DEN @ SF
Denver Broncos at San Francisco 49ers at Levi's Stadium.
Regular season · week 4 · Sunday, Oct 4, 4:25 PM ET
Levi's Stadium
89°F · 1 mph wind from the NW · 0% chance of rain · mostly cloudy — not used by the model; no weather term enters the numbers below.
Denver Broncos at San Francisco 49ers at Levi's Stadium.
10,000 simulated games · model nfl-regular-season-public-v1
Projected score
DEN 22 — 24 SF
the middle of our simulated outcomes, not a call on the exact final
Win chance
DEN 42.3% · SF 54.7%
how often each side won in 10,000 simulations · ties 3.0%
Total points (both teams)
46
8 in 10 simulations landed between 29 and 63
SF winning margin
+2
a minus means DEN wins by that much · 8 in 10 between -15 and 18
The left side is what the live source reports right now. The right side is the GameTime forecast made before kickoff — it is frozen and does not change while the game is played.
Checking the live feed…
Forecast frozen at Oct 3, 2:37 PM ET. It does not change during the game.
From the margin-of-victory Elo win head, published exactly as evaluated on held-out 2006–2021 — no shrink toward 50% is applied, and no claim to out-predict the sportsbook market is made. Generated 2026-10-03T18:37:22Z under model nfl-regular-season-public-v1 and frozen pre-kickoff; every forecast is settled against the official result.
DEN
Likely TD scorers
RJ Harvey 35.0%
J.K. Dobbins 30.7%
Jaylen Waddle 27.4%
Passing
Bo Nix 206 pass yds (113–340)
Rushing — withheld for DEN: the players' modelled shares add up to 108% of the team's carries, more than exists — shown again once the shares are reconciled
Receiving leaders
RJ Harvey 3 rec · 27 yds
Jaylen Waddle 3 rec · 37 yds
Courtland Sutton 3 rec · 28 yds
SF
Likely TD scorers
Christian McCaffrey 64.7%
George Kittle 45.4%
Mike Evans 37.8% · questionable
Passing
Brock Purdy 251 pass yds (138–415)
Rushing — withheld for SF: the players' modelled shares add up to 120% of the team's carries, more than exists — shown again once the shares are reconciled
Receiving leaders
Christian McCaffrey 3 rec · 30 yds
George Kittle 3 rec · 36 yds
Mike Evans 3 rec · 27 yds · questionable
the 10th to 90th percentile of each team's simulated score
| Team | Low (10th) | Projected | High (90th) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | 22 | 34 | |
| 12 | 24 | 36 |
from an event-based simulation of touchdowns and field goals, solved onto the median margin and total above
| Score (DEN – SF) | Chance |
|---|---|
| 17–20 | 0.69% |
| 20–17 | 0.68% |
| 27–24 | 0.67% |
| 24–27 | 0.63% |
| 20–23 | 0.57% |
| 20–24 | 0.56% |
No single scoreline is likely — these are the most common of hundreds. The projected score above is derived from the medians and answers a different question: the middle of the distribution, not its most common point.
football's margins pile up on those four — this is the one thing a normal-draw model cannot show you
| Margin | This game | Last 3 regular seasons |
|---|---|---|
| Decided by exactly 3 | 10.2% | 14.2% |
| Decided by exactly 7 | 6.6% | 8.3% |
| Decided by exactly 10 | 5.8% | 4.2% |
| Decided by exactly 14 | 4.9% | 4.4% |
| Any of the four | 27.5% | 31.1% |
The right-hand column is what actually happened across 816 regular-season games (2023, 2024, 2025) — the same finals this engine was fitted to. It gets the shape right, with 3 the most common margin by a distance, and it is not calibrated to the number: it puts less weight on 3 and more on 10 than those seasons did.
two independent reads, shown side by side
Our win chance
54.7%
SF to win
Sportsbook win chance
57.1%
SF to win, read from 8 sportsbooks' odds with their built-in margin removed
Difference
-2.4 pp
ours minus the sportsbooks', in percentage points — not a recommendation
Total points: ours vs sportsbooks
46 vs 48
our projected total against the sportsbooks' over/under line
The sportsbook numbers are the books' own, shown for context. A difference is a difference — this model is not validated to out-predict the sportsbook market.
Prices captured 2026-10-03T18:08:15Z — before kickoff.
Every modelled player, with his availability. Players listed out carry no volume projection.
Anytime-scorer probability means scoring a touchdown — never throwing one. Void if the player does not play; questionable players carry their state above.
Our win chances come from a team rating that weights how decisively teams win. Tested on 4,281 past games it had never seen (2006–2021), it scored 0.629 on log loss (lower is better) — better than our previous rating's 0.642 and a coin flip's 0.693, but short of the sportsbooks' own odds at 0.610. It has NOT been shown to beat the sportsbook market. Where our win and margin ratings disagree on the favourite, the previous rating is used for that game. The 2026 season evaluation still runs under bars frozen in August, so every forecast stays experimental. These ratings are built from results, not from who is playing: they do not know that a starting quarterback has been ruled out. Our player projections do remove players who cannot play; the team win chance beside them does not. We tested whether adding that would help, using perfect hindsight about whether each team's main quarterback actually played — on 855 games from 2023 to 2025 it improved the win rating on average but was WORSE in one of the three seasons, so it did not clear the bar we hold these ratings to and we left the rating alone.
Educational and paper-only — not betting advice.