Wild-Card Preview @ Dallas

Fancy seeing you here [Peter Read Miller / SI]

Opponent: Dallas Cowboys
Date: Sunday, 1/16
Location: that hideous dome thing in Texas
Kickoff: 1:30PM PT
TV: CBS, or wherever you stream it illegally
Line: DAL -3.0

Hello, old friend.

In a matchup that could garner better TV ratings in the Los Angeles area than the Rams home game, the Niners and Cowboys rekindle their long-time playoff rivalry in their first postseason matchup since the 1994 season—the third straight year the two met in the NFC Championship game and the prelude to the Niners’ last Super Bowl win.

In many ways, this Cowboys team should be a legitimate Super Bowl favorite. They lead the NFL in Total DVOA, are tops in the NFC in points differential, and have—by nearly all forms of measurement, advanced or otherwise—top 10 units on both offense and defense. But—fair or not—there are questions.

Some (many?) of those concerns revolve around the Cowboys’ reputation and recent playoff history. They haven’t advanced past the divisional round of the playoffs since 2Pac was alive (1995, their last Super Bowl season) and Jerry Jones is—you know—Jerry Jones, which many believe has contributed to some real butthole-clenched postseason flops throughout the years. 

But the other (likely more legitimate) questions revolve mostly around whether this is a team that’s a contender or a team that looks like a contender against lesser competition. The Cowboys are the champs of the much-maligned NFC East. While the division has improved since last season (mathematically it may not have been possible for them to get any worse) and sports two playoff entrants this year, the Cowboys got to beat the piss out of teams like the Racial Slurs and their backup quarterback and the New York Football Giants, which is basically a team of backups, twice a year. 

If you exclude a drubbing of the Eagles’ reserves last week, the Cowboys are 2-5 against playoff teams and 9-0 against everyone else. Granted, that stat is a bit misleading. Only two of those losses were by more than a single score—neither being blowouts—and the Boys lost two games in OT and another two by a combined five points. But it’s a stat that could be important nonetheless.

Realistically, the Cowboys probably lie somewhere in between their contender analytics and pretender meme status. Oftentimes, that kind of team—the one that just simply CAN’T breakthrough—is less a case of can’t and more a case of when. Perhaps it’s this year and the Cowboys finally make a run. Or perhaps our season of ups and downs through the NFC West gauntlet will have us battle-tested and ready for the upset.

Either way, this is a talented and dangerous Cowboys team and a matchup that—in some ways—is favorable, and—in others—potentially worrisome.

OFFENSE

No, you stop. No, YOU stop! [Matthew Emmons / USA Today]

33-year-old offensive coordinator Kellen Moore—who will likely be a head coach sooner rather than later—helms a Cowboys attack that leads the NFL in both offensive yards and points scored. Averaging over 400 yards of offense and 31.2 points per game, this Cowboys offense is unique in that its offensive identity is largely based on not having one.

The man with no name. In terms of personnel groupings, the Cowboys offense largely fits the mold of a typical modern NFL offense. They are a one-back team, with the majority—if not the entirety—of their two-back snaps coming on the goal line or when they want to get both of their talented tailbacks on the field at once. They’re primarily a three wideout squad but will run double tight as well. They lean more shotgun than under center. Nothing surprising there.

But while their personnel and general formation tendencies are expected, the Cowboys’ offensive scheme thrives in multiplicity and in doing a lot of things well. They’re largely middle-of-the-pack in terms of usage percentages for any kind of play subcategory—such as play-action passes, using motion, etc.—but their efficiency metrics are strong across the board, making them incredibly difficult to game plan against.

Whereas the Baltimore Ravens or a Sean McVay offense take the In-N-Out Burger approach—a limited menu done well—the Cowboys are like Cheesecake Factory. They throw an unbelievable amount of shit at you and hope that the sheer quantity of it all overwhelms you (and gives you diabetes).

For defensive game plans that are built around taking away an offense’s bread-and-butter and making them win a game by doing anything else, this can be a problem. By not knowing what the Cowboys want to do in any given week, there’s no real bread or butter to take away. It’s like a keto diet. And just like the keto diet, it kinda sucks to deal with.

Usually, this kitchen-sink approach to offense leads to rickety or inconsistent units. You do a lot of everything and end up doing nothing well. The reason that’s not the case with Dallas—aside from Moore’s experience and talent in building an offense this way—is that the Cowboys are loaded in every offensive position group.

Big Uglies, pretty blocks. Save for an injury-plagued 2020 season, the Cowboys have had a legitimate claim to having the best offensive line in football for much of the past half dozen years. 

Tyron Smith—of “my arms are so huge I wear knee braces as my elbow braces” fame—has probably been the best offensive tackle in football not named Trent Williams this year. According to PFF, he’s been graded out as a top ten tackle in 7 of his 11 professional seasons. Bookending the opposite side is La’el Collins, whose horrendous draft day luck led to an absolute heist of an UDFA acquisition by the Cowboys. He’s a stud in his own right.

On the interior, Zack Martin has been a mainstay at right guard since he was drafted. He’s been a PFF top 5 guard for each of his eight years in the league, with the #1 ranking during this 2021 season. Opposite him at left guard is Connor Williams, who is less top tier than the three guys just mentioned but still grades out in the top 10-ish range. 

Filling out the front five is second-year center Tyler Biadasz. He’s a major step down from former point man Travis Frederick—who retired last year after coming back for one more Pro Bowl season following a bout with Guillain-Barré syndrome—but when you’re surrounded by the talent the Cowboys have, you can afford an average center.

Undoubtedly, much of what Kellen Moore is able to call—and the multiplicity in which this offense operates—is due to the strength of this offensive line.

When he’s drafting from his coke yacht, you know he’s taking a wideout in the first. This wouldn’t be a Jerry Jones team if it didn’t have an excess of exciting skill players, and the Cowboys are talented and deep out wide.

The veteran presence in the wideout room is Amari Cooper, a talented route runner and after-the-catch threat, who—up until this season—was their No.1 option. He’s consistent but seldom spectacular, which is one of the reasons he’s been passed up by the rapidly-ascending second-year wideout CeeDee Lamb.

Lamb—who we’d contemplated drafting at 15 in the Javon Kinlaw/Brandon Aiyuk class—is a long, slippery, and acrobatic three-level threat who excels both after the catch and when adjusting to the ball in the air. He lines up in the slot for nearly half his snaps and is at his best picking through the open areas of zones. Expect to see him on digs and crossers if they can protect it. He’s also their primary target on vertical routes. 

Elsewhere, Michael Gallup was the Cowboys’ designated ''fuck it, go deep” guy until he went down for the year with a late-season torn ACL. Soaking up his snaps is Cedrick Wilson Jr., the son of former Niner wideout Cedrick Wilson Sr.—who had his best professional season in 2004 when he was second on our team in catches. Yes, we sucked ass that year, won two games, and would go on to draft Alex Smith shortly after.

At tight end, Dalton Schultz has taken a big step forward this season. He’s a very effective pass catcher but a solid blocker as well, and his emergence as an underneath safety blanket has really helped this offense’s consistency. When Schultz is getting his looks, this offense is usually humming, in part because of his reliability working the short middle of the field.

Two guys who are fantasy relevant. While the hiring of Moore in 2019 has been an unquestioned success, the balanced nature of his attack has led to a production drop-off from one of the Boys’ top weapons.

While Ezekiel Elliott led the NFL in rushing yards per game in each of his first three seasons in the league (101.2 yds/game on 4.7 ypc), his production has steadily declined as the Dallas offense has shifted away from being so run-centric (69.5 yds/game on 4.3 ypc).

In fact, for the third season in a row, third-year back Tony Pollard—who emerged more on the national scale with over 1,000 yards from scrimmage this year—has actually outdone Elliott in most averages and advanced efficiency metrics. Granted, Elliott gets a lot more defensive attention when he’s on the field, which opens things up for other players—Pollard included—but the shift to Moore has made the need to spend big on a single running back less of a financial priority than during the Jason Garrett years. 

That said, both backs are dangerous and utilized heavily in the passing game. They love to dump them the ball on shoot routes with natural picks/blockers downfield, motion them into empty for quick screens, or give them slip screens out of the backfield. They want to get these backs in space and for good reason.

Is Dak Dat Dude? Fair or not, most questions surrounding the Cowboys’ ceiling as a Super Bowl contender also involve Dak Prescott’s status as an elite quarterback. While many have come around to the idea that Dak is at least a Tier 2 signal-caller, he still has his doubters.

This year, many of those questions surround Dak’s mid-season calf injury. While it only kept him out of two games, he was noticeably off when he returned, and—although his play has clearly improved since then—the Cowboys passing attack hasn’t had the same punch in the latter half of the season. While Dallas may lead the league in offensive yards and points scored, they were 3rd in points from weeks 1 through 6 and only 13th in that mark from weeks 7 through 17. Similarly, Dak threw for 300+ yards three times in the first six weeks, but only twice in the last ten. While this is still an explosive offense and passing attack, that drop-off tracks with the Cowboys Offensive DVOA rating, which—at 9th, and a weighted 12th (before facing the Eagles’ backups)—is potent but doesn’t scream “best offense in the league” like its traditional counting stats might.

Additional questions surround the fact that Prescott can put up absolutely monstrous numbers, but the Cowboys as a team are typically better when he doesn’t. In games that Dak has attempted 40 or more passes this year, the Boys are 2-3. In games that he’s attempted 37 or fewer, they’re 7-0. Arbitrary numbers? You bet. But—just as the Niners are 7-0 this year when they log 30 team carries or more—that doesn’t mean they’re not relevant.

DEFENSIVE KEYS

I’m going with incomplete [George Rose / Getty Images]

Make them load up on carbs. As a team that can attack defenses in any number of ways, the Cowboys—and Dak—are at their best when they don’t have to attack a defense in one way repeatedly. Whereas a team like the Niners or the Ravens are happy pounding you on the ground with a diverse and effective run game that follows their offensive identity, the Cowboys strive for balance. When they’re forced out of that balance, they can struggle. I just mentioned the cherry-picked stat about the Cowboys’ record when Prescott attempts 40+ passes, but here’s another: when the Cowboys rush for less than 100 yards this year, they’re 1-5. That’s every single one of their losses.

While I believe Dak is a very good quarterback, the way to beat the Cowboys is still to force them to throw. That’s not just on the quarterback, but a potential inherent drawback of this kind of multiple offense. 

Save for a 73-yard fake punt against the Seahawks, the Niners haven’t allowed a team to surpass 90 rushing yards since week 9. Much of that credit is due to the play of Arik Armstead—who slid primarily inside about that same time—and DJ Jones—who’s having his best year as a pro, but improved play by Samson Ebukam on the edge, rotational snaps from Charles Omenihu, and Arden Key’s emergence as our svelte interior pass rusher have helped unlock a next level for our defensive line. Mo Hurst—who practiced in full for the first time all season—should also be back for this game. While injuries have limited him to only 41 snaps this season, if he’s actually healthy and in game shape, he could provide valuable spot snaps on the interior. 

Even though the Cowboys are no longer the run-first, run-heavy scheme of years past, forcing them into being one-dimensional is still one of the best ways to slow up their offense.

Turning greased-up pigs into bacon. The Cowboys are likely fine with being a high-volume passing attack if they’re breaking 6-8 yard gains off the wide array of quick screens and shoot routes that they use to get the ball quickly outside the hashes to their backs and wideouts.

We’ve had a few ugly showings when it comes to open-field tackling, with the game against Arizona’s backups being the most glaring example, and the Boys love to manufacture those “long handoff” type plays to the perimeter to test defenses early in games and get their offense in rhythm. 

Despite the Boys’ dominance upfront, every team will be looking to manufacture ways to slow up our pass rush, and one way is to get us running sideways enough to gas our D-line. If Dallas’ screen and quick perimeter game is humming, that softens the box for the run, and that lets them stay composed, on schedule, and—once again—balanced offensively. 

It’s not out of the question to think the Cowboys may come out with an initial game plan similar to the Cardinals’ in their second matchup against us: tons of quick perimeter passes paired with some power running inside. Thus, sound tackling will be key, especially early on as the Cowboys attempt to establish their identity. While Azeez Al-Shaair’s development and knack for the splash play has been welcome (and crucial) this year, Dre Greenlaw has been one of our soundest tacklers since he entered the league, and his return should help us track down plays on the perimeter.

If we can flow to the ball quickly and tackle well in space, we’ll take away a lot of the easy stuff that the Cowboys like to employ to steal yardage on early downs. If that happens, they’ll be forced to manufacture their offense through more difficult means.

[Another terrible food analogy]. Dak is a smart quarterback who excels at audibles and pre-snap adjustments, which makes him a really good fit for the variety of plays featured in Moore’s multiple offense. When he’s reading defenses well, Dak can chip away in the quick game, take deep shots down the sideline, and do basically everything in between. So why does Dak sometimes get knocked as a dude who seems “out of rhythm” in games?

If there’s an area where Dak struggles, it’s when his pre-snap read is off. That’s when you start seeing issues in the timing of Dak’s progressions and more scattershot decision-making. Often, you see these issues materialize on intermediate and deep throws across the middle. Dak’s never going to be the most accurate quarterback—with his misses typically sailing high—and—when a coverage dupes him pre-snap—he can be late to recognize and trigger on second and third reads between the hashes. Late throws high over the middle make for a sketchy combination and that’s led to the majority of his turnovers this year.

Dak’s completed 68.8% of his passes with 37 TDs-to-10 INTs on the year. On intermediate and deep passes in the middle zones, he’s completing 50% of his passes for 4 touchdowns and 8 picks. Over the last three seasons, 18 of Dak’s 25 interceptions have come on passes in the middle of the field. While most quarterbacks throw the majority of their interceptions across the middle—where there are more defenders lurking and less open space to work with—Dak’s numbers on second-and-third level inside passes are a legitimate trend. 

This is where the healthy return of Jaquiski Tartt—who has considerably more range than Hufanga (also injured)—and K’Waun Williams will be crucial. For the past few years, the 49ers have done a great job of hiding their coverages pre-snap, utilizing a number of different looks against trips formations, and regularly rotating their safeties after the snap. That skill set could be especially important in this matchup, as confusing Dak at the LOS may throw off his timing just enough to keep the Cowboys’ offense off-kilter, or—even better—lead to late/ill-advised throws over the middle that could swing the turnover battle in our favor.

If we can hide our coverages, rotate safeties post-snap, and make Dak a beat slow on his reads, that might be enough time for Nick Bosa and Co. to get home against the Cowboys’ stellar offensive line. While Dallas’ offense has underachieved in the second half of the year, this is still a unit with as much explosive potential as nearly anyone in football. It just hasn’t broken out yet. The best way to make sure that breakout doesn’t happen against us may reside in how well we hide what we’re doing on the backend.

Misc.

• The return of Emmanuel Moseley makes our defense a totally different unit, but hopefully, Ambry Thomas continues his slow (but consistent!) growth on the opposite side. Thomas went from “get burnt” (@ CIN) to “get burnt sometimes but get mossed” (v. ATL) to “usually in good position but sometimes getting mossed” (@ TEN) to “good position, nearly making plays on the ball” (v. HOU) to “game-winning interception to seal a playoff bid” (@ LAR). It would be ignorant to think this means he’s suddenly a lock-down corner, but I’m glad the coaching staff let him work through his issues during the season, as he’s bound to be heavily targeted in this matchup. If Thomas can hold up, we should be in good position.

• While the Cowboys have a great offensive line, we still need to find ways to get pressure on Prescott and flush him out to where he makes those late throws that get him into trouble. Look for Ryans to dial up some well-timed blitzes, mug looks to create one-on-one blocks off the snap, and inside twists in an attempt to isolate and confuse Biadasz in pass pro.

• Cedrick Wilson Jr. is 5-of-5 for 111 yards and a touchdown over the past two years. Just sayin… If you see him on a fly sweep or a deep outlet pass don’t assume it’s legit.

DEFENSE

A not-that-rare sight this year [Tom Pennington / Getty Images]

Familiarity runs deep on this side of the ball, as Shanahan takes on his old boss in Dan Quinn. The former Falcons head coach has rejuvenated his brand in a hurry, taking over a defensive unit that was absolutely horrid last year and building them into Football Outsiders’ #2 overall defense in terms of DVOA.

Since their last playoff appearance in 2018, the Cowboys defense had been sliding. The promising young linebacker duo of a rookie Leighton Vander Esch and a fully-rehabilitated Jaylon Smith never became the cornerstones of a defensive revolution—the latter finally getting cut mid-season after his play plummeted following his big-ticket contract extension in 2019. Things bottomed out last year with the hiring of Mike Nolan to run some kind of 3-4 hybrid-esque scheme—a pairing that barely lasted a single season and left the Cowboys in historically bad defensive company.

To be fair to the former Niners headman, the fit was poor from the jump. The Cowboys had basically been a 4-3 unit since Rob Ryan got the boot in 2012. A shift to a 3-4 base would have required years of personnel adjustments, and Dallas—as they are known to do—wanted results immediately. In the off-season they turned to Quinn, who brought them back to a 4-3 scheme with Seattle 3 roots. By simplifying assignments, putting players in the right positions, and coaxing the emergence of a few young superstar talents, the Cowboys’ defense is now a strength rather than a liability.

As one of—if not the singular—hottest names in the coaching carousel, this is likely a one-and-done season for Quinn in Dallas, with the Cowboys hoping the foundation he laid can be repeated in years to come. But, this is probably not the type of airtight defense you’re used to seeing top the ranks. There is variance in this Cowboys unit, and with that comes a potential weakness that can trickle down to everything else they do.

And by god we will do our best to exploit that.

Cavemen vs. the NEW iPhone 13 Pro Max with XDR Retina Display. The Cowboys defense is good. That is largely inarguable. But how you view them beyond that is in part based on your opinion of what makes a great defense in 2022.

By many traditional counting stats, the Cowboys aren’t particularly impressive. They’re 7th in points allowed (a highly respectable number) but an unimpressive 19th in yardage. Often times that difference is due to a stingy redzone defense—you know, the whole “bend don’t break” thing—but inside the twenty, the Cowboys rank only 21st. So what makes for the difference in the gap between the Boys’ yardage allowed and their points allowed? Just as importantly, why is this considered an elite defense?

Like an NBA team trying to only take shots at the rim or beyond the arc, the Cowboys excel at the two things advanced stats groups love: third down, where they are ranked second in the nation (34.08% conversion) and takeaways, where they are tops in the league (34). This makes up for their other, less impressive, counting stats, and makes them quite the advanced stats darling.

Many people believe that a modern-day defense is all about possessions, the thought process being that—due to the league’s heavy shift in favor of offenses—you can’t actually have a lockdown defense anymore. From this perspective, pass defense should be prioritized above all else, and physicality, yards allowed, and stopping the run are exponentially less important than increasing the likelihood of generating turnovers.

This isn’t to say that the Cowboys defense is undisciplined or wildly inconsistent, but their emphasis on hunting for “havoc plays”—sacks, tackles for loss, and takeaways—means they lean into variance in a way that elite defenses of the past have not. The Cowboys are near the top of the league in taking the ball away, getting off the field on money downs, pressure rate (5th), and have a #2 rank in pass DVOA. That means they’re an elite defense.

But there is another—more old-school—train of thought from a group that is less bearish on the idea of playing defense in the post-PI, post-roughing the passer world. While often disregarded as traditionalists who have yet to update to the times, these believers continue to stress physicality, stopping the run, and fundamental play over the higher variance, higher risk world of takeaway chasing.

It’s important to note that the two ways of thinking aren’t mutually exclusive. Offensive rule changes or not, it’s impossible to be an elite defense if you aren’t generating takeaways. Likewise, if you can’t tackle anyone or are always out of position you’re never going to cause turnovers. Typically, today’s best defenses fall somewhere in between these two belief systems. The Cowboys are just one of the first defenses to be considered elite that leans so heavily towards the new way of thinking. They want to generate pressure and create takeaways, and they don’t particularly care what happens other than that.

The three-layer cake method. As has become commonplace in a hard salary cap league with exorbitant quarterback contracts and a constant lean towards offense, the Cowboys’ defense is built off of a few studs at every level of play who help mask the presence of some of their less impressive teammates.

On the front line, we’re likely all familiar with Demarcus Lawrence, the Cowboys’ star defensive end. Despite missing the first 12 weeks of the season with a fractured foot, he hasn’t missed a beat upon his return. Through the season, the Cowboys have shown a willingness to blitz with regularity if the moment calls for it, but—since Lawrence has come back from injury—those blitz figures have dropped. They are still more than willing to send extra men, but the combination of Lawrence and fellow disruptive defensive end Randy Gregory has made it less necessary on a regular basis.

On the second level, linebacker Micah Parsons is a shoe-in for DROTY and an All-Pro selection in his first year in the league. Despite opting out of his last year of college, the 6’3” 246-pounder who runs a sub-4.4 forty has slid effortlessly into the Cowboys’ SAM linebacker position. His size/speed combo makes him an obvious sideline-to-sideline chase down threat, but where he really excels is as a pass rusher. Dan Quinn loves to slide him down as a stand-up edge—especially in their traditional 4-3 under fronts—as well as send him as a blitzer from the second level. That’s led to 13 sacks and 30 QB hits—an unreal number for a guy who spends the majority of his snaps as an off-ball linebacker. Even if the rest of the team isn’t blitzing much, they’ll be sending Parsons plenty, and whether he plays more snaps off-ball or as a stand-up end is largely dependent on the matchup. In the 16 games he played in this year, he totaled more snaps on the DL than at LB four times.

The Cowboys’ third big-ticket item is much more polarizing than the first two. While there’s little debate about the prowess of Lawrence and Parsons, cornerback Trevon Diggs is another story. If the Cowboys are a test of what makes an elite defense in 2022, Diggs is that question personified in a single player. Diggs has 11 picks this year, the most interceptions in a single season over the past 40(!) years. But while he led the league in picks, he also led all cornerbacks in penalties (somehow, even more than Josh Norman) and yardage allowed. By A LOT. He’s given up over 1,000 yards receiving this year, a feat that—per PFF—has only been reached by nine other cornerbacks over the past ten years. While some advanced ranking sites have Diggs as a top 5 corner based on his interceptions, PFF has him ranked 84th out of 120 cornerbacks. Among players who have played over 100 snaps at outside corner this year, Trevon Diggs ranks 98th out of 100 in yards per target, and when the ball does get completed, the average gain is a whopping 18.2 yards per reception.

Clearly, opposing teams have not been afraid to target Diggs in coverage despite his tremendous ball-hawking ability. When he isn’t taking the ball away, he’s regularly giving up big yardage, touchdowns, and first downs—whether from completions or penalties. Like Lawrence and Parsons, Diggs is a huge reason why the Cowboys are 11-5 and their defense is ranked as highly as it is, but if you needed a portrait of the variance that we’re talking about with this Cowboys defense, Diggs is a prime example.

That soft nougat interior. When you’re prioritizing the pass rush and generating takeaways on the backend, it’s natural that you’re going to have some weaknesses elsewhere. And usually, that weakness presents itself in the run game. The Cowboys are no different.

The Boys have allowed 100+ rushing yards in 11 of the past 12 straight games. To be clear, that’s not actually that crazy in 2022. They rank 17th in rushing yards allowed per game, 16th in DVOA against the run, and their yards per carry allowed (4.5) is about league average. By all accounts, they are just that—an average run defense.

Their guys on the interior are just guys, even if the scheme and rolling into 4-3 under fronts allows them to be hidden at times. Their corners are not particularly strong tacklers in the open field. There’s space to be had here, even if the defense has stood up well to the challenges they’ve faced. Speaking of said challenges…

That soft(er) offensive schedule. We’ve talked briefly about the Cowboys’ suspect slate of victories and the issues they’ve had in closing out some of the stronger teams on their schedule. But the most legitimate worry that comes from their strength of schedule (or lack thereof) is on the defensive side of the ball. Not because their defense hasn’t looked good in these matchups, but because they’ve faced so many horrendous offenses.

Below is a breakdown of every single offense the Cowboys have faced since the beginning of December (5 teams, 6 games). This includes the offense’s DVOA plus its starting QB, starting RB, and #1 receiver who played in that contest.

So… yeah.

The Cowboys have had their moments against strong offenses, generating four turnovers against the reigning champion Bucs (#1 DVOA) and holding the #4 DVOA Chargers to 17 points, but they did allow over 400 yards in both those games, and it’s safe to say they haven’t been tested in quite a while.

OFFENSIVE KEYS

you know it had to be this picture

Two Tickets to Pound Town. It should come as no surprise that we’ll want to pound the rock in a matchup against an elite unit with an average—and largely untested—run defense. While I wouldn’t expect anything like a “Raheem Mostert on god mode versus a bottom five rushing defense trotting out nickel personnel and six-man boxes in the 2019 NFC Championship Game”-level performance, we’ll need to run the ball effectively to win this game.

Give the Cowboys credit, they’ve stepped up before when they know the run’s coming their way—holding Dalvin Cook to 78 yards on the ground in their matchup against the Vikings—but Minnesota’s rushing attack wasn’t what it has been in previous years. Make no mistake, the Boys haven’t seen a ground game like ours.

Teams that are inconsistent against the run can rise to the occasion when they know it’s coming—especially if their plan is to fast flow hard against our stretch game and not get beat outside. But if we utilize misdirection and backfield cross-flow early, it becomes harder for defenses to keep up on just effort and hustle alone. That’s when you can find cracks in their run D.

While untested against the run, this defense is likely too good to just be bludgeoned to death (at least right out of the gate), which means misdirection in the run game and some key plays through the air may be key to unlocking the kind of ground-and-pound game that we’re looking for. I also have to imagine that Shanahan and Mike McDonald are scheming up as many ways as possible to make the Cowboys’ cornerbacks the unblocked man. Whether it’s unbalanced and closed formations or shifts and motions when we diagnose man coverage, there’s nothing our coaching staff would like more than to make Trevon Diggs spend the majority of this game filling in run support rather than covering down the field.

Beat man coverage on early downs. I have to assume Dan Quinn will take a page from Pete Carroll and the Seahawks and load up against the run with 4-3 under fronts, tons of single-high safeties, and seven-to-eight guys in the box on every down that isn’t third-and-long. That’s why—despite it likely leading to some frustrating “why didn’t we run it there?” situations—we’ll need to attempt (and complete) some passes on early downs to keep the running lanes open.

Despite coming from the Seattle 3 system, Quinn has actually employed a ton of man coverage in Dallas this season, good for third-most in the league. That’s a surprising development for a team whose star corner is clearly better in zone, but I think part of the reason why that strategy has been so successful is that loading the box and calling man 1 and man 1-robber on early downs allows a team that isn’t that great against the run to play above their means be just fitting lots of hats in gaps. It gives them numbers and keeps things simple, which—after their many issues against the run last year—is a great place to start.

I fully expect Quinn to start the game out with single-high loaded boxes and press coverage. Lockdown man with a loaded box, plus a pass rush that can abuse the right side of our line (to be fair, Compton has improved a decent amount in pass pro) has been our Achilles heel on offense. For all his incredible contributions as an offensive Swiss army knife, Deebo’s only real drawbacks have been the occasional drop and the fact that he is considerably less effective against man coverage than zone. Deebo is a slippery dude and incredibly tough to tackle, but he’s not the most electric route runner. Against zone coverage he does a nice job of finding the open lane and building up steam to abuse everyone in his path. Against man coverage, he’s less likely to generate that kind of space and momentum. While Deebo is sure to be involved in this matchup—be it as a receiver or as a runner (hopefully both)—Kittle and Aiyuk may need to step up as our man beaters.

Aiyuk was always drafted to be Deebo’s long and explosive counterpart—a more traditional wideout who could develop into a deep ball threat and run everything in the route tree against any coverage. This is as good a time as any for him to play that role. If we want to get our underneath chunk yardage game going, Aiyuk will need to win some battles against Diggs and fellow outside cornerback Anthony Brown—who is no slouch himself. Early separation against press will be key.

Kittle has been our man-killer all year, and we’ll need him to be that once again in this game. My guess is the Cowboys throw the kitchen sink at our All-Pro tight end, rotating a bunch of looks his way with safety/big nickel Jayron Kearse getting the first shot at locking him down. I personally think that slot and tight end defense is a weakness of this Cowboys defense and that they don’t have a particularly strong answer for Kittle. Kearse is a solid player, but slot corner Jourdan Lewis is just too small to cover Kittle and I wouldn’t trust any of their linebackers to be able to hang.

Shanahan will undoubtedly do his best to move Kittle around and get him matched up on as many linebackers as possible, but regardless of who gets the nod to cover him, Kittle needs to win when his number is called.

Stay on target… It may seem overly simplistic to say that avoiding negative plays and turnovers against a defense that is built on generating those very things is the best way to beat said defense, but… it is.

The Cowboys have forced two or more takeaways in all but five games. In games where they haven’t forced any takeaways, they’re 1-3. Conversely, we’re 5-0 in games where we don’t turn the ball over, 8-2 when we win or tie the turnover battle, and 1-5 when we lose the turnover battle. The Cowboys are an opportunistic defense that uses takeaways as their primary means of obtaining field position. The Niners are a run-heavy outfit that wants to play physical, complementary football. It is more likely than not that whoever wins the turnover battle in this game, wins the game itself.

Offensively, that means keeping on schedule in drives through incremental gains, minimizing losses, avoiding penalties, employing an efficient—even if not spectacular—passing game, and delivering a few well-timed play-action shots. And—of course—not turning the ball over.

Looking at you, Jimmy.

Misc.

• People seem optimistic that Trent Williams will play. Needless to say, having the best offensive tackle in the game—whose PFF rating of 98.3 is (I think) the highest PFF rating ever for any position over an entire season—against a pair of talented defensive ends would be critical.

• Trey Sermon was activated off IR on Tuesday, which was at least a little surprising. Elijah Mitchell was limited in practice this week, and there’s a chance the roster move was done in case Mitchell can’t go this weekend? But perhaps it was just to keep the running back room stocked in case we can make a run at things.

• Tom Compton is currently ranked as PFF’s #4(!) overall tackle, based largely on his impeccable run blocking. That’s pretty generous, but Compton has done a great job of filling the “Mike Person on roids” role for us this year. He’s even better than Person in the run game and—after improving throughout the season—less of a liability in pass protection.

BONUS CATEGORY: The Thumb. Mike McCarthy, head coach of the Dallas Cowboys, looks like a thumb. You know it’s true, and now you can’t unsee it.

CONCLUSION

long live the run game (in all its forms) [Getty Images]

If you don’t love the Cowboys, you probably hate the Cowboys. And if you’re twenty-five or younger, you probably don’t know why anyone ever cared about the Cowboys in the first place. But despite the internet’s penchant for meme-ing the Boys, this is a more dangerous and complete squad than Dallas has fielded in quite some time. They’re balanced, talented, piloted by two top-flight coordinators, and certainly hungry to make some noise in the postseason. Soft schedule or not, it would be unwise to underestimate a team that was a Week 17 loss to the Cardinals away from genuinely vying for the #1 seed in the NFC.

If there’s anything we know for certain about this year’s 49ers, it’s that we have no idea what’s coming next. This isn’t the 2019 squad, which was a buzzsaw from the jump and was basically destined to win the NFC. Sometimes we come out slow, or shoot ourselves in the foot, or—in a few unfortunate cases—do both, but—to be perfectly clear—we have a very good football team. And we can hang with anyone when we’re on our game.

We are the NFL’s new (old) unicorn, a physical run game paired with a quick passing attack, and that’s a hard thing to prep for when no one else does it. If we can protect the ball, I think our grind-it-out style, punishing ground game, and successful maneuvering of countless “wtf” games this season make us a tough out for anyone and a particularly bad matchup for the Cowboys.

Go Niners 🏈👍

Ascending, Contending, or Pretending?

Clinging onto our playoff hopes like… [49ers.com]

In Seattle, it rains nine months out of the year, games are required to end with goal-line stands, and quarterbacks 5-11 and under must be handled delicately with velvet gloves. On Sunday, as the unforced turnovers flowed like box wine at a college party, we were once again reminded—as if we needed it—that there is only one constant at (checks new sponsor) Lumen Field: never ever call defensive holding.

If there’s a constant to our 2021 season as a whole, it probably has something to do with pulling out our hair in frustration and making exasperated noises that are incomprehensible to most speaking adults. After the most Seahawks game that ever did Seahawk, we’re now 6-6 and—for all intents and purposes—battling six other teams for the final two wild card spots in the NFC. That’s right, we’re even summoning the number of the beast. Sunday was a bad loss for every reason imaginable but mostly because we now have little-to-no margin for error to make the playoffs. A win would have put us pretty comfortably into the six spot, with a chance to catch the Rams at the five. Now we’re in the muck.

Joining us in said muck are the…

• Racial Slurs (6-6): They have the tiebreak over us and are currently in the six seed while in the midst of a four-game winning streak. This could be us. This could be us… They’ve got the Cowboys and the Eagles twice down the stretch. Of the teams listed, this one is playing the best.

• Eagles (6-7): Half a game back and winners of three of four. Them playing the Slurs should help us one way or the other. They also play the Boys one more time. We have the tiebreak over them due to head-to-head.

• Panthers (5-7): They play the Falcons and the Saints and then the Bucs twice to end the season. No one knows who their quarterback is. They only know they will suck.

• Saints (5-7): Speaking of quarterbacks who suck… Despite a five-game slide, their remaining schedule only has one playoff team (Bucs) and they’re better coached than most of this crop. They could make a move.

• Vikings (5-7): The second team on this list that we’d beat in the tiebreak cause of our head-to-head win, matchups against the Steelers, Bears (twice), Rams, and Packers, make for a tough schedule the rest of the way. Other than the Slurs, they’re probably the best team of this bunch but the Lions game may have doomed them.

• Falcons (5-7): This team sucks and we play them at home in two weeks. If we lose to them, we—by the transitive property—also suck.

As you can see, there’s going to be a lot of cannibalization in that group, which is great for our chances. Unless one team from the NFC East and one team from the NFC South both go on a tear through the last five games, the playoffs are still very much in the picture.

Due to the top-heavy nature of the NFC, a team will most likely sneak into the post-season with a 9-8 record, but assuming that as fact—and that we’d win the ensuing tiebreak with our terrible divisional record—is a risky proposition. Our final five consists of two home games against absolute horrendous teams and then three road games against playoff squads. If we go 4-1 or better down the stretch, we are almost certainly in the playoff field. If we go 3-2, we need some things to fall our way but are probably still in. That means we need to beat two doormats and AT LEAST one playoff squad (preferably two) to have a shot. Any worse than that and we’d need a heavy dose of chaos.

As all who watched last weekend’s debacle can attest, chaos has not been friendly to us this year. So let’s just win some games plz?

Things were (are?) looking up Milhouse. Soured by our loss to the Seahawks—who only exist to play in excruciatingly close games they have no business being in—was the greatly improved play that had us on a three-game winning streak entering the weekend. A number of factors contributed to that turnaround—including the players’ only defensive meeting that Jimmie Ward helmed after the embarrassing loss to the Cardinals—but the biggest keys to our improved play centered around winning the turnover battle, a recommitment to the run game, and—up until Sunday—a highly efficient Garoppolo who was playing the best ball of his career.

While it seems simple, we’re 1-4 when losing the turnover battle, 1-2 when even, and 4-0 when we win the battle and/or don’t turn the ball over. As a physical team that likes to control the clock and lean on our run game, we’ve got less ability than most to get away with sloppy play, and it shows in our record.

On the ground, we’ve done a great job of deploying window dressing, misdirection, and creative formations and personnel sets to average 42 carries and 178 rushing yards through our three-game winning streak. Elijah Mitchell’s (mostly) healthy return has been clutch, as his vision, decisiveness, and elusiveness seem to improve with every passing week. 

Meanwhile, Jimmy G has performed exceptionally well on money downs and was PFF’s highest-rated quarterback through the month of November. In the five games since The Shit Show In the Storm (TM) against the Colts, Jimmy G led the league in EPA, DVOA, and (I think) QBR, while also leading the league in EPA and success rate on 3rd and 4th downs. While I’d guess his stinker in Seattle has dropped him down the leaderboard a bit, we’d found a nice balance of running the ball and letting Jimmy pick apart defenses on favorable downs and distances.

The question moving forward is if the Seahawks game is a sign of things to come or just a blip on the radar where everything went wrong while missing key parts? We’ll find out next week when we take on a Bengals team that—on top of being nearly as bipolar as us—could give our cornerbacks fits, especially since Emmanuel Moseley was diagnosed with a high-ankle sprain on Monday.

Doubling Down on Deebo. A recommitment to the run game means fewer passes to go around, so Shanahan has kept one of our best offensive weapons involved by getting Deebo the rock as a running back. 

With Deebo, the appeal is simple. He’s one of the best ball carriers and space players in the league and is routinely bigger, stronger, and faster than defenders realize. He is a freight train in the open field, only slowing momentarily to collect the souls of defensive backs before heading to the section of the field that has the big letters painted in it. But his insane efficiency in the run game—203 yards, 5 TDs, 8.1(!) ypc—is aided by how Shanahan creatively uses different formations, motions, and personnel groupings to create marginal advantages all over the field. 

One of the most interesting and most effective examples of this is when we deploy Deebo in the backfield with a true running back (usually Jeff Wilson) as a lead blocker to generate run game mismatches on every level.

Here we show up in 21 personnel, but—by putting Deebo in the backfield—we’re basically deploying two lead blocking backs as we run stretch lead.

Wilson goes in motion across the formation so that he can get a head start getting outside the box, while Kittle and Juice work the two edge linebackers.

Every time Deebo is in the backfield, we’re theoretically creating a blocking mismatch with a bigger body on a smaller one. In this instance, the big mismatch is Wilson (a physical running back) on a corner.

🏃‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/rtf2AxRDtP

— DefinitelyNotEric (@TotallyNotEric) December 7, 2021

Deebo hits the edge, Wilson pancakes his dude into the safety, and the result is a 20-yard touchdown.

This time, we’re once again in 21 personnel but have spread Juice out wide to the formation’s offensive right. The Vikings aren’t buying that we’re looking to throw out of this formation so they keep their seven-man box, but now we’re modifying our edge blocking to leverage positioning and mismatches.

Wilson is once again pulling out onto a cornerback. Compton is pulling outside to the safety. And Juice (off-screen) is cracking down on the linebacker (59). So in two out of three blocks we have a massive size advantage, and in the third, Juice has a good angle. The one block that seems like a TERRIBLE matchup for us is Aiyuk sealing the defensive end. But due to the speed and outside aiming point of the play, Aiyuk only has to wall him from immediately getting outside and chasing Deebo from behind.

Even though Juice misses his block, Deebo does Deebo things, shaking a defensive end in space before accelerating up the field behind a horde of downfield blockers that almost resembles a screen.

🏃‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/h8t9oE8a5h

— DefinitelyNotEric (@TotallyNotEric) December 7, 2021

Another DB gets ruined. 49 yards.

Against the Rams, we showed a similar look out of 11 personnel, spreading the field just enough for the Rams to deploy a six-man box with safeties creeping up. Unlike our stretch runs against the Vikings, the Rams game saw us pounding zone and split-zone in what was a more grind-it-out, downhill performance.

On this run, we’re running inside zone, but in a way that more resembles a “duo” concept. Wilson will once again go in motion to kick out the wide crashing stand-up DE, while Compton and Kittle will double-team the down lineman over the tackle. Because he’s Aaron Donald.

This play is meant to be a quick hitter, but—and this is the part that most resembles duo—Deebo is given the leeway to read second-level flow and bounce the run one way or the other if he sees fit.

Showcasing how truly rare of a talent he is, Deebo reads the second (and third) level flow as he gets the ball. Immediately, he recognizes that the unblocked run support player (Taylor Rapp, circled in blue) is taking an inside path to meet Deebo in the hole or cut off the path if he stays on the intended track. So Deebo makes one hard step frontside off the hand-off then bounces into the cutback outside of Tomlinson.

Rapp (blue arrow) gets caught inside, and Deebo bounces outside of the trailing defensive end, once again showing that he’s too fast for the big guys…

…and too big for the fast guys, easily stiff-arming the outside cornerback as he walks in for a touchdown.

🏃‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/gXj4PRQpPH

— DefinitelyNotEric (@TotallyNotEric) December 7, 2021

That’s a good cut and run for a running back, much less your leading receiver. Lots of teams will trust their wideouts on a fly sweep or an end-around, where they can see an outside opening and simply sprint through it before it closes. What makes Deebo so rare is that he could actually be a running back in the NFL.

Despite missing the Seattle game with a groin injury, Deebo has already become just the third player in NFL history to record 1,000+ receiving yards and 5+ touchdowns receiving and rushing. He’s the only receiver ever to accomplish said feat. And he did it in 11 games.

The plus side of this is obvious. Deebo is awesome, he’s one of the funnest players to watch, and our offense is much more creative and harder to defend when he’s healthy. The downside is there is only one of him and, when he isn’t available, we lose a dimension of our offense that is near impossible to replace. 

Searching for The Mythical GaroppoLance. Entering the season, I was as guilty as anyone in hoping that we could run a two-quarterback system. If the Saints could do it with a sex criminal and the world’s most overpaid third-string tight end, I was sure we’d be able to bridge the gap between our present and future at quarterback. But I was greedy.

And—based on comments made by Shanahan in the week leading up to the Vikings—it doesn’t seem like the “Lance package” is coming back anytime soon.

“We get into a rhythm of attacking a defense and what fronts they’re playing, what coverages. Every play kind of plays off the next play and you get a feel, our players do and I, kind of what we’re going to …

“What’s been hard on me that I didn’t realize is when you do bring in a quarterback who gets a different set of plays, then it’s almost like it’s the first play I’ve been seeing of a new defense. Because now, yeah, you see what fronts and coverages they’re doing, but they’re doing it completely to a plan as a threat of a runner at the position. And so I don’t know what to anticipate with it. And then I’ve got to stay in it for a while to get a feel for that. And then when you go back, that feels kind off for the last guy.

“So it kind of hurts my rhythm a little bit of understanding what the defense is (doing) and that’s why personally as the year’s gone I’ve gotten a little bit more away from it. ‘Cause I like to get a feel for what the defense is doing.”

In short, Shanahan’s offense is sequential. Plays and formations and looks set up better plays and formations and looks, and every time we switch to quarterback B, we lose information on how to attack defenses with quarterback A. While the bulk of the worry about the two-quarterback system was if the signal-callers themselves would get out of rhythm coming in and out of the game (and, to be fair, Jimmy has played much better now that the Lance subpackage has been shelved), we’d underestimated how much the rotation could throw Shanahan out of rhythm as a play-caller. 

Does that hurt our ability to get Lance valuable reps as a rookie? Yes. Does it make the fourth-and-one where we ran a Jimmy G zone read against the Seahawks even more frustrating? Yes. But the Niners decided that they had to make a call on ONE quarterback who was going to lead them out of the bye week, and since the inexperienced rookie with the tantalizing upside had a knee sprain with a then-undetermined recovery timetable (he’d end up missing the bye plus at least one game due to injury), they went with the quarterback who they knew and who they knew would be healthy enough to play out of the break.

Now, if Lance had finished out that Arizona game healthy would that still be the case? At this point, that’s just another fascinating “what if” in a season that’s been full of them. But it doesn’t really matter now. Barring a string of performances similar to the one he had against Seattle—or a late-season stumble that eliminates us from the playoffs—Jimmy is likely our guy for the rest of the season, and we should be rooting for him to do as well as possible so that we can swap him for a draft pick come spring.

If only we could play ourselves on defense… Emmanuel Moseley has been a stud this season, stepping into the No.1 role after Verrett went down and allowing only a 47% completion rate while keeping wideouts out of the endzone on his past 51 straight targets. Now, he’s out with a high-ankle sprain. Considering the injury and the position he plays, that could easily mean he’s out the rest of the season.

If our starting cornerbacks weren’t already the worst in the league, they most certainly are now. Josh Norman mans one side cause he leads the league in forced fumbles. He also just happens to lead the league in crippling pass interference calls and (if this were a stat) times dusted deep down the field. I wanna say I remember him making one good play at the catch point this season, but I couldn’t tell you when that was, and I only remember it because it was such an outlier from the mean.

Opposite him will probably be Dontae Johnson, who honestly could have replaced Norman weeks ago if he hadn’t run into his own nagging injuries and wasn’t needed in the slot while K’Waun was out. He’s played solid in limited reps. Perhaps with an increase in snaps he can maintain that rate of play. Perhaps he can’t. But did you read the thing I just wrote about Norman? As long as Dontae’s a warm body that can contest the occasional go route, he’ll see plenty of play moving forward.

As for our rookies, things are just moving a bit too fast for them at the moment. Thomas has the athleticism and top-end speed to develop into a starter, but he needed a transition year after opting out of last season and only being a one-year starter in college. He’s just not seeing things quickly enough and has been living in the trail technique in the limited snaps he’s seen. Deommodore Lenoir has more of a chance to pull a starting spot away from one of the veterans above, but he’s smaller and less athletic than Thomas and—whether he’s breaking on short passes or covering deep down the field—he seems just a step too slow. Both have potential down the road. But for now, teams are gonna dump the ball underneath them in off coverage and target them deep whenever they press. We’ve seen it in garbage time. We saw it last weekend against the Seahawks. If the rookies get major snaps moving forward, we’ll see it some more.

That said, it’s probably still worth giving them some run here and there. That’s how bad our cornerback situation is. So bad that it might wind up the nail in the coffin of our playoff hopes.

Special, but not in the way you want. Our special teams have been about as bad as possible. So much so that you could make the very legitimate argument that our special teams units ALONE have lost us AT LEAST two games this season. Or you don’t have to make the argument because, according to David Lombardi of The Athletic, advanced stats can for you:

But the 49ers’ total lack of awareness on special teams doesn’t enjoy the benefit of the doubt this time, not when we consider how Seattle won, 28-21, back in the first meeting. The 49ers’ special teams accounted for a staggering negative-14.3 expected points in that game. That was the losing difference. Coordinator Richard Hightower’s unit also nearly blew last week’s game against Minnesota, losing 6.1 expected points in a tight contest.

Last weekend, a missed extra point, a fumbled kick return, and the most successful fake punt of all time would be the difference in yet another disappointing loss to our division rivals.

I get that every time an offensive or defensive player goes down, a special teams unit loses another dude to promotion up the depth chart and that keeping a rotating crop of bench players and practice squadders in lockstep is a tall task. But our inadequacy in this department has gotten out of control, and we’ve been paying for it dearly.

It gets the people going. Lance will take over next year. We’ll (theoretically) address the cornerback position in the off-season. But the biggest thing stopping us from being a Tier 2 or better team is consistency. We know when we play our best we can compete with the best. But how in the world can we stop playing our worst so regularly? If we can’t figure that out, we’ll never be a legitimate contender. At least not for the long haul.

Right now, it’s nearly impossible to predict how we’re going to look on any given week. When we play clean—without turnovers and a slew of penalties and mistakes—we look like a team that can do real damage in the playoffs. When we don’t, the wheels fall off. While I do believe the changes we made mid-season will result in more consistent play moving forward, we may have dug a hole so deep that it doesn’t matter. We’re down our best two players at our thinnest position and everyone in our remaining schedule knows that. If there’s a time to circle the wagons, it’s now. Otherwise, we’ll be looking at back-to-back seasons missing the playoffs, and this year—unlike in 2020—we’d have no good excuse as to why.

Go Niners 👍🏈

Mid-Season Breakdown

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

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

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.

Dontae Johnson came close to blocking Mason Crosby as time expired. Hard to tell if ball went just over/under hand. pic.twitter.com/DrH6ZHB9qi

— Matt Barrows (@mattbarrows) September 27, 2021

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]

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.

🤔 pic.twitter.com/goMe5wgUtB

— DefinitelyNotEric (@TotallyNotEric) October 8, 2021

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. 

🏃‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/OAexCKpsRa

— DefinitelyNotEric (@TotallyNotEric) October 8, 2021

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]

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 👍🏈