Joe Gibbs spent the past week making sure we knew he wasn’t looking past the San Francisco 49ers. He didn’t want to provide them with locker-room material. He didn’t want his team to lose focus and start drifting ahead to next week’s battle in the Meadowlands. Gibbs wanted one thing made clear—the San Francisco 49ers were the greatest threat to life in the DC Metro region since the Hot Zone. “Do you think you can tackle a phantom?” he asked his team. “Can you drop a nightmare for a two-yard loss behind the line of scrimmage? Can you stay in your lanes and cover a kickoff against the Apocalypse?”

In the end, the 49ers that showed up were the same snake-bitten crew that are battling injuries, suffering the slings and arrows of the salary cap, and still wincing under the embarrassment of an ownership group that rolled the dice with Dennis Erickson. The result? An epic ass-whipping to the tune of 52-17.

Let’s not belabor the point. Only Indianapolis came into this week a heavier favorite. The discipline Gibbs imposed rarely flagged as the team clicked in place and ran San Francisco out of the stadium. But the blowout was nevertheless an occasion to track a few of the developing storylines: