to the city and county of San Francisco,” he said at a city hall hearing in September 2022. “Without a 100% cleanup, that land transfer does not take place.”
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The mayor’s office echoed these sentiments, but has not advocated pausing development. “The health and safety of San Francisco residents remain our highest priority,” a Breed spokesperson told the Public Press. “To this end, we remain committed to ensuring the navy’s remediation of the Hunters Point shipyard is thorough and transparent to the community.”
It may be impossible to know exactly what harm the radiation exposure caused. Many survivors believe it to be a slow killer. Arthur Ehrmantraut, who served with Jones in the 1950s, said many men in the 50th chemical platoon died young. Others developed illnesses long after leaving the service. “I know that many had severe health issues, that, as with myself, manifested after 50 years,” he said.
Jones, now 89, said he did not regret his army service. But he suspected reckless radiation exposure caused the illnesses and premature deaths of others in his platoon, and his own impaired blood flow and partial blindness.
Experts agree that during the cold war, safety was secondary to precious knowledge that might give the United States an advantage in a nuclear third world war.
“The US government was very, very interested in information about how radiation affects the human body, internally and externally,” said Bo Jacobs, a history professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute in Japan and co-founder of the Global Hibakusha Project, which studies people around the world affected by radiation from nuclear weapons. As for how that information was obtained, he added, they didn’t much care: “They want data.”
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Additional reporting by Rebecca Bowe. Listen to episode 1 and episode 2 of her Exposed documentary podcast.
Funding for Exposed comes from the California Endowment, the Fund for Environmental Journalism, the Local Independent Online News Publishers Association and members of the San Francisco Public Press. Learn more at sfpublicpress.org/donate and sign up for email alerts from the San Francisco Public Press when new stories in this series are published in December
The Clemson Tigers suffered their first loss of the 2024-25 season the last time Brad Brownell’s team went out of state.
Despite a career-high 30 points from Chase Hunter, the Tigers fell 84-71 at Boise State in their first road trip of the season on Nov. 17. Clemson rebounded with a 79-51 win over Radford on Thursday behind Chauncey Wiggins’ game-high 16 points.
Next up for Clemson (4-1) is a quality mid-major opponent in the Sunshine Slam in Daytona Beach. The Tigers face the San Francisco Dons of the West Coast Conference. The Dons went 23-11 last season and were 11-5 in conference play, receiving an NIT bid and falling to the No. 2 seed Cincinnati Bearcats in a first-round game.
San Francisco (4-1) lost its first game of the season against Penny Hardway’s Memphis Tigers Thursday. According to ESPN’s Matchup Predictor, Clemson has a 63.4 percent chance of winning.
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The winner of Monday’s game will face the winner of Penn State vs. Fordham in the winner’s bracket Tuesday. The loser of Monday’s games will play in a “consolation game” Tuesday.
Here’s how to watch today’s Clemson game, including time, TV schedule and streaming information.
What channel is Clemson vs San Francisco on today? Time, TV schedule
TV Channel: CBS Sports Network
Start time: 6:30 p.m. ET
Clemson vs. San Francisco will broadcast nationally on CBS Sports Network from Ocean Center in Daytona Beach.
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Where to watch Clemson vs San Francisco on livestream
Streaming options for the game include FUBO and Paramount+.
For FUBO:
Watch Clemson vs San Francisco live on Fubo (free trial)
For Paramount+:
Watch Clemson vs San Francisco live on Paramount+
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Clemson vs San Francisco odds and spread
ODDS: Clemson -2
O/U: 144 1/5
All College Basketball Odds via BetMGM.
Clemson schedule 2024
Nov. 4: vs Charleston Southern (W, 91-64)
Nov. 8: vs St. Francis, PA (W, 88-62)
Nov. 12: vs Eastern Kentucky (W, 75-62)
Nov. 17: at Boise State (L, 84-71)
Nov. 21: Radford (W, 79-51)
Nov. 25: vs San Francisco (Daytona Beach, Fla.)
Nov. 26 vs Penn State/Fordham (Daytona Beach, Fla.)
Nov. 29 vs Florida A&M
Record: 4-1
San Francisco schedule 2024
Nov. 5: vs Cal Poly (W, 86-78)
Nov. 9 vs Boise State (W, 84-73)
Nov. 13 vs Long Beach State (W, 84-54)
Nov. 16 vs Chicago State (W, 82-37)
Nov. 21 at Memphis (L, 68-64)
Nov. 25: vs Clemson (Daytona Beach, Fla.)
Record: 4-1
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The writing seemed to be on the wall heading into the weekend for the San Francisco 49ers when Brock Purdy, Nick Bosa, and Charvarius Ward were ruled out due to injury. Then, Trent Williams was deemed inactive after a pregame warmup.
Well, Sunday went exactly how many expected and even worse to a degree, as the 49ers suffered their ugliest loss of the season in a 38-10 defeat to the Green Bay Packers, dropping to 5-6 on the season.
Offensively, the 49ers couldn’t establish any form of a run game, while their passing game struggled to generate many explosives and finish drives.
Defensively, San Francisco was out-physicaled and looked gassed from the jump, struggling to contain the run without Bosa, leading to the blowout defeat.
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Here are three quick takeaways from the 49ers 38-10 loss to the Packers on Sunday.
Establishing the run game
Coming into the game, with a key injury at quarterback and at left tackle, it was clear the 49ers weren’t going to muster enough offense without a consistent run game.
San Francisco had struggled to establish the run with Christian McCaffrey over the last two games, as the star rushed for just 3.7 yards per carry since returning from injury.
That didn’t improve on Sunday, as McCaffrey had just 31 yards on 11 carries, failing to muster any type of success on the day. In our three keys to win, I highlighted the need to give Jordan Mason more carries during a game where the 49ers absolutely needed an identity on the ground.
Mason got a 16-yard carry on his first touch on the first drive of the second half, but didn’t see much volume outside of that, with San Francisco relying more on their passing game after falling into a deficit early.
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The 49ers just looked flat, so an extra boost of physicality from Mason could’ve helped. Instead, they rode McCaffrey hard again, who struggled on the ground, while fumbling the ball on his longest catch of the day.
Defensively, San Francisco allowed Green Bay to run the ball 42 times, gaining 169 yards and three touchdowns on the ground. Starter Josh Jacobs led the way with 106 yards and all three scores, powering through inside the red zone for a number of touchdowns.
The passing game was inconsistent for Green Bay, as Jordan Love completed just 13/23 passes for 163 yards. But, a strong rushing attack led the way en route to 38 points.
Big swing
One of the 49ers’ biggest chances in this game came to open up the second half. San Francisco had an abominable start, going three-and-out on consecutive possessions, while giving up scores on all three of Green Bay’s opening drives.
Down 17-7, the 49ers had a big chance to cut the game to a one-score lead, but opportunities were missed, as has been the case for much of the year.
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Facing a 1st & 10 at the Green Bay 47-yard line, Brandon Allen had a deep ball to Jauan Jennings behind him, missing the open wideout who could’ve corraled the pass but wasn’t able to. Then, on 4th & 2, Allen had happy feet and was late dishing out an out-route, killing the drive.
After having a chance to pull within one score, the 49ers missed out, giving Green Bay a chance to improve their lead. But, the defense forced a quick three-and-out, giving San Francisco a chance to get within one score once again.
Well, as they did on the opening drive, San Francisco moved the ball, getting from their 10-yard line to the Green Bay 45-yard line. But, disaster struck again, as Brandon Allen had a pass intercepted off a dart to Deebo Samuel, which went through his hands and into those of Xavier McKinney.
Green Bay wouldn’t let that opportunity pass, as they swiftly put together a three-play, 26-yard touchdown drive to go up 24-7, never looking back from there.
In a game where so much was already going against them, the 49ers had a big chance to begin the second half. But, as they’ve done for much of the season, San Francisco was unable to capitalize.
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Outlook of the stars
Coming into the season, it seemed like the 49ers were going to rely on their stars more than expected with the roster getting older and younger talent slowly getting integrated into the roster.
Well, 11 games through, San Francisco is 5-6 and their stars are a big reason for that.
Offensively, it starts at the top with Brock Purdy. The quarterback has been a positive for the season as he has utilized his legs more often, while overcoming other deficiencies. But, the question is: has he looked like a $60 million dollar quarterback?
Running back Christian McCaffrey missed the entire first half of the year as he rehabbed Achilles tendonitis, leaving San Francisco in a hole with arguably their best skill position player shelved. Brandon Aiyuk suffered a torn ACL early in the season, forcing rookies into action sooner rather than later at the receiver position. Then, Trent Williams started dealing with ankle issues, limiting his play and forcing him to miss a game.
Defensively, Nick Bosa has recently dealt with an oblique and hip issue, missing this past week. Javon Hargrave was ruled out early in the season with a triceps injury. Charvarius Ward has missed time. Fred Warner has not looked the same as his Defensive Player of the Year-level start. Talanoa Hufanga has also been out of the lineup for much of the year.
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That has led to a talent depreciation on both sides of the ball, with certain players feeling like they’ve regressed, while the passion and fight in this team feel different than years past.
With the top players looking as they have over the first 11 games of the year, it’s questionable to see how this team can truly turn things around.
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