Terry McLaurin and Mike Evans Both Ruled Out Before Halftime at Levi's Stadium

Washington’s Terry McLaurin was carted off in the first quarter of Monday night’s game at Levi’s Stadium and ruled out with a left knee injury. San Francisco’s Mike Evans was ruled out in the second quarter with an Achilles injury, after aggravating soreness he had carried for weeks. Two offences built around one receiver each lost that receiver in the same half, San Francisco won 23-17, and neither team said anything about severity beyond the night.

What happened to Terry McLaurin?

His night started with the kind of play that quiets a road crowd. On Washington’s first snap, Jayden Daniels found McLaurin down the right sideline for 27 yards, and the drive ended in a 51-yard Drew Stevens field goal. A few possessions later he was down and not getting up. Fox Sports’ account has the injury happening away from the ball on a third-and-9 where Daniels was sacked by Osa Odighizuwa, McLaurin buckling to the turf. Other accounts describe jostling with a 49ers cornerback before he fell. The accounts do not agree on contact, and this desk is not going to settle it from a broadcast angle. What every account agrees on is what followed: his left leg in an air cast, McLaurin hobbling to a cart with players from both teams around him, and the team ruling him out with a left knee injury. DraftKings Network put the cart at 2:16 left in the first quarter.

The context makes the cart heavier than the play. This was the first game since Week 1 that Daniels, McLaurin and Stefon Diggs were all healthy at the same time, a trio Washington’s season was supposed to run through. McLaurin had only just come back from a hamstring strain suffered in Week 4 in London, on top of a 2025 season in which he missed seven games and posted a career-low 582 receiving yards. His career line coming into the night, 512 catches for 7,164 yards, is the record of the most reliable receiver the franchise has had in years, and the depth chart behind Diggs now runs through rookie Antonio Williams and Treylon Burks. Washington’s season already has one clock-management collapse in it, the overtime tie with the Giants, and losing the receiver the offence leans on is a different order of problem.

What happened to Mike Evans?

San Francisco’s exit had a month of warning attached to it. Evans is in his first season with the 49ers after 12 years in Tampa Bay, he arrived at the stadium wearing a Stephen Curry Warriors jersey, and he had not practiced all week. He entered the night questionable with rib and Achilles injuries, in his fourth straight week on the injury report, a run that started with a hip injury in Week 2 and a rib strain in Week 3 and includes playing through fractured ribs against Seattle. None of that stopped him producing: a 54-yard catch in the first quarter, three catches for 94 yards by late in the second, and the team lead in receiving on the season.

Then, on a 16-yard catch with 1:10 left in the half, the Achilles that had been sore for weeks gave him trouble again. He limped straight to the locker room, the broadcast showed him grabbing at the Achilles in the tunnel, and the team ruled him out with an Achilles injury. The earlier Evans story on this site, the night he checked Diggs’s jersey name in a viral moment, was the light version of his first 49ers season. Monday’s was not.

How did the game finish without either receiver?

San Francisco closed the half 20-3 up, behind two Christian McCaffrey rushing touchdowns and a Brock Purdy touchdown pass to George Kittle. McCaffrey also lost his first fumble in more than 500 snaps in the first half, a K’Lavon Chaisson punch-out recovered by Washington, before scoring his second touchdown. The 49ers reached 23-3 in the third quarter, and Washington scored twice in the second half, a short Daniels touchdown pass to Diggs and a Rachaad White receiving touchdown, to close to 23-17. PFF’s recap of the game leads on the same fact this page does: both veteran receivers left in the first half and neither returned, and the result was settled by the teams playing without them.

How bad are the two injuries?

On Monday night the honest answer was unknown, and this page said so. Tuesday answered it for one of them and narrowed it for the other. The section below, added on October 21, carries what the teams have now said. The history of the two players is why speculation would have misled in opposite directions: McLaurin has come back quickly from soft-tissue problems before and this was a knee, and Evans has played through fractured ribs this season, though an Achilles is the one injury a 33-year-old receiver cannot simply play through. The league’s October injury list already runs long, from Davante Adams’s ruptured hamstring with the Rams to the kicking vacancy the Rams created in Buffalo.

What did Tuesday’s updates say about McLaurin and Evans?

For McLaurin, the worst version. TSN’s report of coach Dan Quinn’s Tuesday confirmation says he tore the patellar tendon in his left knee and will miss the remainder of the season. USA Today reports an MRI on Tuesday confirmed the injury and that surgery is required. Quinn called it a big hit on and off the field. The mechanism is also settled now in TSN’s account: injured with 2:16 left in the first quarter while cutting on a route, on a play that ended with a sack of Jayden Daniels, which matches the away-from-the-ball version the accounts disagreed about on the night. He finishes his season with 15 catches for 230 yards, Washington’s team lead, after a year that had already cost him a Week 4 game to a hamstring injury and followed a 2025 season in which he missed seven games. TSN also notes the contract question the injury sharpens: his 2025 extension lets Washington release or restructure him after this season, against cap figures of $34 million next year and $39.5 million in 2028.

For Evans, the news runs the other way. His Achilles is intact. Niners Wire reports the exit was an aggravation of the Achilles tendinitis that had bothered him all week, that coach Kyle Shanahan called it “just the same thing that was bothering him all week,” and that no further testing is planned. Shanahan told reporters he is hopeful Evans can play Sunday at Atlanta while admitting he is unsure, and Pro Football Talk’s account frames the injury as not a long-term thing. One local report, from NBC Sports Bay Area’s Jennifer Lee Chan, has him missing a little time and possibly returning after the Week 8 bye. Those two versions can both be true across a week of practice reports, and this page is not going to pick between a coach’s hope and a beat report until San Francisco’s own designations do it.

What happens next for Washington and San Francisco?

A practice report, for both clubs, and then a receiver rotation decision. Washington goes into Week 7 with Diggs as its only established target and two young receivers behind him, and its next injury update on McLaurin is the first real fact since the cart. San Francisco has to plan a passing game that has leaned on Evans all season, in the first year of the three-year deal that brought him from Tampa Bay. Either club placing its receiver on injured reserve would turn Monday’s designations into a timeline. Until then, what Monday established is narrower and still significant: two No. 1 receivers were gone before halftime of the same primetime game, and everything both teams do this week starts from there.

The same Monday game also produced the week’s loudest sideline clip, and its explanation arrived on Wednesday: Kyle Shanahan explained that Brock Purdy’s viral yell means ‘I need it again’, a request for a repeated play call before the helmet channel cuts off at 15 seconds.