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 👍🏈