2022 Playoff Preview
After a year-long hiatus, I just couldn’t help myself. The Niners are back in the playoffs so this blog must be reactivated. For numerous reasons, I won’t be able to do weekly previews for each matchup, but I wanted to take a quick look at how the team has changed over the past year, how those changes could help us finally get over the hump, and what obstacles could blue ball us once again in our pursuit of the Lombardi Trophy.
But first…
More like Game…ass: The NFL has done countless things worse than screw over my blog, but one of the reasons this site has been dormant for the past year—other than my overall busy life and hectic schedule—is because the league basically bricked NFL Gamepass, which was the paid subscription All-22 service that I used to illustrate my play breakdowns.
You used to be able to look at an entire play-by-play sheet of each game and click on a specific play to watch its footage. Now, they’ve removed all means of sorting or selecting footage and crammed every play from each game into a single, unsearchable, 30-to-40 minute video clip. Since I don’t get paid to do this—and since the new “scroll and guess” method leads to some fat buffering times—that was a dealbreaker. So sadly, there won’t be any in-depth breakdowns of plays in this write-up.
This ends my rant about things no one cares about. Now, on to the rants about things that people maybe care about.
OVERALL
According to Football Outsiders’ DVOA, we’re the #2 ranked team in the country. Based on their weighted DVOA metric—which aims to adjust for how well teams are currently playing—we’re #1 overall. Like every ranking system, there’s some statistical noise in DVOA, but it’s generally a strong barometer for team performance, and it should come as no surprise that we—in the midst of a ten-game winning streak—are at or near the top of its rankings.
But there are a few caveats worth noting. While DVOA accounts for the quality of competition in its calculations, according to pure wins and losses, we had one of the easiest strengths of schedule in the NFL. That’s due to the fact that the NFC West had a rare down year, our intraconference crossover was with the lowly NFC South, and we finished third in the division last year—meaning we played the third-ranked teams in the NFC East and North this season. Realistically, you could make the argument that we’ve only really played one truly elite team (the Chiefs), and that happened to coincide with our last loss of the season. But if we’re noting that then it’s only fair to also comment on how our plus-173 point differential was best in the league and so was our 5-1 record against playoff opponents. So while the competition is about to take a step up, there’s no reason to think we shouldn’t be up for the challenge.
OFFENSE
Offensive DVOA: 6th
Weighted DVOA: 2nd
Passing: 3rd
Rushing: 13th
In what is quickly becoming a Niners tradition, our offense started slowly before picking up steam mid-season and finishing the year with an elite unit. While our 26.5 points per game gave us the nation’s sixth-best scoring offense, when looking at Purdy’s five starts (plus the Miami game where he entered in the first offensive series), that number jumps to 33.5 ppg—which would have been best in the league by 4ppg.
All this to say, we’ve hit our stride at the right time.
levitation = intangibles
Purdy Good. We obviously have to lead this section with our boy Brock—first of his name, (originally) fourth on the depth chart, whose Mr. Irrelevant draft status is required by law to be mentioned multiple times in every broadcast and who looks like he’s twelve years old. He leads us into battle against Seattle this week, and for us to get to where we want to be, he’ll need to fight back a lot of historical ineptitude from his draft cohorts.
To give you a sense of how rare it is for a quarterback drafted this late to have any type of NFL success—much less as a rookie who was thrust into play with functionally zero practice reps—here are a couple of fun facts. Since the turn of the century, there has only been a single quarterback drafted in the 5th round or later to start a playoff game (TJ Yates in 2011). During that same time frame, non-Purdy quarterbacks drafted in the seventh round have gone a combined 1-14 in their rookie years (ironically, Ken Dorsey has that single win while playing for the Niners). If you Google “best seventh-round quarterbacks,” your search returns are filled with non-sarcastic namedrops like Trevor Siemian, Matt Flynn, and Tim Rattay. Purdy’s run as our starter is already unheard of. If he has any success whatsoever in these playoffs (and/or beyond), ESPN will shit themselves before drawing straws to determine which of their unintelligible talking heads declares him the next Tom Brady and/or the second (third?) coming of Jesus Christ.
So why has Purdy had so much success so early in his career? Well, the scheme, the surrounding talent, and a supporting locker room that’s used to powering through massive injuries to key positions are a fat piece of that puzzle. But it would be absurd to believe that the only factors contributing to Purdy’s success have been external ones.
Mentally, Purdy plays like a veteran. He’s smart, reads the field quickly and accurately, and—whether it’s scrambling and sliding with the ball extended to ice a game late in the fourth, throwing from a lower arm slot to work around a defensive end trying to disrupt a quick screen, or spinning outside of a DB blitz then squaring up to make a safe throw out of bounds—Purdy does a lot of little things well in a way that you just don’t see from young signal callers. His game and field awareness are advanced, and—based on stories of him going over every play call of team drills in his mind after practice while piloting the scout team—his preparation is equally as precocious. Much of that is likely attributed to him being a dude who doesn’t have ideal size or physical tools and who started 46 games at Iowa State—a historic Big 12 doormat which he helped lead to its most successful string of seasons in school history. When you’re that guy playing for that team, you kind of have to be better on the preparation side otherwise you’re never going to have success.
While his typical “measurables” don’t pop off the page (height, weight, arm strength, etc.), Purdy’s quick release, ability to throw from multiple arm slots, and sneaky athleticism and pocket presence have greatly aided in his ascent. While no one would mistake him for Trey Lance as a runner, Purdy has good short-area quickness and elusiveness and a great sense of feeling and avoiding initial pressure. We’ve talked a lot about how improvisational ability greatly increases the snap-to-snap floor of Shanahan’s notoriously complicated offense. While Lance could pick up yardage on the ground and Jimmy was connecting on more off-book plays this year than in seasons past, Purdy has been consistently strong at buying time and keeping plays alive since taking over the lead job. By turning negative plays into positives or net zeros and net zeros into small or large gains, Purdy has shown—albeit in a small sample size—the ability to keep us on schedule, avoid big losses and mistakes, and—like a running back who always gets more yards than are blocked—gain hidden yardage that not only accumulates over the course of a game but makes every ensuing down and distance more manageable. For a team like the Niners—with an elite defense and a style that emphasizes complementary football through a physical run game—those hidden yards matter more to us than most.
It’s also worth mentioning Purdy’s deep ball, which is actually not that great (his lack of arm strength was why Purdy fell so far in the draft), but differs from Jimmy G’s deep ball in that he actually throws it.
Jimmy Garoppolo is a notoriously bad deep ball thrower, particularly outside the hashes, but throwing the deep ball successfully (or not) is about more than just arm strength. If you want to throw the ball well vertically—especially if you don’t have a rocket launcher strapped to your shoulder—you need to throw early, throw with anticipation, and throw confidently. Jimmy’s accuracy wavered down the field but it was never as much about a lack of arm talent as it was about a lack of confidence to just pull the trigger and let it rip.
People have been critical of Shanahan not throwing the ball enough deep, but not all deep balls have to be completed on schemed-up shot plays and Bruce Arians-esque aggressive downfield passing. Nearly every passing concept has built-in deep balls—or pre-snap alerts—if for no other reasons than to easily hunt alignment and personnel matchups, to force DBs to drop deep, and to create spacing and passing windows between routes. Yet we rarely—if ever—saw Jimmy G recognize these alerts and let it rip down the sideline. Purdy, on the other hand, showed the ability to see and take these opportunities in just his first career start.
On this play, the Niners have flexed CMC out wide and are running Jennings on a Y-cross concept to the left of the formation with a slot pivot from Aiyuk underneath it. It’s a pretty standard concept in the Niners playbook, and—knowing how much we love leveling routes across the middle of the field—the cornerback on CMC false steps on the snap in hopes of jumping a short route inside. This is an outrageously aggressive move that can only be done if a corner (a) doesn’t fear the man out wide (which we’ll get to later) and (b) doesn’t fear that the offense will throw the deep ball. Purdy sees this aggressive approach from the corner—which is basically the equivalent to lining up in press and getting beat off the LOS—and lets it rip to CMC for a back-breaking TD near the end of the first half.
To be clear, I wouldn’t consider Purdy’s deep ball a strength. He has to put more effort on balls over 20 yards than most QBs, he was a bit off-target on back-to-back fades against the Raiders, he’s had a few instances of missing deeper receivers to take safer passes underneath, and—also against the Raiders—he tossed a pick to Kittle that someone like Lance would have threaded upfield for a touchdown. But the willingness to see and throw the deep ball opens things up for our offense because it makes defenses FINALLY respect us just enough vertically that they can’t just crowd the box to play the run and short game.
Even when Jimmy is playing well, he always seemed to leave yards on the field because he would skew so heavily towards underneath routes and rarely take the deep shots that were baked into concepts. That led to a lot of short-yardage passes in lieu of early skinny posts or nine routes or the digs that often open up behind those contested passes. Then, in turn, those underneath windows would shrink tighter and tighter as teams began cheating away from anything down the field. As we move into the playoffs, teams are going to continue to do what they always do—load up the box against the run and crowd the middle against our intermediate passing game—but at least Purdy has shown he’s got the anticipation and the confidence to toss the occasional long ball. And you only need a few of those passes to be successful to open everything else in our playbook.
More Like Christian Mc-Catch-rey HAHAHAHA, okay I’ll show myself out. Speaking of raising our offensive floor, Christian McCaffrey probably does that as well as any non-quarterback in football. We know that our emphasis on running the ball, completing intermediate passes, and play action means that we need to stay on track more so than most offenses. And CMC has been—in John Lynch’s terms—a force multiplier at turning negatives into positives and short gains into medium ones.
Shanahan has long been looking for a running back with high-end potential in the passing game, shelling out loads of money (McKinnon) and draft capital (Sermon) in the process. He’s finally found that man in McCaffrey, and the result is a dude who just prints first downs.
Like the NBA’s push to entire squads of long, athletic wings, Shanahan knows that his various motions, formations, and schemes become exponentially more potent when he can mix and match personnel sets and hunt matchups across the board. The addition of Juice in 2017 let us use heavy doses of 21 personnel to create mismatches in the passing game on linebackers. The emergence of Kittle a year later furthered that trend. Deebo’s full ascent into the “wideback” destroyer of defenders in space gave us a weapon who could create issues for everyone from corners to linebackers in both the pass and the run game. And CMC’s mid-season addition gives us the same thing as Deebo, but in reverse.
Last year, the Rams won a Super Bowl by (1) loading their roster for a short-term push, (2) peaking at the right time, (3) landing on the right side of an outrageously lucky string of high-leverage, high-variance plays (recovering Matt Stafford’s late-game fumble against the Bucs, Tartt’s dropped pick, the Bengals’ called-back TD in the Super Bowl), and (4) spamming the ever-living shit out of the choice route with Cooper Kupp.
While CMC isn’t on Kupp’s level as a receiver, he’s functionally the running back equivalent in the passing game. McCaffrey’s ability to regularly beat every linebacker in coverage on option and angle routes out of the backfield gives us a guy who is always open underneath—and often in the check-down role when shit gets hairy. His gravitational pull creates more horizontal space for Deebo and Aiyuk’s slants and more vertical space for Kittle and the receivers’ digs and crossers. And his ability to routinely make the first man miss en route to the first down marker can turn safe check downs into wins for the offense rather than consolation prizes. All that and he can still threaten as a receiver out wide against cornerbacks, whether that’s by gobbling up slants, hauling in back shoulder fades like mentioned above, or—like he did against Arizona—running hitch-and-go deep outs on the boundary.
“B” is for “Better Than We Could Have Hoped For”. Banks, Burford, Brendel, and Brunskill haven’t been perfect this year, but props to the four of them for solidifying an interior OL that was a big question mark going into this year. Equal credit to the coaching staff and scouting department for knowing that they had the pieces in place to replace three departed starters on the interior. Interior pressure at the wrong times has been our Achilles heel during recent post-season runs, and while this unit isn’t impervious to the occasional rusher, they at least give us a fighting chance to flip the script on that trend.
While we’re on the subject of players whose play has allowed us to combat past weaknesses (and whose names include the letter “B” so that I can cram him into this category), Brandon Aiyuk’s emergence as the team’s top route runner gives us a true man-beater outside who could prove vital in the playoffs. Often times when our offense bogs down it’s because we simply can’t win enough outside against press man coverage, and that allows defenses to outnumber us in the box. Aiyuk has blossomed into an excellent route runner, and—in an offense that put a higher priority on downfield passes outside the hashes—it wouldn’t have taken him until Week 18 to eclipse the 1,000-yard mark.
Touchdowns Not Turtles. The confidence of Purdy and the “floor-and-ceiling riser” that is CMC have also led to a very important development on the coaching front: Shanahan is calling games more aggressively. Shanahan has long been lambasted for calling a single passing play in the Falcons’ Super Bowl loss when the run game was getting absolutely stuffed—leading to the narrative that he is “too aggressive” in these close games. This was hammered down in the Chiefs Super Bowl, when he called a few passes in the fourth quarter that fell incomplete (even if both were wide ass open). But in reality, I think our sporadic issues in closing games have been more of a product of (a) interior pass blocking, (b) the high variance nature that came with Jimmy G piloting a meticulously schemed offense, and (c) Shanahan becoming too conservative late in some games.
It makes a lot of sense. He openly regrets that pass call in the Falcons’ Super Bowl—even if it’s lost in the narrative that he got the Falcons into would-be-game-winning field goal range multiple times in that game but each time those plays were called back on holding—and he also was the coach behind the absolute roller coaster that has been Jimmy G’s tenure as our starting quarterback. If that was your background, and you saw Jimmy collapse in the Chiefs Super Bowl and then perform as he did after getting dinged up in that wildcard win against the Cowboys, would you be apt to sling that shit all up and down the field? Probs not.
But the reasoning behind that approach—as understandable as it was—was a genuine threat to capping our ceiling as a team for years to come. Ultimately, it didn’t matter if Jimmy was more or less at fault (or more injured) than he seemed in these high-leverage situations. The fact of the matter was that as long as Shanahan couldn’t trust the passing game (and by proxy, the quarterback) to complete open passes to close out games, we wouldn’t be able to finish those games at a high clip.
For the longest time, commentators and coaches have chirped that the only way to close out games is to run the ball effectively. And yes, if you’re lacking in the run game, it’s going to be harder for you to ice games. But if running the ball every down was the best way to close out games, how come the Ravens—who employ Lamar Jackson and an entire offense built on pounding the ball—and the Raiders—who have the league’s leading rusher in Josh Jacobs—have combined to blow eight(!) double-digit second-half leads this season? Running the ball into loaded fronts that have a numbers advantage and know that you’re running decreases the effectiveness of your running game. Closing out games is less about killing clock and more about accumulating first downs. And in today’s NFL, the best way to do that is to keep your late-game passing attack threatening enough that you can still be effective on the ground.
Despite starting a rookie quarterback, Shanahan is calling games with the confidence needed to close them out. Weird Juice-to-CMC option pitches notwithstanding, Shanahan may be in the best overall play-calling groove of his career, and his willingness to mix things up and lean on the pass when required late in the Miami and Las Vegas games has led—alongside good reads and good luck from Purdy—to some impressive closeouts from our offense. That cohesion and confidence between a coach and his offense is a potentially massive development for this post-season and moving forward.
DEFENSE
Defensive DVOA: 1st
Weighted DVOA: 2nd
Pass: 5th
Run: 2nd
The Niners D leads the league in nearly every meaningful statistical category, both advanced and otherwise, as we also lead the league in points and yardage allowed. Unlike our offense, our defense fired out of the gates to start the season and—save for a few hiccups against AFC West opponents—has largely maintained its high rate of play. But we’ve been a bit leakier in the past month and teams are starting to gameplan more specifically against our weaknesses. Hopefully, that means that—entering the post-season—this unit will be energized and re-focused after a string of games against backup quarterbacks on non-contending teams.
Secondary Adjustments. DeMeco Ryans’ first year as a DC was basically a ten-to-twelve-week workshop on how to hide an absolutely atrocious cornerback situation. But that experience, and what I can only imagine included a string of night terrors involving Josh Norman playing jump balls, led to the Niners pursuing and signing Charvarius Ward in the off-season, and Ward has turned out to be one of the best (and best-priced) free agent pickups in the NFL. With the exception of the Chiefs game where he came back from injury rusty, Charvarius has played like a lockdown No.1 all season while being paid under market (his $14M payout next year barely eclipses Robbie Anderson’s $12M). But he’s only one part of what has become the Niners’ best secondary of the Shanahan era.
Ward’s ability to eliminate a side of the field and/or blanket No.1 receivers has helped us weather the storm that comes from losing both Emmanuel Moseley and Jason Verrett to season-ending injuries. In their place, Deommodore Lenoir has emerged from our crop of first- and second-year corners and played admirably. He hasn’t been perfect—and his ability to play the ball in the air has been challenged as of late—but he’s largely been a feisty presence in the secondary who stays in good position.
With the departure of Jaquiski Tartt in the off-season, Jimmie Ward was expected to be the veteran voice at safety holding together a young secondary. But when Jimmie went down late in the pre-season to injury, the Niners signed 32-year-old journeyman Tashaun Gipson—who some of the younger DBs nicknamed “dad.” Together, Gipson and Talanoa Hufanga have formed a safety pairing that combined for nine interceptions this year and which allowed Jimmie Ward to slide into the nickel position, where he can be incredibly disruptive against both the pass and the run.
While Gipson has been a solid stabilizing presence on the back-end, Hufanga took a massive step forward in his second-year, exploding out of the gates with a ton of splash plays early in the season that helped catapult him to a 1st-team All-Pro selection. While his first-team spot was a bit surprising considering he’s had some issues missing tackles and has gotten picked on a bit for his aggressive/instinctual play-style as of late, Huf is a big-play presence on the back-end and we can only hope his trajectory mirrors that of Fred Warner’s—a fellow first-team All-Pro who emerged as a second-year player before becoming all-world in his third NFL season.
Despite these improvements, the secondary is still the only unit with any real weaknesses, even if they’ve been largely hidden throughout the year. Huf is so instinctual that he can get caught guessing at times, and we’ve had a few busted coverages that often involve a miscommunication somewhere on the backend springing a receiver free. That makes me think that teams are scheming up ways to bait our safeties out of position and test them—and Lenoir—on jump balls down the field.
bullying we can get behind
Adam Peters, plz keep turning down those GM interviews. But Hufanga and Lenoir aren’t the only former fifth-round picks to take a step forward this year. While considerably more established than his DB counterparts entering this season, Dre Greenlaw made the leap from “consistent high-level starter who loves goalline plays” to “high-end heat-seeking missile who still loves goalline plays.”
Props to the Niners’ brass for giving Greenlaw a two-year extension entering the season because his growth—particularly in coverage—has been just as much a factor as Warner’s stellar play in the Niners’ ability to eliminate underneath zones in the passing game and hunt running backs sideline-to-sideline. Greenlaw comes in too hot sometimes (and other times he gets booted out of games even when he doesn’t ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), but we’d much rather have that than the opposite, and having two linebackers who excel in coverage eliminates a great deal of what offenses can do to attack us.
As an aside, even if you exclude players like Juice, Samson Ebukam, and Charvarius Ward who we signed to big free-agent deals, the Niners currently start 10 players who were either drafted on the third day or went undrafted coming out of college. Gipson was an undrafted journeyman. Brendel, also undrafted, started three games across six years before this season. The rest were all selected and signed out of college by the Niners.
A bear’s gotta eat. The likely DPOTY gets his own category, as Nick Bosa’s performance this season has been truly spectacular. Despite missing a game-and-a-half due to injury, Bosa led the league in sacks with 18.5 and dwarfed his competition in knockdowns with 48, a figure that not only paced the league by 13 but—based on a general average of 45% of knockdowns becoming sacks—put him on pace for somewhere around the single-season sack record. Again, this is while missing a game-and-a-half due to injury.
Bosa has recorded a sack in all but three games this season, had a six-game mid-season stretch of at least one sack, and was PFF’s third-highest-rated edge rusher despite no other player on the team registering more than five sacks and Arik Armstead missing nearly half of this season’s games (thus tempering the inside stunt work that has terrorized teams for years).
That thing that every coach always talks about. The Niners’ 30 takeaways are tied for second-best in the league, and—in conjunction with their third-best giveaways mark—their +13 turnover differential is tops in the league. For a team that preaches complementary football as much as any in the NFL, this is a massive win, and the record follows. In games with an even turnover differential, the Niners are 3-0 this year. In games with a positive turnover differential (such as the last eight straight), the Niners are 10-0.
Special teams role reversal. Last year, our special teams were among the league’s worst, which led to a coaching change and us adding standouts Oren Burks, George Odum, and Ray-Ray McCloud. After a slow start to the season, Ray-Ray has really come along as of late in the return game and Odum was just named a second-team All-Pro specialist.
But now, the main thing holding back our unit from ascending past league-average status, is the one guy who has been rock solid for years. Our field goal and extra point unit is ranked 26th in the league, and Robbie Gould has missed key kicks in crucial moments of one-score games against the Chargers, Raiders, and Seahawks. Kicking is a fickle business in the NFL, and in last year’s post-season Robbie was a perfect 6-for-6—including a game-winner in sub-zero temperatures against the Packers. Hopefully, he can rekindle that consistency when the games get tighter in the playoffs.
graphics like this are why we don’t trust clutchpoints
THE MATCHUPS
Since all we know about the playoffs is our wildcard game against the Seahawks, here are a few quick write-ups on how we might match up against every team in the NFC (if we make the Super Bowl, I’m sure I’ll find the time to do a write-up). Due to time and NFL Gamepass restraints, these are based more on general knowledge than in-depth film study.
SEAHAWKS
Long the thorn in our side based on their propensity for staying in tight games and Russell Wilson running around long enough to pull them out of said tight games, the Seahawks are same same but different this year. Russ NBA’d his way out of town, the Broncos couldn’t get through a single season with him at the helm before axing their coach, and now the Walmart heirs are interviewing everyone they can think of who will establish a run-heavy offense in a desperate attempt to make Russ cook less. Meanwhile, the Seahawks have (unfortunately) re-emerged into a playoff team sooner than expected on the backs of a return to their intended team identity, a talented crop of rookies, and the resurgence of Geno Smith.
Neither of our first two matchups were particularly close—the second only being more of a game due to a terrible call on a would-have-been-game-ending pick six and a late Seahawks score—but there’s rain in the forecast (potentially very heavy rain) and that always hurts the team with the more explosive offense.
Offense: Seattle wants to operate a run-first offense that utilizes play-action to open up easy completions while limiting turnovers. While I’d expect lots of bootleg passes and attempts to set up misdirection to target our DBs deep down the field, it’s TBD how they plan to gain incremental yardage between their shot plays. Usually, that would be via the running game, but—despite the promise of their rookie tackles—the Seahawks should know that they don’t have the talent to run the ball consistently against our front seven. Nor can they be confident in their ability to drop back each play and let our pass rush tee off. Will the Seahawks open up their formations, shuffle DK Metcalf around (last matchup he was shadowed and shut down by Charvarius Ward), and rely on the quick game rather than run directly into a wall on first and second downs? And if so, how long can they keep that up given their preferred identity and Geno Smith’s uneven play to finish the season?
Defense: Seattle’s defense has been below average all year, particularly against the rush. But Pete Carroll is no idiot, and you have to think he’ll load the LOS and force Purdy into some passing situations early, otherwise, we’ll just bleed them dry on the ground. Getting into a rhythm in the passing game early is key so that we can stay balanced, and hitting the defense with some misdirection runs and counters will likely be in the game plan against a defense that will be trying to offset front seven talent with aggressiveness. They did a good job of shutting down our Deebo-less outside passing attack in the last matchup, but Deebo’s back now and Purdy no longer has an oblique strain. This Seapenises defense is one of the worst in the league at defending YAC yardage and we’ve led the league in that category for (I think?) every single one of Shanahan’s years at the helm. Gobbling up some chunk plays would be a nice way to keep them out of formations with too many down linemen, which should in turn open up numbers on the ground.
GIANTS
Brian Daboll’s first season has gone about as well as anyone could have hoped, as he’s piloted a team largely devoid of premier offensive talent to a winning record and a six-seed. They don’t have the horses to win pretty, so this is a team that has fully bought into winning ugly. While I’m bullish on Daboll and the direction of the franchise, I don’t think this team is particularly good. But they’re well-coached and they can definitely capitalize no your mistakes.
Offense: Daboll is very multiple in what he does on offense and his creativity has led to a top 10 offensive DVOA. If there’s anyone on this side of the bracket likely to put together a highly specialized gameplan against our defense and hard target the eyes of our safeties to spring big plays, it’s probably Daboll. Keys will be expecting the unexpected, settling in quicker than we did in games against the Raiders and Chiefs, accounting for Daniel Jones’ legs at all times, and forcing them to win at the catch point on any deep ball. While that got hairy against a Raiders team that has Davante Adams and Darren Waller, the Giants have speedy outside guys but not really anyone who can high-point like that Raiders duo, and this OL would be hard-pressed to hold up regularly against our pass rush on deep dropback passes. This is not an inherently explosive offense, so the key is not to gift them explosives through blown assignments.
Defense: Giants’ DC Wink Martindale plays more man and blitzes more than anyone in the league. When you have interchangeable players who can hang with whoever in coverage, that can be highly effective, and that blitz heaviness—alongside a talented defensive line—can create havoc when it gets through. But the Giants’ linebackers are major weak spots in coverage and—while safety Julian Love has had a solid year—they don’t have the secondary support necessary to hide those linebackers consistently. They want to throw them forward as pass rushers and let them do what they do best, but Shanahan is one of the best linebacker hunters in the game, and you gotta imagine that—after allowing lines of 7-88-2 and 13-109-2 against the Cowboys and Vikings—we’d be hard targeting those guys in the passing game.
COWBOYS
Unquestionably one of the most talented teams in the field and with high-end potential on both sides of the ball, the Cowboys—fair or not—are always looked at through the lens of their nearly endless string of butthole-tightening fuck-ups come post-season play. This is a team that stomped the Vikings 40-3 on the road then nearly lost to the Texans at home. They can hang with anyone and they can lose to anyone and regardless of which of those outcomes occur, Jerry Jones is gonna have something to say about it.
Offense: OC Kellen Moore isn’t as hot an HC candidate as he was last year, but he should be lauded for his work with Cooper Rush while the Cowboys stabilized through Dak’s early season injury. The problem is that this offense, which momentarily took off when Dak came back healthy, has been massively inconsistent to finish the year (including a six-point stinker against the Commanders to close out the season). When they’re on, they’re explosive and multiple. CeeDee Lamb is a genuine No.1 receiver and three-level threat and—given their second-best wideout is Michael Gallup—I wouldn’t be shocked if we shadow Lamb with Ward. Tony Pollard is the explosive head of their backfield and a homerun threat on the ground or as a receiver while Zeke remains as their sledgehammer on the inside. Tight end Dalton Schultz is often their metronome. If he’s getting his, the offense is likely operating well because he lives for intermediate routes. Taking away easy leveling concepts with Lamb and Schultz across the middle with our linebackers and generating pressure on an OL that has had to shuffle a bit due to injuries will be key. Prescott has been interception-happy to wind down the year. This would be a good time to be opportunistic.
Defense: The Dallas defense is equally as formidable as their offense (and has probably been the more consistent of the two this year). Their headliner is edge defender/linebacker Micah Parsons, who’s likely Bosa’s greatest competition for the DPOTY award. He’s a supreme athlete and a rocket shot off the line, and—when paired with fellow elite edge DeMarcus Lawrence—there’s a high likelihood we don’t run a ton of deep dropback passes (which we don’t run a ton of anyway). As everyone knows by now, Trevon Diggs is a big play guy who you can target if done smartly, but opposite him, Anthony Brown has gotten picked on throughout this season. The emergence of Aiyuk should help as one of him or Deebo will likely be matched up on Brown at any given point. Despite the strength of their edges, Dallas relies on a rotation of replacement-level players on the interior. Winning there will be important to establish our run game and keep their edge rushers at bay.
BUCCANEERS
Back by no one’s demand, Tom Brady is once again in the playoffs. While the Bucs’ place in these playoffs is mostly due to the large-scale ineptitude of the NFC South, this is a team that is finally finding its stride at the right time and you can never discount that.
Offense: The Bucs finally had an explosive passing performance in their last competitive game, torching the Panthers for 430 yards through the air and three tugs. Granted, this was a Panthers team that was so ravaged at cornerback that they signed Josh Norman off the street… but nonetheless, it was a good time for Brady and his two big wideouts to get on the same page. This Bucs offense isn’t fast anywhere and we have a sizeable athleticism advantage, but they are as good as any at winning jump balls if they have the chance. The last thing we want is Lenoir and our safeties having to box out Mike Evans and Chris Godwin forty yards down the field, so we’ll likely lean on our DL to force them out of those jump ball looks and into their quick game—where Brady has always excelled but where the Bucs lack speedy options who can get open early. If the Buccaneers’ historically inept rushing attack has improved it’s only slightly, but OC Byron Leftwich has found success as of late in leaning more into play action passes regardless. Stuffing the run game via minimal effort so that we can hedge play action passes would go a long way toward us repeating a similar performance. If we eliminate the deep shots, they’ll have to paper cut us down the field, and it will be hard for them to do that against our team speed.
Defense: We rushed for upwards of 200 yards on nearly 6ypc in our last matchup so it’s safe to say the Bucs will be keying the run in this one. This time they’ll also have a healthy Vita Vea, who is a huge presence (both physically and figuratively) on the interior and a big part of their run defense, but I’m not particularly scared of the rest of their d-line. Their secondary is talented, and they have two of the better cover guys in those hook-to-curl zones with linebacker Lavonte David and nickel corner Antoine Winfield Jr. If anything, I would expect our gameplan to look like a classic Jimmy G one. The Bucs play Cover 3 as much as anyone, which means putting their alley defenders in run/pass binds and pounding the edges makes some sense. As does threatening the alley defenders via seam routes, digs behind them, and the layering concepts across the middle that we love so much. Bowles is a savvy DC. Purdy will have to be smart in diagnosing coverages and noticing any safety rotations that attempt to jump routes over the middle.
VIKINGS
Much-maligned by the analytics community (and basically every other community outside of Minnesota), the Vikings are notorious for winning only close games and having a -3 point differential (a worse figure than the 8-9 Packers or 9-8 Dolphins) despite their 13-4 record. Football Outsiders has them as the 27th-ranked team in terms of DVOA, which has got to be the greatest disparity between on-field record and projected (they estimate the Vikings should have 6.3 wins). But, you know what, that’s why you actually play the games.
Offense: The Vikings offense rides the wave of variance. They’ve started multiple games with Kirk Cousins 0-for-something and digging them a hole, but—more often than not—they climb out of that hole (see: largest comeback in NFL history vs Colts). This is a Shanahan scheme that leans more McVay, and when they’re humming it’s often because they’re force-feeding the ball to Justin Jefferson (just as Kevin O’Connell learned to do to Cooper Kupp with the Rams). Hitting him off the line and disrupting his timing with Cousins is probably the biggest key, as Cousins is a big-time rhythm guy. When he’s on, he’s on, and when he’s off the nadir is very, very real. The Vikings have a strong OL—especially if center Garrett Bradbury comes back healthy—but Cousins is tied for the third-most sacked QB in the league. If you muck up his initial reads, he can hold the ball too long and good things (for the opponent) typically result.
Defense: Minnesota’s defense is much more consistent than its offense, but that’s not always a good thing. Since a week into November, this Vikings defense has allowed 29.6 points per game, with games against Mike White and the Jets and the first-pick-hunting Bears the only contests where they’ve allowed fewer than 24 points. They have a lot of pieces—even if some of them are getting long in the tooth—but to this point, the product simply hasn’t matched its parts. Despite having two high-tier edge rushers in Danielle Hunter and ZaDarius Smith, the Vikings have one of the worst pass defenses in the league. There will be guys open through the air. Get them the ball, let them run after catch, and keep their defense from keying the run game.
EAGLES
Seemingly unstoppable for much of the year, the Eagles are still very much a contender (and the front-runner) to represent the NFC in the Super Bowl, but how likely that occurs hinges largely on the health of second-team All-Pro quarterback Jalen Hurts and first-team All-Pro right tackle Lane Johnson. They have an extra week to get healthy courtesy of the first-round bye, so maybe when we see them next they’ll look more like the team that started the season 13-1 versus the banged-up squad that finished it 1-2.
Offense: The Eagles have done a tremendous job of building their offense around Jalen Hurts’ strengths in a way that is flexible enough to target multiple different defenses. They want to run the ball, both with Miles Sanders (except for when you start him in the fantasy playoffs) and Hurts, and they give a lot of option looks and designed runs to their QB. How Hurts’ shoulder feels will be paramount here because when you take away his legs he uses a lot of his effectiveness. They are a heavy RPO team when paired with their running game, believing that their strong OL and excellent running QB means QB runs are too mathematically difficult to defend while in heavy man coverage, but if you do go to man coverage, they love to toss contested fades to AJ Brown and DeVonta Smith. Obviously, we’d like to avoid having to rely on Lenoir beating either of those guys on jump balls. Our wide-9 system can make us slightly more susceptible to running quarterbacks at times, so we’ll need to rush smart and with proper lane integrity. Bosa on their backup right tackle could be huge. Bluff blitzes, rotating safeties, and disguising coverages pre-snap will be important to get them out of their RPO game. It’s not an easy task, but if you can force them out of their comfort zone and into a more traditional dropback passing attack, they're not nearly as effective.
Defense: The Eagles are—as always—loaded along the defensive line, with a rotation that goes eight deep and genuine players at each position. They lead the NFL in sacks with a whopping 70 (second place has 55). They also spent the past two off-seasons loading up at cornerback, with Darius Slay and James Bradberry making up one of the better cornerback pairs in the NFL and Chauncey Gardner-Johnson continuing to badger people from the safety/nickel slot. This combination gives them Football Outsiders’ #1-rated defense against the pass. But their greatest weaknesses on defense actually align rather well with what we’re trying to do offensively. The Eagles are one of the league’s worst defenses at missing tackles, and we love to get our players the ball quickly in space where they can catch and run. While linebacker TJ Edwards is having a career year, the Eagles follow the analytics trend of minimizing team investment in the linebacker position, and thus, those non-Edwards linebackers can and should be targeted in the passing game. Employing misdirection and play action to open up seams and make those linebackers hesitate on their assignments will also help us run the ball on their front seven. Despite the strength of their DL and the return of first-round NT Jordan Davis, the Eagles are 26th in generating tackles at or behind the line of scrimmage and dead-last in stopping short-yardage runs. This isn’t a team that gives up many long runs, but it is a team that—in the few times its faltered—can be susceptible to a run-heavy plan. So while the personnel that we’re up against would present quite the challenge, it’s not the worst stylistic matchup from our POV.
While these are far from in-depth or detailed looks at these matchups, hopefully, they’ll do for now. And hopefully, we’ll string off a few wins and there will be another one coming in the lead-up to a Super Bowl appearance.
Go Niners! 👍🏈