Mid-Season Breakdown
Not to be confused with the mental breakdowns that come every Sunday
Can we win a game here plz? [Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group]
We are (about) halfway through the season now, and—while a top-heavy NFC and a seventh playoff spot make a post-season push still well within the realm of possibility—it’s hard to imagine our squad in its current form doing much of note if given the opportunity.
Considering our expectations entering the year, our current 3-5 record—and the way in which we’ve gotten there—has been quite the shocker. So what’s gone wrong? And is there any hope to salvage this season?
Below are six reasons why we’re currently tied for last in the NFC West and five things to look for in the back half of the season.
6 SIGNS OF SADNESS
Brain Drain. We’ve had some excellent coaches come through here in the past few years, and we may be starting to feel the effects of just how many of them we’ve lost. Both the success of our own coaches (Saleh in particular) and the spread of Shanahan’s scheme across the league have made our staff ripe for the poaching.
Saleh is a clear upgrade over Ryans. The latter could get there eventually, but there’s a reason every team with a head coach opening wanted to talk to Saleh last spring. Not only did he excel at film study and scheming to team’s tendencies, but he was also the emotional hype man of the coaching staff, and—in a season in which we’ve been maddeningly inconsistent—losing that high-energy presence shouldn’t be underestimated.
Saleh took Mike LaFleur, John Benton (OL), and Tony Oden (DBs). Oden’s departure was the second straight DB coach to last only one year in SF, with Joe Woods—architect of the drastic turnaround in our secondary during the Super Bowl run—leaving for the Browns the year before. While it’s hard to make any judgment calls on their replacement, Cory Undlin, particularly in a year when our secondary has been ravaged by injuries on all levels, it’s not a stretch of the imagination that we’d be a bit more secure in that area under Woods or Oden. Woods had the benefit of a generational pass rush as he shaped our secondary, but has done good work in Cleveland since leaving. While Oden dealt with seven different starters at cornerback, but still patched things together to help us to a top 5 passing defense in 2020.
Former quarterback coach Shane Day left for a QB coach/passing game coordinator promotion with the Chargers. Johnny Holland had to step down just before the season due to a re-emergence of cancer—meaning the linebackers lost both their position coaches after Ryans was promoted. This isn’t to say our new coaches aren’t good or don’t have bright futures, but some of them—like Ryans—will need some time to settle into peak coaching form, and there are always growing pains with large-scale staff turnover.
Injuries at our deepest positions. In true Niners fashion, even our two deepest position groups have been wrecked by injuries. And that’s led to major issues on the field.
We already talked about how our string of running back injuries derailed offensive continuity in the first quarter of the season. We not only drafted two running backs this year but released a perfectly capable backup on cutdown day simply because we ran out of roster space. That depth dried up quickly, even if it’s (knock on wood) getting healthier by the day.
Just as impactful—if not more—have been our injuries along the interior defensive line. Excluding Armstead, who is more of a defensive end, we entered the season with five seemingly capable interior linemen (and another on the PUP list preparing for an early-season return). Now, it’s a position of weakness.
While Kinlaw hasn’t developed into the pass rusher we’d hoped, he’s been a vital piece against the run. In games that he’s played, we’ve allowed 86 yards rushing to backs and receivers. In games that he hasn’t, we’ve allowed 110.
Kevin Givens went down early this year and has only now been rotating back in, but his play isn’t up to the level that we’d grown to expect given his two-year upward trajectory. Part of that could be lingering injuries. Part could be that he’s at his best when paired beside a space-eater so that he can really operate as a one-gap penetrator. Kentavius Street hasn’t taken a major step forward. Him, Givens, and the now-released Zach Kerr have had their issues getting washed out against the run. The new guy (Charles Omenihu) was a nice value trade, but he’s more of an Armstead type. Giving him snaps inside as a situational pass rusher isn’t going to help our run defense.
DJ Jones has been his usual reliable self, but when he gets dinged up and has to come off the field, we really feel it. On the second level, the return of Dre Greenlaw—who has been a remarkably consistent tackler through his short career—should help against the run. But maybe our best hope to bolster our front-line (other than Jones staying healthy) is a speedy return from Maurice Hurst, who was very disruptive against the run in the two games he’s played in this year. Unfortunately, those games have been bookended by injuries. Any way you look at it, our interior DL has underperformed.
The Snowball Effect. Let’s try and chart our defensive philosophy and approach through DeMeco Ryans’ up-and-down first season as DC.
We go through the pre-season expecting to play more man coverage and blitz more because of the strength of our STARTING cornerbacks and the fact that we need an added pass rush boost upfront. Verrett goes down in week one, which makes us bring in aging veterans Josh Norman and Dre Kirkpatrick to fill his void.
Still lacking an ideal pass rush, we continue to be aggressive and run more man, and we even have some success in doing so—like against the Eagles and in a stellar first outing against the Cardinals. But our historically bad pass interference rate on deep balls pulls us away from that. Although even when we play zone, receivers eat up our cushion in a hurry and force one-on-one jump balls down the field, a strategy that reaches peak frustration during the rain-soaked Sunday night shitshow in which seemingly every Colts scoring drive was buoyed by a deep shot penalty that set up a first-and-goal.
So against the Bears, a team that—in contrast to everything Matt Nagy stands for—had started slinging the ball down the field to cater to its rookie quarterback’s strengths, we began deploying huge cushions underneath. We’d been absolutely devastated by deep ball pass interference calls for a month straight, so the mentality shifts to allowing underneath passes and rallying up to them. The result was Justin Fields’ most productive game as a starter. Then, last week—against a team who wants nothing more than to dink-and-dunk you to death in the short game—the same general game plan led to one of our more embarrassing defensive displays of the past three years. Afraid of being toasted deep by the Cardinals backups—and rightfully worried about our replacement safeties having to play man coverage against speedy slot players like Rondale Moore—we allowed the Cardinals to do nothing but complete short passes then eviscerate us on yards after the catch. If you think that’s an exaggeration, we’ve missed 10+ tackles in both of the past two games, and last week, Colt McCoy’s average depth of completion was a “laughable-if-it-hadn’t-worked” 3.5 yards down the field.
Through eight games, Ryans has had his good moments and his bad moments. Injuries have put him in some unenviable positions, but you only have to look to last year to see what an elite DC can do to adapt to those problems. At the moment, I don’t think Ryans’ job is in jeopardy because of three games post-bye. But for our sake, we have to hope his adjustment period speeds up and he finds some answers despite our depleted secondary.
Who should know better, more? The 33-year-old corner or the 42-year-old coach? [Kyle Terada-USA Today Sports]
Leading the league in backbreaking plays. We know about the penalties. Despite playing soft the past two weeks in an attempt to discourage the deep ball we—unsurprisingly—still lead the league in defensive penalty yardage, pass interference penalties, and pass interference yardage (and pass interferences declined because they resulted in catches anyways). And that’s having played one less game than most teams. Many of these penalties have been on deep balls and many have come on third downs. Needless to say, these are backbreakers.
But if it seems like our penalties are more backbreaking than most, that would be because they statistically are. We’ve had 17 defensive penalties that have resulted in automatic first downs, which is (only) fourth-worst in the league (although two of the teams ahead of us haven’t had their bye weeks yet), but we’re the single worst team on third down, third and long, and “desperation” situations.
While penalties can be backbreaking, nearly all turnovers are. When it comes to our turnover differential, the 49ers sit at -9, which is tied for second-to-last in the NFL with the Jaguars and the Chiefs—who have eked their way to 5-4 on the back of close wins over the Giants and Jordan Love making his first career start. Offensively, we cough up the ball too much and often in crucial situations—like the two fumbles last weekend while we were dicing them on offense. Defensively, we just don’t generate takeaways. This is obviously a stat that is the result of multiple different things going wrong, but it’s also a great way for a good team to lose more games than they should and a bad team to stay afloat.
All this at least provides a numerical explanation for why our advanced efficiency metrics are shockingly strong—9th overall in DVOA, 6th in Offense, and 17th in Defense—and calculate that we should have 5+ wins on the season despite our on-field results inverting that projection.
Our counterpunch lacks knockout power. Every good defense knows that our bread-and-butter is the outside run game. To make sure teams can’t cheat too heavily to stop that, we like to deploy our quick game between the hashes and take play-action shots over the top.
The problem is that teams no longer care if we’re completing a ton of 8-to-12-yard passes underneath because they’ve realized that (A) they’d rather allow that than be bludgeoned by 5-to-10-yard gains on the ground and (B) when they load the box against the run, they’re also creating tighter passing windows for our quick game because we so often throw inside. In essence, they’re killing two birds with one stone—selling out against the run while simultaneously shrinking our strike zone on the slants and in-breakers that Shanahan likes to employ because of how many bodies they have crammed in the box. And so far, our quick game counterpunch hasn’t been effective or explosive enough to get teams away from this strategy.
But wasn’t that basically our offense in 2019? Now we have a re-emerging Brandon Aiyuk, and a third-year Deebo, and Jimmy G, who—by many measures—is actually playing better than he did during that Super Bowl run? If anything, shouldn’t we have fewer issues?
The biggest difference between then and now is that teams are fully committing to that defensive strategy and have become so aggressive with their box alignments that it’s difficult to get the ball onto the perimeter with the stretch run handoffs that set up our play-action game. By lining stand-up defensive ends far outside our tackles and tight ends, putting down linemen outside shade of everything, and utilizing aggressive slanting, we’ve often been forced to resort to relying on crack tosses—condensed splits from wideouts and quick pitches to the running back—to get the ball outside faster than on a normal handoff. While that’s led to plenty of decent gains on the ground, pitches are terrible for play-action purposes and open up fewer cut-back opportunities for our backs.
Part of the benefit of our outside run game is that it stretches the defense horizontally for our play-action game behind it. That’s why we so often spring wide-open crossers going against the flow of the play. Or we used to. But you can’t really do that when you have to rely so heavily on pitches to outflank the defense. Pitches also allow the defense to see run immediately, which means the linebackers and other second-level defenders can fast flow towards the outside gaps without the threat of being punished backside or over the top.
That isn’t to say we should never be running pitches. After all, some variation of crack toss was behind most if not all of our explosive runs in the past two games, but a heavy reliance on tosses means a less effective play-action game. And since our play-action game is basically the only way that we can threaten teams deep, leaning on the crack toss means we’re forced to choose between running more effectively into loaded boxes or forcing defenses out of those loaded boxes in the first place.
Unfortunately, this once again comes down to some combination of Jimmy G’s talents and what Shanahan is comfortable calling while he’s under center. Teams know we won’t drop back and throw the ball outside the hashes or deep down the field. They know that our deep ball comes off of play-action, which is at its best when we can show stretch looks to create more space horizontally on crossing routes. So they choose to commit fully to stopping our #1 threat, the outside running game, knowing that in doing so they’re slowing down our second threat as well and—when they get us out of our play-action game—our third threat on top of that. Right now, the primary difference between us and the currently-more-successful Rams and Packers’ offenses, is that opposing teams know those offenses can drop back and dice them in the passing game if they load up against the run. Currently, we can’t do that. And until we can, teams will continue to force us out of the stretch handoffs.
That doesn’t mean the rest of 2021 (or however long Jimmy G is our quarterback) is hopeless. Despite all the issues, our offensive metrics are still high. In that hideous game against the Colts, one of the bright spots was how well we ran the ball with our split blocking in the backfield. In a non-monsoon, the offense could have had quite a performance that night. And even though it feels like ages ago, we’re less than two weeks removed from absolutely gashing a strong Bears defense, in part because Jimmy was able to hit a deep pass or two over the top and pull their safeties out of the box. But at the moment, when teams sell out against the run, we have to be playing flawlessly to string together long drives via our intermediate passing game while threading the ball between underneath defenders. And whether it’s drops or penalties or—in the last game—backbreaking fumbles, we haven’t executed nearly well enough to keep those drives alive.
Reactive versus proactive roster building. There is no such thing as a “luxury pick” in the NFL. As a hard salary-cap league with large rosters and a rookie pay scale that keeps young players’ pay rates artificially deflated, the best teams remain consistently competitive by choosing to make roster decisions ahead of when they have to make them. In other words, they fill holes on the backend of their roster in the present before they become problems in the future. The Niners, in two specific positions that they’ve had issues at for years, have failed to fill those holes, and the entire team has suffered because of it.
After Chris Jones annihilated our interior OL in the 2019 Super Bowl, we knew that we had to improve our interior pass protection. At right guard, Mike Person was a stellar run blocker, but he had issues in pass protection. Ben Garland, our backup center, was much the same. That off-season, we hoped that Weston Richburg would return healthy at center and that star swingman Daniel Brunskill would take over right guard duties. But instead of adding a starter-level player or a promising young developmental prospect at either position—whether to start now or later or even just to push the incumbent—we brought in elder veteran Tom Compton and fifth-round pick Colton McKivitz, who many considered a reach on the interior due to his lack of ideal movement skills. Richburg never played another down of professional football, we had a new center every week, and McKivitz is currently on the practice squad.
With our interior still a mess this off-season, we added Alex Mack—who has played well and given a big boost to our pass protection but is also 36 years old—and second rounder Aaron Banks, who—like McKivitz and Skule before him—scouts considered a bit of a reach while questioning his movement skills in our system. After missing much of the preseason due to injury, Banks has yet to take meaningful snaps in a game. While it’s far too early to write him off, we clearly took him where we did with the expectation that he’d be a starter by now. If we’d properly addressed the position the year before, he wouldn’t have to (or wouldn’t have been picked in the first place).
Moving forward, we’re about to see an additional ripple effect from all this, and it may not be pretty. If Banks was comfortably starting, or if we’d added playable interior depth this year or the year before, or if we’d moved on from Shon Coleman years ago when it was clear he wasn’t going to contribute, then maybe we’d be more confident in how we’re going to patch up the giant hole at right tackle that now exists due to Mike McGlinchey’s season-ending quad injury. For all the shit McGlinchey gets on social media, he has steadily improved after a tough start to the season and was really rounding into shape as a strong two-way tackle when he went down against the Cardinals. After his injury, we got absolutely abused along the right side of the line, with his replacement (Compton) and Brunskill acting as turnstiles for Cardinals defenders. It seems clear that Brunskill is not only at his best as a swing substitute, but could be best outside—where he had lots of success on both sides of the line during our Super Bowl run. If Banks (or someone else) were ready on the interior, perhaps shifting Brunskill outside would be the best move to patch up our OL. But now, our best hope may be playing a promising rookie who has taken mostly (if not entirely) snaps on the left side of the line up until this point.
Similarly, cornerback has been an area of concern for at least the past three off-seasons. Ahkello Witherspoon’s brutal sophomore season meant we entered the 2019 draft with a still-recovering Richard Sherman and giant question marks opposite him. Hoping that Witherspoon would rebound, we took a low-risk flyer on Jason Verrett and added the injury-prone Tim Harris in the sixth round. Witherspoon fired out of the gates, and—after he went down to injury and came back a shell of his former self—we struck gold with the emergence of Emmanuel Moseley opposite Sherman. But entering the 2020 off-season, the cornerback position looked like a UDFA with half-a-season of good play under his belt and two aging and injury-riddled veterans (one who hadn’t played in three years) across from him. Yet we didn’t address the position at all through free agency or the draft. In fact, the biggest cornerback move we made was letting DJ Reed go to waivers during training camp. He was promptly swooped up by the Seahawks and has started 16 games for them since.
When Sherman went down in week one last year, we again struck gold with the re-emergence of a finally healthy Jason Verrett, who—against all odds—returned to a Pro Bowl form that let us play more man coverage and blitz to offset our many defensive injuries. But entering this past off-season, with Sherman’s play dropping and his injuries accumulating and Spoon off to the Seahawks (and then the Steelers), we found ourselves with Moseley and Verrett—a top-level corner who has missed about half of his career to devastating injuries. Once again, we had injury concerns with our starters and question marks behind them. We didn’t add anyone in free agency, choosing to address the position in the draft, but we waited until the end of the third round—at the tail of the run on defensive backs—to take a player who had opted out of last year’s COVID season and was seen by most as a 2022 contributor rather than a 2021 one. Then a fifth-rounder.
Once again, in the first week of the season, Verrett went down. With Moseley already dinged up, that left us with a fifth-round rookie and veteran journeymen at one of the most important positions in football. Anyone who has watched us play this year knows how that’s gone.
I fully believe in drafting for value over need, but—just like anything else—it’s a balancing act. A pick like Nick Bosa or Deebo Samuel—a high-level selection used on a high-level player at a position of need, is obviously the dream—but that’s not always possible. The best teams stay strong year-to-year by hoarding mid-round picks to accumulate depth and patch up roster holes ahead of time before they become massive problems down the road. Because when your team’s weak spot becomes a hole and then a genuine problem—as we have at cornerback or on the right side of our offensive line—there’s no hiding it (or fixing it mid-season) in the NFL. And that’s what we’re seeing this season.
Either of these guys doing dope shit would help [Getty Images]
5 KEYS FOR THE SECOND HALF
Shanahan and Lynch aren’t going anywhere. The calls for their heads have grown loud since the bye week, but that’s not happening. Nor should it. Despite mistakes in the draft and our woefully disappointing first half of 2021, we just traded three first-round picks for a quarterback who Shanahan hand-picked with the intent of sitting his entire rookie year. Now that Shanahan finally has his quarterback—one who is dripping with physical tools and potential—why would we boot him to the curb in lieu of a new coach who may not like our new QB, or lacks the ability to build an offense around him, or wants to rebuild the team in their image with all the first-round picks we no longer have?
We’ve got a lot of high-end talent and should be performing better than we have. And if we flop next year and are looking at three straight years out of contention despite said talent, then we can start looking at making moves up top. But until then, understand that we’re less than halfway through the season and are only ONE GAME out of the final playoff spot. Things could get much worse and are far from unfixable.
Play the young bloods. It’s one thing to let Trey Lance sit for the majority of his rookie season. We’re already all-in on him as the future. If he sucks, we suck. That’s the deal we made. But guys like Aaron Banks and—now that McGlinchey has gone down—Jaylon Moore need to see the field at some point this year. Same with some combination of Deommodore Lenoir and Ambry Thomas. Because, even if they’re not totally ready, we need to know what we have in these players so that we know how to approach free agency and the draft.
Part of the reason we’re in this situation in the first place is that we’ve been overly optimistic with our self-scouting. Whether that’s with injuries (Tim Harris, Jalen Hurd) or talent level (McKivitz, Skule) or simply valuing aging veterans over their younger, greener counterparts (Compton), we need to make sure we don’t repeat those same mistakes as we enter a crucial 2022 off-season. The worst possible outcome is that we enter next year as we did this one—unrealistically optimistic about our ability and health in crucial positions and then struggling through the year for patchwork options to offset our suspect depth.
With few draft picks and little cap room, every personnel decision is going to matter more. I’m not saying we throw in the towel and give up on the season (once again, we’re one game out of the playoffs), but we gotta see what we have from our latest draft class.
Have successful knee surgeries. Jason Verrett. Raheem Mostert. Javon Kinlaw. Things would look a tad different if we had even one of them healthy this year. With Verrett, the future is very cloudy. He’s on a one-year deal, has a long history of knee injuries, and it’s too early to know how successful the surgery has been or what his timetable for return might be. But despite also having lengthy injury histories, the other two present a bit more hope.
Both Mostert and Kinlaw were shut down and opted for surgery because they believed that going under the knife was the best way to eliminate the lingering knee issues they’ve had over the past two years. Bite the bullet now for the promise of better long-term health. Will that be true? Who knows. And Mostert at least is in the last year of his contract.
But if both guys can come back truly healthy (and with surgically repaired knees that are more likely to stay that way), that’s a huge boost for our future prospects.
Maximize QB return. This could mean a lot of things, but for the remainder of the season, our goal for the quarterback position isn’t just “win as many games as possible.” Obviously, that is important. The growing “throw-in-the-towel” crowd really needs to look at how detrimental that can be to a group of talented veterans and how ineffective that is when you don’t have your next two first-round picks. But our unique quarterback room means we have other priorities as well.
Obviously, we want Lance to be put into the best position to succeed next year and in the years after that. Whether that means he should play sooner or later is up for interpretation. If anything, Mahomes’ significant drop in play this season lends credence to the idea of sitting Lance for most (if not all) of the year. Mahomes has been way too aggressive and has been forcing ad-libbed plays out of the structure of the offense—in part because he’d gotten away with all of those “oh my god Mahomes is the best” throws in the past. But variance has caught up to him. And while I’d still build a squad around Mahomes before most, his current slump really points to how much he could have flopped if he hadn’t sat for a year behind one of the smartest, most professional, and most risk-averse veteran quarterbacks in the league.
I’m not saying we should or shouldn’t start Lance (although I would like to see him in subpackage work). I’ve already had my say on that, and I have to have faith that the coaching staff knows what he can do right now and is doing what’s best for his development. But the “do everything off-structure, it’s way better” crowd has certainly taken a hit this year. The ability to extend plays and create positives out of would-be negatives will always be effective, and it is part of the massive allure of Lance, but if anything this year has once again confirmed that you need to win within the structure of an offense before you can think about making plays outside of it. Otherwise, you dig yourself into a hole that’s hard to dig out of.
The other side of this coin is Jimmy Garoppolo. Part of the inherent value of the Trey Lance trade is in what we can get in return for Jimmy. And with so many of our high picks now gone, the higher the draft pick compensation the better. At the moment, I’m not sure what (if anything) he’d get on the trade market. Large QB classes in the past few years mean most teams have established or young quarterbacks on their rosters, and Jimmy has been good but not great. But if he does hold off Lance through the rest of this year and helps the Niners surge into the playoffs, we could be looking at the kind of second-day draft pick compensation that we desperately need to offset what we gave up to pick Lance. It’s far from unreasonable to think that someone like the Panthers, Steelers, Packers (post-Rodgers), Racial Slurs, or Browns(?) could see value in acquiring Jimmy G in the off-season. But only if he finishes the season strong and healthy.
If you love something, you set it free. If there’s one silver lining to this year, it’s (hopefully) that Shanahan and Lynch can finally let 2019 go. It was a great run cut short by some knocked-down passes and the complete inability for anyone to call a hold. In 2020, when we returned nearly all our team, it made sense to try and run it back. Even this year, when the COVID cap and injuries the year before depreciated the value of many of our veteran players, it made sense to believe that—if we could only avoid repeating as one of the single most injury-riddled teams in the past two decades—we could rekindle some of that Super Bowl run magic. But our commitment to the status quo for the past two years has hampered our continued evolution both schematically and as a team.
The fact of the matter is that we’re old at some critical positions, and our commitment to sticking with those veterans means we haven’t properly developed the talent behind them. We once again will have a lot of free agents at the end of the year and big extensions looming in the near future for Nick Bosa and Deebo Samuel. That means making hard decisions elsewhere and letting go of some players that you like while accumulating value through the backend roster turnover required of teams that want to become perennial contenders.
It also means changing things up schematically to match our ascending talent, opening up offensively to match the changing way games are officiated and keeping an open mind to what needs to change for us to take that next step forward. In short, by finally letting 2019 go, we free ourselves to make the evolution needed to contend again.
Go Niners 👍🏈
Bye Week Breakdown: Lance’s First Start
Running. Gunning. But more running.
Clean Pockets, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose [Michael Zagaris/Getty Images]
Since this was the first (and potentially last) start for Lance during his rookie season, I figured it was worth a deeper look. So we’re gonna dive right into it.
The Gameplan
With Kittle out and Lance making his first career start on the road against the undefeated Cardinals, the Niners’ deployed an offensive gameplan much different than anything we’d seen to this point.
In the passing game, we sat in the gun and spread things out to make it easier for our young QB to read coverages. The spread sets—along with lots of trips formations—gave Lance mostly passing concepts in which he could pick a side of the defense based on pre-snap alignment then focus on half-field reads post-snap. While we ran a handful of stick concepts, there were far fewer lightning-quick underneath passes and RPOs compared to your standard Jimmy G gameplan. We still deployed slants and digs—any Shanahan offense is going to want to use those to attack defenses in the intermediate zones between the hashes—but the focus was more on down the field passing and some work outside the numbers.
The difference was most apparent in our play-action game, where—instead of gobbling up short-to-intermediate gains and dotting between the hashes with RPOS—we ran more deep routes with a lot of max protect. In essence, we catered the offense to Lance’s strengths—opting to showcase his strong arm while minimizing the tight windows he had to throw into and giving him more time to process defenses.
In the run game, we aimed to get outside quick on the edges with pitches to Mitchell behind a horde of crack blocks, and—of course—a heavy (some would say, too heavy) dose of option looks.
The Effectiveness
10 points despite a tremendous defensive effort.
Granted, that total is a bit misleading, as there were MANY points left on the field in this one. As has been the case for much of the season, our offense performed well enough to give us a bunch of great opportunities but couldn’t capitalize in the crucial moments. And this game had a lot of those moments.
We had four or five drops, an incredible five offensive holding penalties, and were only 3-of-11 on third down and 1-of-5 on fourth down. Eight of our nine offensive drives ended in Arizona territory, but only two of them resulted in scores. As a frustratingly perfect microcosm of how disjointed our offense has been this season, we had one ten-play drive that took us from our own 36 to the opposing 34 but ended up in a punt when a first down gain was nullified by our third holding call of the drive and a sack and incomplete pushed us back to 4th-and-22 from the Arizona 46.
The right side of our line was a major weakness in this contest, as JJ Watt had his way with both Dan Brunskill and Mike McGlinchey. According to PFF, Brunskill recorded a 13.7 pass pro score, which seems a bit drastic considering he only technically allowed one hit and one hurry on the game, but it’s a strong enough outlier that it’s worth noting. While McGlinchey, who has long been known for dominant run blocking and the occasional bad miss in pass pro, struggled on the ground. Unfortunately, that’s been a bit of a trend for him this season. In what was the worst run of the game for McGlinchey, he got beat by JJ Watt on three out of four plays, ending in the fourth-and-two QB power that got stuffed in the first quarter.
At the skill positions, we obviously need to minimize the drops. In a few instances, the ball came in a bit too hot or a bit too behind receivers, but they were all catchable passes. Some right on the money. We also need to do a better job of getting separation on our deep routes, as Lance’s down-the-field targets were blanketed more often than not. On the tight end front, we really missed Kittle in the run and the pass game, as Dwelley and Woerner also fell victim to some JJ Watt-ing as edge blockers.
That said, we outgained the Cardinals in total yardage (338-to-304) and per-play average (5.7 to 5.1) despite having one fewer offensive drive than them and a string of backbreaking penalties. We rushed for 152 yards on a whopping 5.4 ypc average despite them committing heavily to stopping the run throughout the day. In short, it’s more of the same of what we’ve been seeing.
Despite all of our backfield injuries and the changing of quarterbacks, entering the bye week we had the NFL’s 9th-best offense in terms of DVOA. Meaning there’s talent, there’s potential, and there’s glimpses of putting it all together. We just haven’t. Which is either encouraging or discouraging depending on how you look at it.
Lance’s Performance
More aggro. As briefly mentioned earlier, we went for it on fourth down five times. This, from a coaching staff that has historically leaned more conservative in fourth down aggressiveness. We’d always theorized that with Lance at the helm, Shanahan would be more comfortable going for it, and through this meager one-game sample size that looks to be the case. Granted, we have room for improvement on fourth down playcalling and execution, but anything that pushes us a bit more towards following the idea that possessions are king in today’s NFL is a positive in my book.
Batted Balls. Lance had three or four knocked down at the LOS, and at least one was set up for a giant gain if it hadn’t been. This was a bummer but not particularly surprising. Pass rushers are often taught to get their eyes on the quarterback and their hands up if they get stymied in their pass rush, so batted balls most often happen due to some combination of (1) pass rushers knowing that they can’t get to a quarterback in time, (2) a quarterback holding the ball too long so the DL can read his eyes, and (3) quarterbacks with longer releases.
At this point, Lance checks all of those boxes, and it’s no surprise that the majority of the batted passes happened later in the game, after the defense had been gashed so heavily on scrambles that they became content in sitting, reading, and batting down balls rather than chasing a quarterback who’d eluded them most of the game.
Take Fewer Hits (like by 100%). Everyone and their mother was in agreeance that Lance took way too many hits against the Cardinals. Multiple defensive players even said so in their press conferences. This problem was two-fold in that:
(1) He needs to learn to slide and do it 99% of the time: Not running over people. Not fighting for extra yardage on 2nd-and-8. Not that weird kinda falling over or crumbling to the side thing when you realize you should have slid (which also puts you at injury and contact risk). Sliding. Give up 2 or 3 yards on the scramble and just get the hell down so you can continue playing.
(2) We ran too many designed runs: Zone reads are fine as long as you’re making a regular conscious effort to protect him based on formations running to open sides, bluff blockers protecting your quarterback, etc. But the long-term hope for Lance is that he runs about as often as Patrick Mahomes or Russell Wilson, with his designed runs coming off the occasional zone-read keeper that he gets a chill seven yards on before sliding well before contact. What we should actively be trying to avoid is Cam Newton / RG3 ground game usage. And before you mention Lamar Jackson, just know that the only reason he can carry so much of the load as a runner is because he is fast enough and elusive enough and does a great job of not taking direct hits. If he was any less gifted in any three of those categories, his style would not be sustainable long-term.
Marcus Thompson II of The Athletic shared a great statistical tidbit while talking about this very issue.
We get it, Lance is a really good athlete and a big, tough kid. Against the Cardinals, 62 of his 89 rushing yards came after contact, and—to be fair—45 of those 89 yards came on scrambles versus designed runs. But we made the ultimate long-term investment in giving up the draft capital to pick a 20-year-old Trey Lance. Letting him take this kind of contact for a few extra yards in the regular season would be the ultimate short-term decision.
Scramble Drill / Holding = Mobile QB shit. We had a really bad run of holding calls in this one, but a few of them could be attributed to the natural adjustment of more movement behind center. When you have a mobile quarterback, you’re going to get more holding calls on your offensive line when he starts running around and buying time. Linemen are taught to block at an angle that keeps the quarterback protected at a certain depth and location within the pocket, so when that quarterback suddenly moves deeper in the pocket or vacates it entirely, those angles get thrown off and some holding calls are inevitable. Some. Not the amount that we had in this game.
Similarly, when you have a mobile quarterback, receivers need to be more aware of where they should run to get open when plays break down and the QB breaks the pocket. There were a few instances where Lance was flushed out of the pocket and—when the wideouts broke into the scramble drill—they weren’t totally in sync with where they were going in relation to Lance, his passing windows, and each other.
Every team has different scramble rules (some even dictated by specific route combinations), but the general rules for receivers when a quarterback breaks the pocket are: (1) put yourself in his passing window, (2) avoid bunching up multiple receivers heading into one area, and (3) keep moving so that you don’t entice a horrendous across body throw that could lead to an ugly pick.
The play below isn’t the best example, but it shows how our timing and spacing aren’t quite there when adjusting to a more mobile quarterback.
Here we have a slant-wheel concept to the trips side. On the snap, Lance looks to the right but is flushed out of the pocket before the running back can turn into his route, so he scrambles left. When the receivers notice they’re in scramble mode, they should likely be taking paths similar to the ones below so that they can get into passing windows while clearing space for one another.
But that’s not really what happens. And as Lance crosses the LOS, we’re looking at this.
Deebo realistically should have broken his route off earlier and headed to the sideline. On a slant, there’s not a lot he can do to help, but at the very least he could operate as a lead blocker if Lance runs or pull a defender away from his pursuit. Dwelley actually does this right. He breaks out of where he’d settled into his route and heads out towards the sideline while looking for space. But there’s no space for him to run to because Juice has attempted to turn back into an open window. There are two major problems with this:
(1) That window isn’t really open. There’s an underneath defender and you want to minimize the attempts your quarterback throws across his body while scrambling. If you draw a vertical line down the field from where Lance is, you typically only want him throwing on that line or outside of it. This is doubly the case since he’s a right-handed quarterback scrambling to his left.
(2) He’s blocking space for another receiver to enter. See, Dwelley.
(3) He’s bringing more defenders who can potentially tackle Lance if he runs. Remember, the goal of a scramble drill is to generate a completion off a broken play OR clear enough space so that the quarterback can run for a positive gain without being hit.
At the time of the scramble, Juice’s route was at a middle depth, and—knowing that Dwelley would be working his way towards the sideline—the fullback should have kept going deeper to clear out defenders. If Juice were simply to lose his man—or if a DB were to jump Dwelley on the crosser—he could still get a shot over the top, but with the spacing we’ve presented, Lance’s only option was to run.
One of the great benefits of having a quarterback who can scramble is that you can create positive plays off of what would be losses or incompletes. But that means putting practice time into getting that situational chemistry dialed in. The Seahawks obviously practice the scramble drill extensively (some would argue it’s their best play). This year the Ravens’ uptick in passing efficiency can partially be attributed to them giving their wideouts more freedom to work into space and freelance on their routes. They’ve basically leaned into the fact that Lamar’s athleticism creates a scramble drill on every play, and it’s paid dividends. For many reasons, it’s unlikely that we go anywhere near that extreme, but we will need to devote more time towards developing the chemistry between wideouts and their quarterback if we want more effective passing off of scrambles. Realistically, we probably can’t get there this season while flipping between Jimmy G and Lance. There’s just not enough reps to go around when each quarterback works differently with his wideouts. But it’s something to take note of for 2022.
The Many Flavors of Zone Read. As expected, option runs played a major part in our game plan this week, to mixed results. Our run game as a whole was strong, but it was also buoyed by Lance’s yardage on scrambles, and there was certainly room for improvement.
Today I’ll be focusing on the zone read—the most basic shotgun option play—and the different ways that it was deployed and defended in this game.
First, a refresher on the zone read with one of the simpler calls on the day.
This spread set means that we have a clear six-man box, which—given the nature of the play—means we have an innate numbers advantage when the QB is a run threat.
The linemen are zone blocking left, with two double teams working up to the second level. Dwelley will release outside to pull the defensive back then engage him down the field as a blocker. Lance is reading the end man on the line of scrimmage (EMOL)—in this case, a stand-up DE—who is marked by a triangle. If he crashes down the line and commits to the running back, Lance will pull the ball and run it himself. If he widens, keys the quarterback, or just sits there, Lance will give the ball to Mitchell.
At the mesh point, the defensive end has already committed. While he looks like he could viably middle both options in this photo if you look closely he is in the first stage of a large hop down the line. Thus, he has no chance of changing direction in time if Lance pulls it. Which he does.
The result is a seven-yard gain on the QB keeper. Yet it is rarely that simple.
When the Niners were trying to get an extra blocker and—typically—an extra protector for Lance, they’d put an upback into the mix. In this case, Dwelley takes on the role by motioning into the backfield.
From the Niners’ perspective, the play is basically the same. Lance is still reading the EMOL. The line is still blocking the same. The only real difference is Dwelley, who is crossing the formation on an arc block. On these blocks he’s taught to read the EMOL. If he crashes down the line, he should bypass him and pick up the second-level defender. If he sits and widens, he should kick him out to give more space for the running back on the give. His decisions should mirror those of the quarterback.
But the Cardinals were expecting this, and—I believe—auto-checked into a double gap exchange on the weak-side after seeing motion into an upback position. Before the motion, this is what the Cardinals defense is showing as their gap responsibilities against the run.
But as the motion completes, the EMOL weakside DE slides from outside Trent Williams to directly in front of him, which tells me he’s shooting the B gap all the way while letting the linebacker behind him take his place in the C gap. They’re setting up squeeze-scrape, the most common counterpunch to defending the zone read.
But the Cardinals have taken it one step further. They're doing a similar gap exchange with their next lineman and linebacker. On the snap, the weak-side tackle shoots across our center’s face, forcing his way to the opposite A gap and latching hold so that Mack can’t release to the second level. At the same time, the strong-side linebacker—now free to roam—shuffles to the weak-side, then totally abandons his strong side A gap responsibility to fly outside and chase the quarterback.
The rationale behind this makes a lot of sense. It’s basically reverse-engineering the rules of the option. The weak-side end and linebackers switching gap responsibilities confuses the quarterback’s read. The end forces a pull because the QB sees the EMOL crashing towards the running back while the linebacker runs unblocked to the outside to chase the quarterback after they keep the ball.
Even if the QB diagnoses this and options that linebacker instead of the EMOL, a give would send the running back behind Trent Williams and into the hands of either the first linebacker on the squeeze-scrape or the strong-side linebacker who is going across formation unblocked. Yes, both A gaps are technically uncovered, but against the zone read, the Cardinals know that if they can force Trent Williams to block hard down the line, Mitchell would need to run behind him and into unblocked defenders. He wouldn’t be able to exploit the other open gaps because he’d never get to them in his read progression.
In case of a pull, even if the weak-side linebacker can’t bring down the QB, the strong-side linebacker has come across formation unaccounted for into what is effectively the D gap. While the option out of this set is meant to put the C gap defender in a bind, it doesn’t account for a D gap defender because there wasn’t any D gap before the play. So even if Dwelley can pick off one of the linebackers in his arc block, the Cardinals are betting that one of their speedy linebackers, unblocked, will be able to chase down Lance for a short gain. Which is exactly what happened.
The result was a gain of two, which was brought back on a hold by Travis Benjamin. Because of course it was.
But there’s a reason gap exchange isn’t commonly used outside of stopping the option. It can get gashed by traditional run plays, especially those like same-side powers, counters, and traps whose playside down blocks resemble weakside zone blocks. In essence, you want the gap exchanging players to think you’re running zone and cheat to stop it. Then you hit them in the areas that they vacated while doing so.
We tried an opposite side power out of pistol early in the game, but a JJ Watt inside slant into the backfield sent off a chain reaction of recovery blocks that led to a measly gain. That was a shame because I thought there were more opportunities to go to it in this game.
The one other time we did show something similar, a pistol split zone read with a kick-out block coming backside across the formation, we had success despite some sketchy execution.
The set-up here is very similar to the last play diagrammed, with the major change being Dwelley is starting from a wing-back position versus an upback, which—in turn—sells the misdirection better because he’s telegraphing his move less and is still a traditional passing threat. All blocking rules remain the same.
On the snap, JJ Watt ole’s Brunskill as he shoots inside, causing McGlinchey to block him down the line—which he does very well. The EMOL sits, trying to middle the mesh and likely force a give, while the weak-side linebacker drifts outside of McGlinchey’s block, anticipating either a handoff that will bend right outside of McGlinchey or a keeper that he can chase down unblocked.
But in this case, Lance gives the ball, Dwelley kicks out the defensive end so he can’t pursue, and Brunskill recovers nicely to get a hat on the linebacker, who has put himself out of position from his gap responsibility because he’s trying to cheat based on his knowledge of zone read rules. After an impressive jump cut to get back on track, Mitchell runs for a nine-yard gain through a hole that opened up like the red sea.
It’s also worth noting that gap exchanges can leave you very susceptible to the inverted veer, which we ran twice—in very janky fashion, I might add—to the tune of 21 yards in this contest. But since the inverted veer requires our quarterback to run the ball inside, it’s best that we have a few mixups that protect him a bit better. Mix-ups such as same-side powers and split zones.
Even without Lance at the helm, we’ve had a lot of success with our shotgun running game in years past, but—with Lance involved and teams adjusting to favor stopping the zone read—attacking defenses inside with quick-hitting runs that look like zone off the snap should become a greater emphasis in our rushing attack.
Timing/Anticipation. By now we know that Lance’s biggest areas of improvement are (1) making his mechanics more consistent so that his accuracy follows, and (2) adjusting to the speed of the NFL by quickening his progressions and anticipating open receivers. Ultimately, those are improvements that must come over time, but Lance’s ability to rapidly learn from his mistakes has us hoping that growth could come sooner rather than later.
On the last play of our opening drive, we can see all of his current weaknesses at once.
The play call here is a max protect play-action pass with a single-side read to the field (left) side of the formation. The progression is Benjamin, to Deebo, to Dwelley—with our tight end the delayed check down if the two-man route combo doesn’t work.
12:57 left in 1Q: 2nd-and-10 from ARI 45
The Cardinals are in a two-deep shell, and they don’t run with Deebo as he goes in motion, meaning they’re in some form of quarters or Cover 2. Since the field side corner backs away on motion towards him, it becomes even more likely that they’re in—or have at least checked to—quarters. Given the play call and the pre-snap motion, it doesn’t really matter which coverage they drop into as both will basically play out the same.
On the snap, the defense drops into quarters, with the middle linebacker sinking deep into the hole like it’s Tampa 2, trying to take away two staples or our play-action game—crossers and digs. Before the snap, Deebo’s motion widens the play side linebacker. After the snap, his swing/wheel keeps the attention of the field-side corner, who drops off Benjamin to cover him.
Benjamin takes a mandatory inside release that sets up his inside curl and plays to the rules of the defense. Whether it’s Cover 2 or quarters, two-high safeties with no real vertical seam threat means the corner has help inside. He won’t fight an inside release, especially one so inside as to put him out of position against Deebo. Thus, Benjamin gets cleanly off the LOS, which preserves the timing of the route combinations.
This play is intended for Benjamin all the way. Deebo is a decoy who only gets the ball if the cornerback bails on his responsibility to follow Benjamin’s inside release (aka, a blown coverage). It opens up perfectly, as the field side safety is respecting Benjamin’s speed and playing far overhead, the play-side corner is locking up Deebo, and Benjamin has gotten the perfect depth to threaten the dig before curling into the hole outside of the inside linebacker and inside and over the outside linebacker, who was originally widened out by Deebo’s pre-snap motion.
This is when the ball should be released. For a duo with more reps/chemistry together, you could even throw it earlier. But right now, Lance has a clean pocket and a passing lane to an open receiver. However, he holds it a beat too long—perhaps not yet seeing the route open up or unsure of where exactly Benjamin is going to curl up.
Even with the timing off, Benjamin remains open.
Benjamin giving the universal sign for being open
But Lance has started to feel the pass rush. He moves up into the pocket, which—due to how open Benjamin is could honestly be okay—but instead of sliding in the pocket while keeping his body ready to throw, he turns his shoulders as if he’s going to run.
To be fair, by squaring his shoulders downfield, Lance pulls the attention of the outside linebacker (you can see him starting forward in the previous photo), which puts the defender in no-man’s land between dropping to defend the pass and playing the run. This keeps open the window of time to throw to Benjamin.
But since Lance now has to flip his shoulders back to wind up and throw, he’s losing valuable fractions of a second. This allows the defenders to close in on Benjamin, tightening the passing window. Lance has the arm strength to fit into that window with ease, but he’s now rushing things. As he starts his throwing motion Benjamin begins to work back towards the LOS, a habit that he’s surely been taught to do but was actually unnecessary in this case as the safeties were so far off from him that there was no backline pressure.
Lance’s pass—likely intended to be thrown to where Benjamin was and not where he wound up—sails high—and into the awaiting arms of Budda Baker.
This unfortunate outcome is the product of both a lack of individual and combined reps between quarterback and pass-catcher and the janky overall timing that led to Lance’s throwing mechanics looking like this when he released the ball.
But there’s a clear silver-lining to this mishap, and that’s that—just one quarter later—Lance showed much better anticipation and accuracy on a very similar concept.
On third down late in the second quarter, the Niners showed trips to the field side with Mohamed Sanu and Brandon Aiyuk running—what I believe to be—double dig/post option routes. Both are given free rein to read the defense and break their routes off flat, head upfield on posts, or sit in the holes of zones if they find an opening.
The progression numbers are my best guess. Juice has a one-step slant to occupy underneath defenders and open up passing windows down the field, while Deebo has a run-off route. He’s got a mandatory outside release to make sure the deep defender on his side has to turn to the sideline and away from the posts coming the other way. He’s running off defenders and would only get the ball in a pre-snap alert against press-man coverage.
If the middle safety jumps your first option (Sanu) then that should open up your second option (Aiyuk) behind him. And if the Cardinals drop into man coverage across and you don’t like your matchups (although in the case of Aiyuk on a linebacker, you should like your matchups), then the double vertical stems from the slots will pull defenders out of the alley to open up space underneath, Sanu’s mandatory outside release will create a natural rub on the corner, and you can hit Juice in stride for a chunk play off the slant.
Just before the snap, the overhang safety (#34) bails to the middle of the field and the Cardinals rotate into what looks like Cover 3 Mable, which is Cover 3 to the trips side and man to the solo receiver side. Since they’re rotating their overhang safety to the deep middle, they’re running a cloud variation of Cover 3, meaning the corner and the trips-side hole defender (in this case the high safety) switch responsibilities. The corner squats in the flats while the high safety takes the deep third to the field side.
To the boundary side, the low linebacker opens up aggressively to the solo receiver (Deebo) to cover the flats, while the cornerback over him is playing inside leverage and deep. Often times you’ll see a bracket technique in this situation, where the corner is playing high and outside and the linebacker is playing low and inside. In this case, both defenders are playing inside. Almost certainly because they’re selling out to take away the slant from Deebo, which—if you’ve watched Deebo play—makes a lot of sense.
Upon seeing Juice take an immediate path inside towards the dropping JJ Watt, the field corner opens up to Sanu’s vertical release, tasked with helping on any kind of out or corner down the field. But it doesn’t really matter, as both the corner and the deep sideline defender will be out-leveraged by Sanu’s route.
As Sanu and Aiyuk reach their breakpoints, you can see the two low defenders are even with them, meaning the digs are not available and both wideouts must adjust into posts. Since the deep middle defender (#34) is middling both routes, Lance knows that he has to throw to Sanu immediately before that safety can close the gap.
Lance does exactly that. The photo above is right as he starts his throwing motion, which is before Sanu even clears the defenders and breaks into the post. And while the ball placement looks behind Sanu, that is an intentional decision by Lance, as a ball on the back shoulder slows up your receiver and prevents him from running head-on to the safety crashing down on him.
While it’s far from the tightest of NFL passing windows, you can see from the endzone angle that Lance is throwing on time, with anticipation and accuracy, past defenders on different levels coming from multiple directions.
Unfortunately, this pass got dropped, and we punted the next play.
It may seem like baby steps, but it’s nice to see that Lance so quickly learned from his first quarter mistake and that he already has the capability to see receivers early and throw them open—even if his consistency in doing so is still a work in progress.
In Conclusion
All things considered, I thought Lance played pretty well. After watching film, I thought he played even better. His accuracy is going to be an issue, especially early in games. He just comes in super juiced and hasn’t had the time to consistently iron out those kinks in his mechanics quite yet. He’s also not going to see the field or get the ball out as quickly as Jimmy G. But he does add explosive potential with his arm, legs, and improvisational ability. That can absolutely open up an attack that’s been bogged down as of late, but it also doesn’t play to our current strengths as an offense.
Jimmy probably still gives us the best chance at winning. After all, the last time we saw him he was dicing up the Seahawks before being pulled due to injury, and that—and the Green Bay game—were when we only had one healthy running back. Now, Mitchell is back and Hasty should be returning soon. For a team that wants to run the ball—and wants to have the speed in the backfield to run stretch plays—that’s a pretty big deal.
But… if you told me tomorrow that we were trading Jimmy (for good value) and riding it out with a healthy Lance who we were going to protect much better than we did against Arizona, I’d be okay with it. Because while Jimmy may give us a better chance at winning now, it’s hard to say who would give us a better chance of winning two months from now.
That said, Lance isn’t healthy, and he’s unlikely to even suit up for the Colts game this weekend. And if our game plan is limited to the point where Lance has to run this much because the staff isn’t yet confident in him carrying more in the passing game, then there’s no sense in rolling him out in a way where he could get seriously injured. The most likely scenario is that Jimmy starts the rest of the season (unless he is, knock on wood, injured again) with the QB change happening over the off-season—when the staff has more time and focus to build the offense around our young quarterback and find more ways to protect him from contact. But at the very least, I think Lance showed that he’s ready to tackle a few more snaps per game, and we should allow him that opportunity once he’s back to full health.
Go Niners 👍🏈
2021 Quarterly Recap
There’s a 17th game this year so make it a quarter(ish)
![Hard to tackle, easy to love [Tony Avelar/AP]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e40f3a094d5fa3ebbbedb09/1633673121623-74J8L5014XAV61KKIO3C/kittle+and+deebo.jpeg)
Hard to tackle, easy to love [Tony Avelar/AP]
A month into the season, we sit at 2-2 and the panic level is… middling?
Realistically, we should probably be 3-1. The first two games weren’t as close as their final scores. We started out so poorly against the Packers that—despite us being 37 seconds away from a victory—it would be hard to say we “should have” won that game. But combine that with a Seattle contest in which we dominated on both sides of the ball for the first half, had our kicker and starting quarterback go down, and had one dude’s special teams miscues cost us at least a touchdown, and it’s easy to say at least one of those contests could have / should have fell in our favor. You could even say, we were just fingertips away.
Obviously, none of that matters. Thus, the 2-2 record.
While our start—and the 4-0 and 3-1 records of the Cardinals and Rams, respectively—means we’ll be climbing out of a hole for the foreseeable future, a .500 record through four weeks is far from a death knell for our hopes of contending this season, especially in a year when there is only one undefeated team after four weeks. With a seventeen game season, it’s more important than ever that we peak at the right time, and there’s plenty of season left to do just that.
That said, the next five games will be telling. With matchups against the Colts, Bears, Rams, and Cardinals (2x), we’re looking at the toughest section of our schedule before we enter a run of six of seven games against teams currently .500 or lower (plus the 3-1 Bengals). If we can get through the next five contests with at least a 3-2 record, we’re still in a solid position to reach the 11-ish wins that should be enough to get us into the playoffs.
OFFENSE
![insert quote from the movie Friday here [Tony Avelar/AP]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e40f3a094d5fa3ebbbedb09/1633672594402-K3JU4TIW72KEGQX4KTYE/deebo+power.jpeg)
insert quote from the movie Friday here [Tony Avelar/AP]
Is the Trey Lance era officially underway? TBD.
With Monday’s news that Garoppolo’s calf injury was less significant than anticipated and that he might even play this weekend, a full-time move to Lance seems less likely than it did on Sunday night. In fact, if Jimmy is truly back by this Sunday, this whole section could be moot by the time I post this. But I expect Lance to start against the Cardinals, both because the Niners surely remember how Jimmy G’s ankle injury lingered last year and was made worse when he played on it and because our week 6 bye would give Jimmy an extra seven days to heal up.
After the Seahawks game, the estimated timetable for Garoppolo’s return was “a couple weeks.” If that had stretched to three or four games, then the likelihood of Lance fully supplanting him would have grown. Basically, the longer the audition, the more sense it would make to roll with the rookie. Either he would have struggled against two of the best looking teams in the conference, leading to results that may have shifted our expectations on the season and made it more palpable to stomach rookie quarterback pains down the home stretch, or he would have excelled and led us to a string of victories, which would have made him very hard to put back on the bench.
If Jimmy G can play this Sunday or—more likely—misses this game but returns for the next one, the time that Lance has to develop and grow as a starter decreases tremendously. A single start on the road against the only undefeated team in the league while potentially missing your star left tackle and 80% of your running backs is not the best scenario to break your young signal-caller in gently, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see Shanahan turn back to the veteran after the bye if Lance doesn’t look ready. In fact, that should be the expectation.
To Garoppolo’s credit, he’s started out this year better than any of his past seasons, piecing up the Lions in one of his best performances as a Niner then finding his groove in the second half in games against the Eagles and Packers. While his cold start against the Eagles helped make that game closer than it needed to be, he’s largely been a better version of the guy we’ve seen for the past few years, and if he hadn’t gotten hurt in the first drive against the Seahawks—his velocity/accuracy slowly decreasing until he couldn’t play the second half—we likely would have kept the offensive momentum going and come away with a victory.
Lance is still ironing out the changes to his fundamentals, which leads to bouts of inaccuracy—like his first two passes against Seattle—and he shouldn’t be expected to read defenses quickly and concisely at this stage in his development. In short, the gameplan we had against Seattle—quick passes and RPOs as the Seahawks loaded the box, then crossers when they tried to take away the RPOs by running man—had to change dramatically when Lance was thrust into the starting lineup with only a minute left in halftime. But even in an uneven performance off the bench, Lance showed glimpses of why we gave up so much for him.
Everything he does (for better or worse) is explosive, from his rocket arm, to his ability to evade tacklers to buy time or pick up chunks of yards on the ground. So even in an up-and-down game, we were given a glimpse of the improvisational ability in both the run and the pass game that could open up an entirely different dimension of Shanahan’s offense.
It’s a short pass that won’t get circled on box scores, but shaking a defender, finding a passing lane, and getting the ball over a second-level defender makes for a high-difficulty play. While Garoppolo’s mobility has been markedly better this season as he is yet another year removed from ACL surgery, this kind of movement and improvisational skill gives us the chance for a positive play, even when the called one is snuffed out.
We knew Lance was an explosive athlete and that he could run, but his elusiveness and ability to slip tacklers in the open field has really impressed me thus far. He can both buy time with his feet or bolt upfield for chunks of yardage, and seeing as both of the above plays were on fourth downs, it’s clear that—while he still has a long ways to go—the moment isn’t too big for him.
Even if Lance struggles on Sunday, Jimmy’s unfortunate injury history means he may be getting more starts this season regardless. But for now, consider it a one-week audition.
Consistently Inconsistent. With the exception of the game against the Lions, where we just steamrolled them, our offense has yet to string two strong halves together this year.
Granted, the small sample size means there are a number of extenuating circumstances in our up-and-down offensive performances. The offense gets a pass against Seattle due to the situation we just discussed. We also out-gained them by over 200 yards, so there was a lot of flukey stuff going on there. Garoppolo’s early misses in week 2 really prevented us from limiting the Eagles’ pass rush off the bat with well-timed screens, leading to a defensive battle the rest of the way—a battle which was made even uglier when our three remaining running backs went down. Finally, against the Packers, we were left with a single healthy running back, and one that the staff clearly didn’t entirely trust.
While we all love Juice, we’re not going to be breaking any big runs with him as a solo back running zone and stretch. Without that home run threat from the run game, teams are less likely to bite hard on the play-action concepts that we use to spring most of our big gains through the air. Shanahan’s attack is largely about keeping defenses off-guard with misdirection and counter punches; when the run game is humming, the passing game usually is as well, and vice versa. But if we can’t get anything going initially, it becomes harder to gain the momentum needed to set up those big haymakers later in games. That’s reinforced in our explosive play metrics, where we rank 28th in explosive run rate and 27th in explosive pass rate. If that run rate starts to improve, the pass rate improves. Success in one area breeds success in the other.
But even as Garoppolo has played pretty well, we’ve continued to see how his limitations—namely his struggles on deep balls and passes thrown far outside the numbers—have allowed defenses to load up between the hashes. By packing the box, defenses can focus on the run and force us to throw into tight windows when we throw slants and digs behind them off of run fakes. While Jimmy has gotten much better at avoiding the “linebacker cloaking device” type of turnovers that plagued him in 2019, both of his picks this year have come off DBs jumping his deeper in-breaking routes—likely in no small part because they don’t believe he can make them pay over the top down the sideline so they are comfortable bailing early off those assignments. In short, defenses have crunched down the field so that we have to execute even tighter in both the pass and the run game in order to consistently move the ball. They’ve essentially limited our margin for error whether we’re running or passing, and that makes getting into (and sustaining) an offensive flow more difficult. All this to say, it’s not hard to see why the team got Lance, who—once he’s ready—will be able to create explosive plays both on the ground, in the dropback passing game, and while improvising when plays break down. It just makes our margin for error that much greater.
But this doesn’t mean we’re screwed in the short-term. Sermon settled into the offense with a strong game against the Seahawks and Elijah Mitchell should be back soon, which would finally give the Niners a second playable running back. And no matter how much you may have tired of Garoppolo and/or want Lance to play right away, this is the same scheme and staff that had us averaging 380 yards/game over the last six games of last season despite missing key contributors each week, playing and living out of a hotel in Arizona, and rotating backup quarterbacks. So unless you truly believe that the Beathard/Mullens platoon was more effective than Jimmy G, it’s worth betting on our offense eventually finding its groove.
Not sharing target shares. Through four games, Deebo Samuel and George Kittle are accounting for an absurd 54.6% of our targets in the passing game. For Kittle, that usage rate isn’t actually that weird. If we apply some sketchy math and equally spread out a season’s worth of targets across every game to equate for the contests Kittle has missed due to injury (because I am way too lazy to calculate it more accurately), his usage rates over the past four years look like this:
2018: 26.5%
2019: 26.2%
2020: 22.7%
2021: 22.3%
But, if we apply the same fuzzy math to Deebo Samuel’s usage, the contrast is stark.
2019: 18.5%
2020: 18.2%
2021: 32.3%
Deebo is top 5 in the league in target share and receptions. He leads the NFL in receiving yards (490!). He’s also tops in the league in yards per route run and (the least surprising of the stats) yards after catch over expected. While I’m not going to pretend I saw this coming to this extent, his uptick in usage isn’t as drastic as those numbers would indicate. As was mentioned last year when he went on IR after the Washington game, Deebo has always been a gigantic (and largely underrated) part of our offensive identity, he just wasn’t seen as such on a nationwide level. Until, I would think, now.
Every offense has something they do well (unless, of course, they just suck). Defenses know this and the good ones commit to stopping whatever that thing may be. Naturally, as defenses do this, they start to sell out a bit too much—cheating their other responsibilities in order to stop the offense’s bread-and-butter. That’s where constraint plays come in. Constraint plays are basically counterpunches for when teams cheat to stop what they do best. They punish teams for not playing normal, fundamentally sound football. The simplest example is a shotgun spread team that bases its offense on the zone read (what they do well) and pairs it with something like a bubble screen (a constraint play) to widen defenses out and punish them if they’re loading the box to stop the zone read.
Deebo Samuel is basically a one-man constraint play. He can hit you on a reverse if you’re too eager to fast-flow against our outside run game. He can pop you over the top for a slant if you’re triggering downhill too quickly to stop the run. Hell, you can even just throw him a quick screen if a team goes small in its personnel sets because you know those skinny DBs won’t be able to chop down his thunder thighs. Since midway through his rookie year, the Niners have seen Deebo as their all-purpose wideout/tailback/fullback. But now he’s in the best shape of his life, he’s healthy, and they’re finally able to deploy him as such.
While it’s been downright glorious seeing what Deebo can do when he (and the majority of our passing attack) are healthy, the biggest usage question thus far has been the lack of looks for Brandon Aiyuk, whose impressive rookie season catching passes mostly from backups and strong off-season seemed to point to a sophomore breakout. As is the case for most things after four total games, I would urge you not to jump to any conclusions quite yet.
Shanahan brought Aiyuk back slowly from a preseason hamstring injury, so he played 47% and 54% of offensive snaps in week one and two, respectively. Since then, he’s been on the field for 85% and 67% of snaps in the past two games—the latter figure likely dampened a bit by our run-heavy approach in the early second half when Trey Lance took over.
I know fans have PTSD about how Dante Pettis went from a high-round pick with an impressive rookie season to out the door in less than two years, but Pettis himself has admitted that he was immature and didn’t take practice as seriously as he should have while with the Niners. By all accounts, Aiyuk has not had that problem. He’s regularly been praised for his approach and effort, and I expect that when our offense requires more deep shots and passes outside the hashes (and/or when teams start rotating more help towards Deebo), Aiyuk will re-emerge as the promising speedster we saw last year.
Thunder and lightning (sans the lightning). When you’re down to a single healthy running back, it becomes clear in a hurry why the Shanahan family were early pioneers into the idea of rotational backfields—both for decreasing the workload on each player and (theoretically) decreasing injury risk but also to give defenses drastically different looks.
Having a Coleman/Wilson-type bludgeon you between the tackles is a great way to lull a DB to sleep so that a Mostert/Breida/Mitchell-type can obliterate a bad angle en route to a house call. With Sermon our only healthy back for the past two games, teams have been able to get situated with our backfield’s speed and running style in a way that won’t be the case once we get some guys back to health.
While adding speed will obviously increase our likelihood of big plays on the ground, having complementary power and speed backs will be extra beneficial in our option game. Whether it’s fully deployed this year or next, the inverted veer/power read concepts really need a horizontal stretch player on the give (aka. someone very fast) to be effective. You want to stretch out those gaps as much as possible to give more room to run in case of a keeper, and you do that by having someone like Mostert who can get the edge on a defense even when the read key is in decent position. Conversely, a more traditional zone read play wants someone who can grind out some tough yardage between the tackles, particularly out of the pistol where the running back’s path is more downhill.
In short, you want some guys who are faster, some guys who are more powerful, and when we start getting some of those guys back, our running game should benefit immediately—regardless of whether we’re utilizing option runs or not.
Misc. Trent Williams has cemented himself as the best tackle in the game. Dude is ragdolling world-class athletes on a regular basis and has been excellent in pass pro… While our targets haven’t been spread out that much, our receiver corps has been much deeper this year. Sanu, Jennings, and Sherfield have rotated through as our third wideout and they’ve all proven their value… Raheem Mostert’s contract is up after this year. I’m hoping he’ll re-sign on the cheap because (1) I think he’s just the chillest guy, (2) the off-season surgery might actually give him a chance at staying more durable since it’s been his knee that has bothered him most in the past few years, and (3) I do think he’s the ideal running back for this system. Not pairing him on option runs with Lance in 2022 would be a crime… I’m usually against early-season byes, but this time it could work out well for us. Jimmy G, Kittle, Trent Williams, and Elijah Mitchell are all dealing with injuries. JaMycal Hasty can also return from IR after Sunday. The extra week of rest could be clutch.
DEFENSE
![Getting the band back together [49ers.com]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e40f3a094d5fa3ebbbedb09/1633672920330-5JX6G5WX4QBOVJ09L0DA/niners+DL.jpeg)
Getting the band back together [49ers.com]
Cornerback concerns. Obviously, we’re leading with this because despite entering the season with a defense that looked primed for an excellent season, everyone and their mother could point to the glaring depth issue we had at one key position. Three quarters in Detroit later, we’re still searching for ways to patch that hole.
First off, you gotta feel terrible for Jason Verrett. Dude spent the better part of FOUR YEARS (playing in only six contests from 2016 through 2019) rehabbing his knees from injury. The mere fact that he was able to return to form last year as one of the top cover corners in the league was a miracle. This off-season—for the first time in half a decade—he was able to focus on his craft instead of rehab, leading to a bigger and stronger JV who had absolutely dominated training camp. Now, at age 30 and playing on a one-year contract, he goes down to another ACL injury, and since his injury woes started during his third year in the league, he’s yet to get a significant payday as a pro. If anyone can return to form once again, it’s Verrett.
Here’s hoping.
As for where this leaves us, the most succinct answer can be described as scrounging for scraps. We knew entering the year what sort of depth concerns we had, and that—if someone were to go down—we’d be looking at rookies sooner rather than later. Well, consider it sooner.
We knew Ambry Thomas was a bit of a project considering he’s a little too handsy, needs to get better off the line and in his turn to be able to get high shoulder against down the field against NFL speed, and sat out all of last year due to COVID concerns. So the fact that he hasn’t played a snap on defense since the opener shouldn’t be cause for concern. Yet.
As for the rest of our outside corners… Moseley has played like a No.1 since coming back from injury in week three but opposite him has been a rotating door of Dontae Johnson, new signee Josh Norman, new signee Dre Kirkpatrick, and fifth-round rookie Deommodore Lenoir. It’s unlikely that we have the cap space or the future draft capital to make a big move to address the position before the trading deadline. So we’re probably rolling with who we have now, and the results have been… mixed.
Lenoir has been targeted heavily. I still like his long-term potential, but if you’re a late sub fifth-round rookie lining up against Aaron Rodgers, you’re gonna get targeted. Norman and Kirkpatrick have been… fine, I guess. Ultimately—unless we’re up against a mind-meld situation like Rodgers-Davante have—the rest of our defense is typically able to hide issues at the second corner spot most of the time…
Except when teams go deep.
Big Plays 4 Dayz. Overall, the transition to DeMeco Ryans has gone pretty smoothly. We’ve yet to see one of the complete shut down defensive performances that we’d gotten used to in the past two years under Saleh, but we’ve seen glimpses of becoming a much stingier defense as the season goes on. If we can shore up our problem with big plays.
We currently rank 28th in preventing explosive runs. I don’t think there’s anything structurally wrong with what we’re doing against the run, but we’ve had some lane discipline issues along the DL and our linebackers have not been playing as well they have in the past. Greenlaw going down hurts, even if Al-Shaair has had his moments and (when he breaks down to tackle) has looked fast in space, but in general, our LBs haven’t been triggering downhill into their run fits as quick as they could be.
But our play against the pass is likely more problematic. While our ranking of 17th in preventing explosive passes doesn’t look that bad, I’m pretty sure that doesn’t include our league-leading 8(!) pass interference calls for an astounding 153 yards, which—for those keeping track at home—is equal to 11% of ALL the defensive yardage we’ve given up on the year.
That is an ALARMING stat any way you cut it. For reference, last year saw an absolute explosion in defensive PI calls across the league, and the “leader” in DPI was the New Orleans Saints, who were flagged 19 times across 18 games (including playoffs). Our pace for the regular season is 32. In terms of yardage, last year’s league leader was the Jaguars, and their 348 DPI yards accounted for only 5.2% of the yardage they allowed on the year.
Part of me is like “this has to be a result of small sample size and an outlier that will eventually regress to the mean.” The other part of me looks at our depth chart at cornerback and isn’t quite sure. Realistically, this penalty pace cannot keep up, and you’d hope that with more reps (five different corners have started on the outside through four games), guys will get more comfortable and less handsy at the catch point. Josh Norman, for example, is far removed from his Pro Bowl days with the Panthers, but he had a bit of a career resurgence stepping in for the Bills last year. There’s hope that once he’s back healthy he can shape into a decent No.2 opposite Moseley. But our struggles staying in-phase down the field—and opposing teams’ willingness to test said struggles—will be an issue until our guys prove we can cover the deep ball without drawing flags.
Takeaways. We have 1. That is last in the league. The team we’re tied with is the Jaguars. This is not great.
With Sherman and Verrett gone, we don’t have a lot of ball hawks in the secondary. Moseley is more of a good, sound coverage guy than an interception guy. Ward and Tartt, despite their senior standings, only have 3 and 4 picks, respectively, on their careers. Our linebackers—despite taking a step back in coverage thus far—might be our best bet to turn things around? Warner had two picks and two fumble recoveries last year. Greenlaw housed a pick in the opener—our first and last takeaway of the 2021 season thus far. But they’re still linebackers, and Greenlaw is likely out until mid-season.
In today’s NFL, you really need to generate takeaways to have a really good defense. There’s just too many advantages for the offense to thrive without stealing a few possessions. While it’s a lot to put on the shoulders of a dude who is 34, was a free agent a month ago, and is currently coming off of bruised lungs, Josh Norman has 15 picks and 3 defensive touchdowns in his career. Maybe he can step up and get us the ball back a few times. If so, it could help offset our less-than-ideal situation at cornerback.
D-Line stock check. Sadly, we have yet to reach anywhere near the peak terror levels of the 2019 campaign, when teams were straight-up only throwing slants, hitches, and quick game because they had zero faith they could pass protect for more than two seconds against our DL. We’ve had our moments (like every third down during the first half of the Seahawks), but we’re a far cry from that buzzsaw of a defensive line.
Bosa has been a beast and our best defensive lineman thus far. Neither of those statements should come as a surprise. His 13 pressures are nearly half of our team’s 32, and he paces the squad with 4 sacks. Arik Armstead has been his typically reliable self, even if his game doesn’t always show up as much in the passing game and in the stat sheet as Bosa’s. DJ Jones is back to doing DJ Jones things. He’s got that nice blend of size and quickness to be active along the LOS, even if his center-pancaking sack of Russell Wilson may wind up his career highlight as a pass rusher.
Elsewhere, Javon Kinlaw was a welcome addition to our run defense in week 2, but he’s yet to take the step forward we were hoping for. He hasn’t gotten worse, but given where he was last year, his incredible potential, and the draft capital we invested in him, anything short of steady growth is a bummer. Also along the interior, neither Zach Kerr’s strong 2020 nor Kentavius Street’s training camp hype seem to have resulted in much in the early goings. That’s certainly part of the reason we’ve had some issues against the run this year.
On the plus side, we’d said that anything Dee Ford gave us this year would be found money. While he’s not at the level he once was (and I can’t speak confidently about his work against the run), he’s given us some much-needed juice off the edge. With Samson Ebukam being largely a nonfactor thus far, Ford’s five pressures and three sacks have been a welcome sight and both are good for second on the squad.
Finally, Mo Hurst made his debut against the Seahawks and impressed off the bat. He was quick off the line, moved well laterally, and was disruptive in the backfield. Small sample size, but he was one of our better interior linemen through camp, and I could see him pushing for greater snaps, especially with Givens hurt and other DTs underperforming.
Misc. The Panthers traded a 2023 sixth-rounder to the Patriots for former DPOTY Stephon Gilmore. The price tag was so low because (a) Gilmore is currently injured, (b) fewer teams have the cap space to take on his contract during a year when the cap has been affected by COVID, and (c) it is likely a one-year rental before Gilmore wants another deal. He’s from Carolina and they’ve looked solid so far, so maybe he re-ups with them. But it won’t be at the friendly rate he’s playing on this year. FWIW, the Niners wouldn’t have had the cap space to acquire him even if they’d tried… Since Kevin Givens was put on IR after week 2, his practice window will open up during our bye week. However, no word yet on if he’ll be close to being back by then… after undergoing core muscle surgery, Dre Greenlaw’s is still 2-4 weeks away, at the earliest.
Go Niners 👍🏈
2021 Preview: Defense
sup?
![[Daniel Shirey/Getty Images]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e40f3a094d5fa3ebbbedb09/1631240911593-M0K5L30T1IKA41K8TIXE/warner.jpg)
[Daniel Shirey/Getty Images]
Before we jump into the preview, I wanted to give a shoutout to Johnny Holland, the Niners’ linebacker coach who stepped away from the team a week ago to deal with a relapse of multiple myeloma.
Holland has been with the Niners since Shanahan came onboard, first as a linebackers coach, then an outside linebackers coach and run game specialist, and finally a linebackers coach once more when DeMeco Ryans ascended to the role of defensive coordinator this offseason. While Ryans gets much of the fanfare (and rightfully so), Holland surely played a role in shaping an undersized nickel safety out of BYU into a first-team All-Pro linebacker and a little-known prospect from Arkansas whose 4.73 forty-yard dash plummeted him into the fifth round into one of the surest tacklers in the business.
While it can often be difficult to evaluate the impact of a single assistant coach on an NFL football team, Holland’s track record speaks for itself. This guy fucks. Coach Holland, wishing you a speedy recovery so we can see you on the sideline in the red and gold once again.
Now, onto the three (cause I’m running out of time) questions.
What changes under DeMeco Ryans?
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[Michael Zagaris/San Francisco 49ers/Getty Images]
A preseason in which many of our starters were held out for most, if not all, of the games doesn’t tell us much about the style and scheme of our new defensive coordinator. But there are a few things we can infer from the off-season as a whole. Let’s start with what won’t change.
Two years ago, the move to a 4-2-5 nickel base and a Wide 9 alignment up front quickly turned Robert Saleh from a DC on the hot seat to one of the most sought-after head coaching candidates in the country. While Saleh is off to the Jets, Kris Kocurek—our fiery DL coach whose hiring brought the Wide 9 in the first place–is back, and there’s no reason to fix what’s not broken. The Niners will continue to use the same base fronts and alignments that they’ve had so much success with over the past two seasons.
The same could be said for the faces. With the exception of Richard Sherman—who only started five games last year and was typically less effective than Emmanuel Moseley during that time—nearly everyone in our starting lineup is a familiar face. In essence, the only new starters are Tavon Wilson at strong safety—assuming Jaquiski Tartt’s prolonged injury through camp means he won’t immediately retake his starting role—and Samson Ebukam, who—despite being a potential breakout player for us this year—may be tasked more with piloting our Bravo and Turbo units than lining up entirely with the ones.
In terms of what might change, I think we’ll be more aggressive. Mostly because that was openly stated by Shanahan at an early off-season presser when talking about Ryans vs Saleh:
"DeMeco's an aggressive guy. I always messed with Saleh because I said I don't think he's ever lost a dollar in his life gambling because Saleh doesn't want to gamble too much. I think DeMeco will do that a little bit more. Sometimes there's a little risk in that but sometimes there's some reward also. We'll see how he finds his way with that. It takes time though. But I don't think it's going to take DeMeco too long."
Like any concept that’s co-signed by your drunk uncle who barks at the TV screen while complaining about how soft people have become about concussions and gender pronouns, aggressiveness on defense is a complicated thing. You obviously want your players to be aggressive. They must have an aggressive mentality and be confident in their film study, read keys, and instincts in order to dictate game flow in what is inherently a reactionary position. But aggressiveness schematically can be hit or miss.
The Baltimore Ravens (and really, nearly all of the AFC North) have long been one of the NFL’s most aggressive defenses, building from back-to-front by investing in tons of secondary talent so that they can dial up lots of man coverage while leading the league in blitzing every year. The Bucs, Steelers, and Patriots (and Patriots off-shoots) are similarly aggressive, which makes it easy for people to attribute “aggressiveness” with defensive success. But you know what other defenses have been near the top of the league in terms of blitz % the past few years? The Jets and the Texans. And obviously, they suck.
While aggressiveness can work on a schematic level, it’s often just a catch-all term for any newly hired football coach. Whether it’s offense or defense, no one rolls up to the podium of their first press conference and is like “we’re gonna win by being more conservative.” Aggressiveness, as they say, “gets the people goin.” That doesn’t mean more aggressive = better (see: Erickson, Dennis). Often times, it doesn’t mean anything.
It’s also worth noting that some of the best defenses in recent memory—like Vic Fangio’s squads in Chicago or our defense in 2019—have been some of the least aggressive schematically. The pass rush is still fierce, the players still fly to the ball and arrive with bad intentions, but in terms of X’s and O’s, these teams are regularly near the bottom of the league in blitz percentage and the top of the league in zone coverage. Instead of dialing up man and extra rushers, these teams focus more on keying tendencies, making little tweaks in alignments and stunts, and limiting big plays.
Robert Saleh’s defenses clearly fit that mold. He was at his best game-planning the shit out of offenses and making assignments and communication crystal clear while relying on his front four to generate the pressure required to burden the offense with a rapidly ticking clock. On early downs, he ran variations of Cover 3 and quarters as heavily as anyone in the league. When everything was humming, this turned big gains into small gains and small gains into nothing. It shut down even elite offenses because a defense like that, in theory, has no real weaknesses. But if that pass rush wasn’t getting home, you’d sometimes get the sense that you could get dink-and-dunked to death. That’s what injuries caused near the end of 2019, and it’s why—when injuries ravaged our d-line early in 2020—Saleh adapted by running more man coverage and blitzing more to generate pressure. Against the majority of offenses, it worked. But against the elite units, we had some ugly moments.
So what does “more aggressive” mean for our new defensive coordinator? Ryans inherits an incredibly deep and talented front seven, a free safety whose position-less first years in the league have made him a scheme versatile chess piece, and one of the best man corners in the league. My guess is that what he’ll do with all this talent is try and split the difference between the past two years. I’d expect a continuation of the trends we saw last season—more man coverage and more blitzing—but as more of a polished second-pitch than as a reactionary response to a lengthy list of injuries. To be clear, I still think we’re primarily a zone defense, alternating single and two-high looks with lots of split field coverages. Again, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But there’s enough smoke around the belief that we’re shifting to more man coverage that I buy the shift in philosophy.
There will likely be times where Ryans will think a four-man front can get home but he’ll send an extra guy just in case or where he’ll hop into man coverage on early downs in hopes of setting up a more difficult third down later on. In essence, he’ll gamble more. He’ll take more risks. At times, that may burn us in a way that we weren’t used to under Saleh. But it should also make us less susceptible to death by a million paper cuts. I don’t know if the product will be better or worse, but I’d expect more variance.
Is our defensive line better than in 2019?
![[Christian Petersen/Getty Images]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e40f3a094d5fa3ebbbedb09/1631240427839-II858O8DWFM4AHKBUYEV/DL.jpg)
[Christian Petersen/Getty Images]
Until Kinlaw actualizes much more of his potential, it’s hard to rank a unit without DeFo over a unit with DeFo. The dude is one of the top three people on the planet at doing what he does. So I wouldn’t go so far as to say this year’s line is better. But it could be deeper, especially along the interior.
While there may not be a single superstar on the inside, we have 5-6 dudes with starter-quality talent for two tackle spots (or one in our Turbo packages when Armstead slides inside). Even coming off an injury-riddled 2020, we know the unique blend of size and speed that DJ Jones possesses. Kevin Givens, Zach Kerr, and Mo Hurst (a sneaky breakout candidate if he can return cleanly from his ankle injury) are all first-step mavens who fit our aggressive one-gap scheme perfectly. There’s hype coming from camp that Kentavius Street is finally putting things together into a complete package. And of course, there’s Javon Kinlaw, our sophomore behemoth whose size/power/explosiveness package is near-unmatched in the league. Our interior line is so deep that Darrion Daniels, the second-year UDFA who the Niners feel has a legitimate chance to become their starting nose tackle down the road, had to be stashed on the practice squad.
Outside there are more questions, but (if healthy) loads of talent. Armstead continues to be Armstead, a 6-7 280-pound forklift who routinely puts linemen on skates. Bosa is back on the outside, poised to stake his claim as one of the five best edge rushers on the planet. While people around the team seem cautiously optimistic that Dee Ford—who’ll be on a snap count to start (and possibly throughout) the season—has put his neck issues behind him. I’m high on Samson Ebukam—who will be tasked with doing some Dee Ford things, some Kerry Hyder things, and (depending on how many snaps Bosa gets right away) some Nick Bosa things—and I think Jordan Willis will slot in nicely into the rotation in his first full year in the scheme. Arden Key? I’m not expecting much, but there are crazier things than betting on high upside and the general dysfunction of the Raiders.
But let’s not underestimate the DeFo/Armstead interior rush duo—which was easily one of the best pass-rushing interior tandems that I’ve ever seen. Our 2019 squad featured a Turbo package that had four dudes with legitimate Pro Bowl talent, and—when healthy—the other two rotational pieces were peak DJ Jones and Ronald Blair. Unless Kinlaw takes a big step forward in year two, we can’t make the claim that this defensive line is better than that one. But perhaps it’s deeper. And given the heavy rotations that Kris Kocurek likes to employ and our track record with injuries, perhaps that’s more important?
How big of a concern is our lack of depth at cornerback?
![[Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e40f3a094d5fa3ebbbedb09/1631240753235-0GME3WS2M0T99I51TDJK/verrett.jpeg)
[Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images]
Well, we just signed Josh Norman, so I would say “pretty big.”
Playing more man coverage is nice in theory, and if we have Verrett on the opposing #1 with Moseley on their #2, I’m thumbs-up emoji all the way. K’Waun Williams is one of the best nickel corners in the league, Jimmie Ward’s experience playing corner makes him more than capable to roll down into the slot, and we have one of the best coverage linebacker corps in the NFL. If we’re talking our starters, we match up well against nine out of ten teams, and that’s certainly good enough to play a bit more man here and there. But after those starters, things could get dicey.
The more you want to play man coverage the more you’re shifting both the skillset that you’re looking for in a corner and the amount that you’re prioritizing the position. Up until this year’s draft, the amount that the Niners prioritized corner could be considered next to none. We drafted Ahkello Witherspoon in the third round of the first ShanaLynch draft then didn’t address the position with a big-name addition or a draft pick in the first two days until now. It was a conscious decision, as Lynch and Shanahan openly prioritized a front-to-back approach to building defense. Spend more capital to load up the defensive line—which we’ve done—while saving money on cornerbacks due to our DB-friendly scheme. But if we go too much more towards man coverage, the math—and the type of player we’re targeting—may change.
Richard Sherman is gone, and—even if he wasn’t dealing with his own issues off the field—he’s a zone corner through and through. Witherspoon is off to the Steelers—via the Seahawks, who (of course) picked him up before shipping him out of town when they planned to start someone else. And the Tim Harris experiment finally ended with a whimper. He got some good play at the beginning of camp after a strong showing in OTAs, but after getting beat a few times then suffering a groin injury, that ship has finally sailed. RIP my hype train of blind hope.
So backing up our starters we have two rookies and two veteran zone corners. Josh Norman, who peaked in 2015 and had a three-year run in Washington that ended disastrously in 2019. To his credit, he rebounded well in Buffalo and played a meaningful role for them in 2020, but even so, he’s 33 and I’ve always considered him primarily a zone cornerback. The same could be said for the guy who got waived to sign him. Dontae Johnson has bounced on and off the roster twice in the past week. I’m sure we’ll see him at some point again this season. While his physical profile also leans more towards a Cover 3 corner, he played unquestionably his best ball last season when we were in more hybrid coverages. Perhaps this is a sign that we won’t be employing more man coverage after all? But then you look at our rookies.
Deommodore Lenoir and Ambry Thomas are both handsy, aggressive cornerbacks whose college experience was mostly in press-man coverage. Despite a lesser draft position, Lenoir seems to have surpassed Thomas on the depth chart and is likely the team’s top backup outside. Since Emmanuel Moseley hasn’t practiced all week due to a hamstring injury, maybe that means Lenoir is our week one starter?
Wondering when the Niners will address the future (and present?) of the cornerback position has been a recurring theme of every off-season. In the past, we’ve been bailed out by the emergence of Emmanuel Moseley (2019) or the healthy return to form of Jason Verrett (2020). Is this the year it finally bites us in the ass?
The hope is that our incredibly talented front seven can pick up the slack if one of our starters misses time. And as long as we’re healthy up front, we can always lean more heavily on zone coverage if someone like Johnson or Norman are pushed into major snaps. All this to say, there are ways to hide someone if we need to, especially against lesser offenses. But it’s not the best spot to be in, and if there ends up being a crack in our defense, it’s likely our cornerback depth.
Go Niners 🏈👍
2021 Preview: Offense
yes plz 🙋🏻♂️
![Would be REAL CHILL if we have red zone trips ending like this [Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e40f3a094d5fa3ebbbedb09/1631142332843-RZPXG1ZT6YBDHD36HLJW/Lance+TD+run.jpeg)
Would be REAL CHILL if we have red zone trips ending like this [Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group]
Four questions (and four attempts at answers) that could shape our offense this year.
Should Trey Lance be starting?
![[Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e40f3a094d5fa3ebbbedb09/1631141320805-9YTPQMXBGFU3ANNHJRWG/Lance+QB.jpeg)
[Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group]
No.
To be fair, I understand the appeal. After all, there are only two instances in my life where I can remember cackling with glee during a preseason game and both involved our rookie signal-caller. His first career pass completion:
And when Shanahan finally showed him in an inside-out option look with Mostert going wide:
I’ll put out an in-depth write-up about our option game once we get into the thick of the regular season, but the CliffsNotes version is this: LOL
I’m too removed from coaching to know what the terminology for this play is called, so I’ll just call it QB Counter Read. In the simplest of terms, our offensive line runs counter left—a blocking scheme that we already know from past years—while Lance has the option to keep the ball running inside to the offensive left or hand it off to Mostert, who has an unblocked (or “naked”) sweep to the right. The first defender this puts into a bind is the end man on the line of scrimmage (orange triangle), who is our read key.
On the snap, Lance sees that the defensive end is flat-footed and trying to play both him and the running back. If the end were to crash down the line it would be an easy give. If he were to immediately widen, it would be a keep. But since he’s flat-footed, and a defensive end, and Mostert still has a jet pack strapped to his back, it doesn’t matter how much the end tries to read and react off the option mesh. He’s getting beat outside.
Also highlighted above is the inside linebacker. Yes, he could theoretically scream outside to try and cut off Mostert before he can get the edge. If combined with the defensive end crashing down the line, the two defenders would basically be switching gap responsibilities, effectively replicating the squeeze-scrape technique used commonly to combat option plays. However, everything about our blocking says that this play is counter left. So unless told specifically not to, the linebacker needs to stay true to his reads. Because if he was to guess wrong and immediately chase Mostert towards the sideline, a Lance keeper would feature a convoy of Trent Williams and Mike McGlinchey lead blocking onto air. The linebacker has to stay put through the handoff, which means—by the time he makes contact with Mostert—the ball carrier is already ten yards down the field.
TLDR: no flat-footed defensive end is gonna be setting the edge against the fastest man in football on a fly sweep.
But I digress. And despite all the tantalizing potential of Lance’s arm talent and running ability, he is still a work in progress. A work that is far closer to completion than we likely thought when we drafted him, but a work in progress nonetheless. While the Niner staff—as well as Lance himself and his private coaches—have done a tremendous job of cleaning up his throwing mechanics, those improvements still waver when he’s hurried or pressing. He’ll clean it up with time, but at the moment, it leads to bouts of inaccuracy.
While Shanahan’s offense may make things easier on quarterbacks, that’s only after they get comfortable in his notoriously complex scheme. This is the same core offense that took a thirty-year-old Matt Ryan a year to get accustomed to in Atlanta. Expecting a rookie who has played one game in two years to immediately pilot it without issue is simply unrealistic.
After seeing clusters of inaccurate throws and short passes rocketed a bit behind receivers on routes across the middle, it’s hard to make the claim that right now, for the 2021 season, Lance is a more efficient passer than a healthy Garoppolo. This is especially true given how much we like to rely on in-breaking routes and chunk plays to guys like Kittle, Deebo, and Aiyuk.
But the best argument IN FAVOR of starting Lance right away isn’t really thinking about 2021. Instead, this argument posits Lance’s development as an extension of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours concept. In short, give the kid as many reps as possible so that he can master the craft as quickly as possible. Under this thinking, a second-string Lance would be losing both valuable game AND practice snaps, so—by not starting him—we’d be stunting his growth. Like many Gladwellian concepts, there’s legitimacy to parts of this concept but issues as well.
First off, this assumes that Lance won’t be getting any practice snaps or seeing the field if Garoppolo is the starter. More on that later, but it’s safe to say that won’t be the case. Second, it simplifies the idea of growth to the point where time spent is mutually exclusive: you’re either getting reps and growing or you’re not. This fails to look at how growth can occur outside of game reps through film study, meeting rooms, side work with coaches, etc. Next, it neglects the inherent downside of immediate playtime. Whereas practicing the violin to become first-chair in the LA Philharmonic only has the potential pitfalls of growth inefficiency (if you’re practicing the wrong way or with the wrong teacher) or burnout (a potential downside of literally anything), we only need to look at the recently jettisoned Josh Rosen to see how the idea of playtime = progress is more complicated in team sports. Throwing someone “into the fire” is a nice expression to use by suits in pre-game shows, but it’s not especially productive if all they do is burn. While Lance seems to have the team support and mental makeup to avoid the crippling fate of a high draft pick thrown to the wolves, putting someone into play before they’re ready always comes with the risk of developing bad habits or debilitating mental blocks. And finally, the 10,000 hours approach doesn’t take into account team success. This is a group with championship aspirations, and Shanahan is trying to tow a line where we can win now and later, rather than one or the other.
Are we really running a two-quarterback system?
![[Randy Vazquez/ Bay Area News Group]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e40f3a094d5fa3ebbbedb09/1631141488065-XY3RD2AV0YF6YRX4J721/jimmy+g+and+lance.jpeg)
[Randy Vazquez/ Bay Area News Group]
Not in week 1 at least, as Lance is still recovering from a minor bone chip in his finger. But given the way Shanahan rotated quarterbacks in our final preseason game (and the fact that he’s openly stated that both QBs will have a role moving forward), there’s a natural curiosity as to how much we’ll really see Lance and how effective a true committee approach can be at the position.
In general, football heads and media members alike are equally skeptical of a two-quarterback approach—especially on the NFL level. And as the importance of the position has grown (and the mythology of its importance has grown exponentially), so too has that skepticism. You’ve undoubtedly heard the oft-repeated idiom that “if you have two starting quarterbacks, you have no starting quarterbacks.” If you haven’t, expect to hear it plenty this season. Any Garoppolo or Lance miscue will likely be followed by a meathead color guy saying something along the lines of “you gotta wonder if they can’t get in a rhythm because they’re coming in and out of the game like this.” If there’s a miscommunication with a wideout, questions will undoubtedly follow about whether “either quarterback has gotten enough reps in practice to get on the same page with his guys.”
To be fair, these are all legitimate concerns. No coach wants less reps for his players, especially when that player touches the ball on every snap. And miscommunications and mistakes can arise from lack of familiarity. But if you’re doing a two-quarterback system right, the practice reps that you’re losing should be offset by the practice reps your opponent loses while preparing for two separate offenses.
While rare, quarterback rotation is something we’ve seen before. Our fan base has actually seen it multiple times. Colin Kaepernick had a few run plays each game as he got brought along slowly as a rookie, but that could hardly be considered a rotation. Joe Montana would get pulled for Steve Young at times, but that was more along the lines of Bill Walsh trying to get the best out of two Hall of Farmers at once. Even Montana, when he was a rookie, would come in for Steve Deberg during red zone trips. But probably the most successful instance of full-on quarterback rotation was the 2006 Florida Gators, who rode a senior Chris Leak and a battering ram freshman Tim Tebow to the BCS Championship. More recently—and perhaps more importantly, on the NFL level—the gold standard has been the twilight Drew Brees and Taysom Hill combo.
Shanahan has openly referenced the Saints duo as a framework for what the Niners may do with Lance—especially in how the threat of a QB run game opens things up offensively. But in this case, our change-up is considerably more dangerous than theirs, as Lance is not only a tremendous athlete, but he—unlike Hill in his rotational role—can actually throw the ball. Perhaps we see Lance as a match-up-based change-up, sprinkled in like a wildcat formation that actually works. Perhaps he sees the field as regularly as he did in our preseason finale. At the very least, I think he gets good play on short-yardage situations and in the red zone, where his running ability can help the offensive arithmetic and his play-action potential will force defenses to make some tough decisions.
While most teams likely cannot (or should not) run a two-quarterback system, there are reasons to believe that the Niners can be the exception. We have one of the top offensive minds in all of football, two players with distinctly different styles and strengths, a strong locker room run by veteran leaders, and a young quarterback who we’re trying to groom to be our 2022 starter. There will be hiccups, and you have to imagine that the first time Lance puts the ball on the ground off an option mesh, Tim Ryan or whoever his regional away-game-equivalent is will remind you of this fact. But if the Niners can weather the early storm and get into a groove playing both Jimmy G and Lance, this could be our most exciting offense in decades.
And that is exactly how Shanahan plans to bridge the present and the future.
What does our extra beefy wideout corps mean for our offensive identity?
![[Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e40f3a094d5fa3ebbbedb09/1631141851703-EHGK1IKMJ5DZ1M21K9C1/deebo+point.jpeg)
[Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images]
After roster cutdowns, the six wideouts on our opening day squad average 214 pounds, making us one of the thicccer receiving corps in the NFL (and that’s including Deebo at a dubious listed weight of 215). A filled-out Brandon Aiyuk is the lightest of the bunch at 200 pounds, with former running back Jalen Hurd topping them off at 230, but what’s really keeping the average weight up is the fact that this is the first roster of Shanahan’s tenure that has simply declined to keep a traditional slot receiver.
During the ShanaLynch era, the Niners have always rostered at least one player to fill the role of a smaller, quicker slot receiver. Whether it was Trent Taylor (5-8, 178 pounds) or Richie James (5-9, 185 pounds), their job was to create separation underneath on short-to-intermediate routes and act as the quarterbacks’ security blanket. So why the change of heart now?
Granted, James was put on IR just before cutdown day, so it’s not like the Niners are just done with him (although since he was put on IR before the roster cutdown he is NOT eligible to return later this year). But the decision to keep all bigger bodies in the receiving corps despite keeping one more wideout (6) than they have in the past, strikes me as a calculated one.
If I had to guess, there could be a few reasons behind this decision. First off, the slot receiver as a security blanket was cool in practice but largely nonexistent in reality. With the exception of Taylor’s rookie year back in 2017, none of our slot-type bodies have come close to replicating the kind of play that [insert undersized white receiver from New England] made a living off of. When we needed a short completion underneath, it usually went to Kittle—who often split out into the slot and replaced a “slot-type body” anyways—and our second man up was typically Kendrick Bourne—who did the majority of his damage on slants and square ins from out wide. The last time our slot receiver felt like a slot receiver was Shanahan’s first year, before Taylor’s explosiveness was sapped by injury, and as part of an offense that was more of a hybrid between what Shanahan wanted to run and what Jimmy G—who was obtained mid-season—was used to with the Patriots. That meant more shotgun sets and more of a reliance on option and pivot routes from slot receivers like Taylor. Four years later and with a roster shaped to his liking, perhaps Shanahan figured the drawbacks of an undersized slot outweighed the benefits.
The second more obvious reason for the change is that Shanahan wants to run the ball, and a bigger roster of wideouts will allow him to do that. When Taylor finally came back from injury last year, it was his superior blocking that kept him ahead of James in the pecking order until the latter’s breakout game against Green Bay. When Dante Pettis was deep in Shanahan’s dog house, it was often a lack of urgency and physicality that sent him there (and kept him there) for long periods of time. Ultimately, I think Shanahan got fed up with the outside runs that we sprung so easily in 2019 getting shut down last year because of a single missed block on the edge. So he sought out a receiving corps filled with willing and capable blockers. By focusing more on size and physicality out wide, Shanahan is likely hoping to eliminate the sporadic edge blocking of last year that often turned a fifteen-yard gain into a five-yard one and a would-be house call into a third-and-short.
I’d also guess that this change—like our constant attempts to bolster the interior line—has something to do with the Super Bowl loss. As stated before, that game included an inordinate amount of uncalled holding calls. And while the lack of offensive holding was more obvious and showed up more readily during the Chiefs’ big plays, the lack of defensive holding—in conjunction with Chris Jones—stymied our passing attack. Shanahan has always prioritized separation ability from his wideouts, but perhaps his opinion on what that means—like his opinion on the benefits of a quarterback who can create off-script—has shifted in step with the NFL’s changing enforcement of their rules. Since defensive holding has plummeted in lieu of pass interference, bigger wideouts are more likely to be able to fight through grabby defensive backs at the line and create defensive PI calls down the field. Sure, we’re poking at theoretical margins here, but Shanahan’s attention to detail and his ability to be one step ahead of the curve when it comes to offensive trends is one of the things that makes him such a great offensive mind.
Finally, our focus on XXL wideouts certainly points to an interest in finding a way to lighten the offensive burden on Kittle. We kept one more wideout and one fewer tight end than we normally do, which likely means that (A) the staff is happy with Charlie Woerner’s progression, and (B) our wideouts will be tasked with doing some of the things Kittle does when he’s lined up in the slot or in the wing. Kittle’s style of play and tremendous blocking ability mean that he’ll always be an injury risk, and the best way to minimize that risk is to get him a breather every once in a while. Since his emergence as one of the NFL’s premier tight ends, we’ve been trying (and failing) to do just that. But with a stable of wideouts who can all block down into the box and two would-be “jumbo slots” in Jalen Hurd and Jauan Jennings, perhaps this is the year where we can finally give Kittle a break.
Have we finally fixed our interior OL issues?
![[Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e40f3a094d5fa3ebbbedb09/1631142110302-EDTJCONQZNDTL1FZESO2/OL+banks.jpeg)
[Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images]
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Alex Mack will be a massive upgrade at center over the rotating door we had at the position last year, and the presence of Jake Brendel on the practice squad means that Daniel Brunskill can focus solely on right guard—a starting position that he all but secured after the struggles and ensuing injury of Aaron Banks. Mike McGlinchey has put on 25 pounds of solid weight in the off-season to help him deal with bull rushers on the edge, and—entering a quasi-contract year—seems focused and motivated to clean up the sporadic pass protection whiffs that routinely infuriate our fan base. Barring injury, our offensive line will definitely be better than last year’s unit. But how much better? And what happens if someone misses time?
Our track record at offensive guard hasn’t been stellar. Banks—who we wanted to start right away—struggled mightily in his only preseason action and then missed the rest of training camp with an injury. While he’s now healthy, it would be difficult to expect much—if anything—from him in his rookie year. After regressing in 2020, Justin Skule slid inside from tackle to guard before going down for the season prior to training camp. Colton McKivitz, last year’s fifth-rounder, didn’t even make the active roster. He now resides on the practice squad. While he had a rough start to the preseason, he settled down and looked better than he did last year. But again, he’s on the practice squad for a reason. If we get anything from him it’ll be a bonus. If there’s a bright spot it’s been the play of Tom Compton, who was greatly hindered by last year’s nonexistent off-season and an injury he sustained mid-season. Word out of camp is that he returned a much better player, and the staff seems confident that he can step in on the interior if called upon. But what does that look like?
Outside, there are just as many questions. Fifth-rounder Jaylon Moore has acquitted himself better than anyone could have expected given his draft position, but he had some struggles in the first preseason game and may not be ready for heavy snaps. While his future looks bright (be it inside or out), you never feel great about a Day 3 rookie being your swing tackle. Shon Coleman finally wrapped up a three-year stint on the team in which he played in 0 games despite theoretically being our swing tackle. And Skule—as noted above—is both hurt and potentially destined for the interior. While Moore likely gets the nod if either Williams or McGlinchey misses time, we may be looking at… all-purpose swing Tom Compton?
Ultimately, you’d be hard-pressed to find many squads who are THAT deep at offensive line, and I am cautiously optimistic that Compton can fill-in for spot duty if needed. There’s also the classic “throw Brunskill at the problem and move someone into his place” approach, but after a full calendar year of that, I think we can safely say that isn’t the best outcome for anyone (including Brunskill). A world where Banks took the starting job and Brunskill could learn behind Mack while being a true swingman across all five positions would have naturally alleviated many of our concerns. But alas, that isn’t the world we live in.
Go Niners 🏈👍