49ers 23, Cardinals 24
Another week, another inexcusable loss to an underwhelming divisional foe. Now, as we enter a two-month stretch against eight straight teams currently with winning records, our margin for error has largely evaporated. And we have only ourselves to blame.
Fortunately (unfortunately?) we’ve been here before. In 2022, when we started 3-4 before running off 10 straight to close the season. In 2021, when we were 2-4 before an 8-2 finish secured us a wildcard spot. In both those seasons, we made the NFC Championship Game. We know how this goes. And we know that the road will be bumpy.
Sneaking into the playoffs from a bloated middle class may be more realistic in a season like this, when—through five games—only five NFL teams have fewer than 2 losses, but our early-season stumbles sure have made Thursday’s game in Seattle feel like a must-win situation. A victory puts us in a tie atop the NFC West. A loss and we’re suddenly the guy holding a rubber chicken in a knife fight.
Because after the Seahawks we have the Chiefs—who will be coming off a bye—then the Cowboys—who will be coming off a bye. Then before you know it we’ll be hosting the Seahawks—who will be coming off a bye—before traveling to Buffalo for a night game in December to play the Bills, who will be–you guessed it–coming off a bye. If we’re going to right the ship, we’ll have to do it at some point during this stretch of the schedule while juggling a historically bad rest differential of -21 days.
OFFENSE
There are so many moments in each game—and statistics, advanced or otherwise—that support the idea that we’re an excellent offense. We almost always move the chains, leading the league by a mile in drives where we pick up at least one first down. We hold the ball on our possessions for longer than any other team, meaning we often string together multiple first downs and rarely stop the clock with incompletions. And we get into the red zone as often as any team in football. Unfortunately, that’s where the good times have come to a grinding halt.
Short Yardage Slump. This week we were a pathetic 1 of 6 in converting red zone looks into touchdowns, with two of those trips resulting in zero points. That dropped our red zone touchdown rate to 40.9% on the season, which beats out only the lowly Patriots and the Tua-less Dolphins for the third-worst mark in the league.
Let’s look at how all six of those red zone possessions ended.
1Q - Field goal from the 10-yard line.
1Q - Touchdown pass from the 4-yard line.
2Q - Field goal from the 2-yard line.
2Q - Field goal from the 7-yard line as time expired in the half.
3Q - Turnover on downs from the 27(!!!)-yard line when we didn’t have a kicker.
4Q - Jordan Mason’s fumble on the 12-yard line.
We’ll talk about the turnover on downs later, but the two attempts in italics don’t need much explaining. One was a touchdown and one was a back-breaking mistake. However, the three attempts in bold are worth mentioning from a macro-decision-making level.
Talking to Management. 3rd-and-longs are difficult. Passing in the red zone is difficult. Compound the two and a fourth-and-goal from the 10-yard line should be a field goal attempt almost every time. But the fourth-and-goal form the 2-yard line in the second quarter? That’s another story.
Inside the two-yard line–when you have the legitimate threat of a run or a pass–I think you should basically be going for it every time. There are a few specific instances when you’d kick the ball (like if you were down by two with time running out), but this isn’t one of them.
As for the field goal from the 7-yard line? The logic makes sense to me for the same reasons it made sense from the 10-yard line. But I did have issues with the process we took to get to that situation.
While scoring as time expires is always the ideal situation, we’re often so hyper-focused on the opponent not getting the ball before the half that we let far too much time run off the clock. This limits the calls we can make and the way we can execute them. For instance, we had a 1st-and-goal from the ARI 7 with 16 seconds left on the clock. Yes, we were able to barely squeeze out three pass attempts at the endzone before kicking, but–because we’d let a minute twenty run off the clock on the first two plays of that drive–those passes were rushed. The concepts we could run were limited. There wasn’t enough time for a sprint out pass, a bootleg, or a patented Purdy scramble. The ball had to get out of his hands quickly. And the plays HAD to be passes.
We easily could have been more uptempo earlier in that drive and given ourselves some run-pass optionality and play-calling flexibility down by the goalline. Now, would speeding up earlier run the risk that we might give the ball back to the Cardinals with time for a few plays left on the clock? Yes. But I’d rather give them 25 seconds after a touchdown than settle for a field goal. The way we approach the ends of halves often feels too much like we’re playing for a kick rather than a touchdown. Possessions and scoring opportunities are critical, and in a game where we only had four possessions in the second half, these kinds of decisions—which fail to maximize our scoring output—are magnified.
We don’t need another hero. Let’s talk about that last red zone attempt: the turnover on downs from the ARI 27. To me, this was the worst game of the year for Purdy. He had his moments–especially in the second quarter–where he diced up the Cardinals, but there were signs last week that he was holding the ball too long for the homerun and neglecting checkdowns. And that trend continued in a bad way in this game.
Shanahan said after the game that the Niners were comfortable kicking field goals with Wishnowsky from about the 15-yard line and in. With that in mind, Purdy CANNOT take a scramble-around sack for -9 yards on second-and-14 from the ARI 18. It’s one thing if a free blitzer came in and Purdy had no shot, but he could have gotten rid of that ball earlier. He could have dumped it off to an underneath receiver, or—if no one had opened up—just thrown it away. It was second down and we were mere yards from a comfortable field goal attempt.
Purdy has to have better situational awareness there and know that–in this odd and unlikely scenario–he may be in the red zone but he’s also on the cusp of giving up points. Instead, he takes the sack, we throw an incomplete on third down, and we functionally use the fourth down as a punt to pin the Cardinals back deeper into their territory. That’s a likely three points off the board.
Plays like this make me a bit more willing than usual to blame Purdy for his interception on the final drive. Here we’re lined up in a standard 2x2 set with Kittle in-line and we’re trying to send our outside receivers on deep comebacks, our slot on a two-high splitting skinny post, and Kittle on a delayed shallow in case the secondary plays way off.
The Cardinals line up in what looks like some kind of Cover 3 or man variation but are actually sending six and backing way off in a quarter-quarter-half shell.
This means the Saints have an unblockable overload blitz to the side of the running back but that Kittle will open early and with plenty of space to run. And that’s exactly what happens.
The middle linebacker—the only defender who could make a play on Kittle—has totally lost him and is instead eyeing Purdy (almost like a spy defender). The two DBs to the left of the formation are bailing deep to cover the vertical routes. Kittle is WIDE open with a ton of room to run if Purdy hits him here.
But he doesn’t. In a hurry to get the play snapped, Purdy missed the overload blitz and he holds too long on the skinny post in hopes that it will break open. By the time he starts the throw to Kittle, it’s too late. The result is a game-losing interception off a QB hit. Purdy had been big-game hunting all day long, and he did it one too many times here, costing us the game in the process.
We love how Purdy can improvise, buy time, and make plays off-schedule. But there needs to be a balance. We need to hit the plays ON-SCHEDULE first. Because hero ball is NOT (nor has ever been) a sustainable offense.
Identity Crisis. It’s great that we can throw the ball deep this season and that we can deploy more dropback looks in varied situations. That allows Purdy more time to see coverages develop without having to turn his back for play-action looks, gives us more firepower on long downs-and-distances, and in general allows us to attack defenses with another look. But it’s hard not to feel like we may have overcorrected and that our offensive identity has become foggy as a result.
Our dropback game has always been the least advanced and unique aspect of our offense, and our skew toward true pass sets seems to have taken away from the explosive play-action passes, intense misdirection, and YAC generators that we’ve excelled at for so many years.
Shanahan is calling the offense more like when he had Matt Ryan at the helm than at any other point in his tenure with the 49ers. That’s a testament to his ever-growing trust in Purdy. But there’s got to be a middle ground where we can still showcase the power run game and play action haymakers that we’ve thrived on for years.
The good thing is it’s still early. By figuring out how much Purdy can handle now, he gets important reps for the stretch run and we gain the confidence in him to call more pure dropback passes when the games get tight and the defenses get more savvy. But for now, let’s lower the level of difficulty (and variance) a bit, and get back to what we do best.
One Stat to Rule Them All. Since the beginning of 2022, we are an NFL-best 29-3 when we don’t turn the ball over two or more times (and one of those three losses was week 18 last year when we rested our starters). But when we turn the ball over 2 or more times, we are 2-11, which is tied for 24th in the league. Turnovers are always important in football, but the formula is especially clear for us. We are practically unbeatable when we take care of the ball (the last game we lost without a turnover was the season opener of 2020). But when we give the ball up in bunches, we struggle more than most to keep up.
DEFENSE
Yards per play is far from a be-all, end-all stat, but it’s worth noting that through 17 regular season games last year, we gave up upwards of 6.0 ypp three times. Through five games this season, two teams have already eclipsed that mark. And one of them was THIS team.
To be fair, things were promising in bunches. We only allowed 10 points and were stout against the (non-QB) running game in the first half. But that changed in a hurry. We held the Cardinals to zero first downs three times. But also allowed them to score on three straight long drives to end the game. The Cardinals were only 4-of-11 on third- and fourth-down attempts. But two of those successful conversions kept their last two scoring drives alive.
Running Man. They referenced this stat like fifty times throughout the game but James Connor going 6 for 9 yards (1.5 ypc) in the first half and 13 for 77 yards (5.9 ypc) is telling. So were the 14 missed tackles the Niners racked up. And the fact that the Niners only had four offensive drives in the entire second half. We couldn’t stop the run or get off the field to save our lives.
We kinda knew that the Cardinals–who were first in the league in conversion % on third-and-short and last in the league on third-and-long–would live and die by their ability to run on early downs. So when the Cardinals got their run game going, everything snowballed from there.
Injuries didn’t help here. Javon Hargrave is out the year and Yetur Gross-Matos–who was expected to play more inside reps to help shoulder the load–had knee surgery on Friday and is out at least 1-2 months. Talanoa Hufanga had to leave the game after 11 snaps with a wrist injury and will almost certainly miss the Thursday night game. And Fred Warner–despite playing the whole game at mike linebacker and racking up a team-leading 12 tackles–was clearly hampered by his ankle sprain. But the fact remains that the guys who did play had to tackle and fit the run better. And they didn’t.
The Sequel No One Wanted. Then there were Kyler Murray’s rushing yards. Murray is the fastest QB in football and is tough to bring down in the open field when he takes off scrambling, but 70 of his 83 yards were on designed runs.
So far in every one of our losses, our defense has gotten beat multiple times by a recurring concept. The Vikings forced bad switches with bunch sets and exploited the “safety on JJ” coverage for—among other things—a 97-yard touchdown. The Rams ran duo over and over and motioned Tutu Atwell into bunches on crossing routes against our vacated interior when we went man. The Cardinals also beat us with switches (I don’t know what the problem is with our communication on the edges), but the recurring backbreaker was the read option.
On the first drive of the game, the Cardinals have shifted their third tight end (#84) to the left of the formation and are planning to run a pistol duo read to the right. The tight end is going to loop around and kick out our corner, with Bosa (in the red triangle) as the read man. If he crashes inside, Kyler will pull. If he sits, Kyler will give the ball to Conner.
We’re slanting weak-side so—versus a read play—this is basically squeeze scrape, meaning Bosa and DeVondre Campbell will switch gap responsibilities against the run (run fits are shown with dotted lines). Bosa will slant inside, causing Kyler to pull the ball, and DeVondre Campbell will be tasked with working outside to play the QB, or—in this case—reset the edge and funnel Kyler inside to help.
On the snap, an excellent ball fake (with Conner turning his backside shoulder away from the defenders to hide the ball he doesn’t have) and bad reads from Warner and Huf take all of our support defenders inside. While DeVondre is too slow to trigger downhill, gets hooked, and gives up his outside shoulder—thus giving Kyler a free path to the edge.
Realistically, neither Huf nor Warner was likely going to make this play because they’d bit too far inside, but—if Kyler was forced up the field into help—Huf at least had a shot. Instead, Campbell gets hooked, Ward doesn’t step up soon enough or aggressively enough to squeeze down the hole, and Kyler hits the edge for long, untouched score.
Fast forward to 2:08 left in the fourth quarter. The Cardinals are driving for the game-winning field goal. They’re on our 46 and are running almost the exact same concept.
They’re in gun instead of pistol this time and don’t have the loop-around blocker from the back side, but they once again have two tight ends to the formation’s right and are optioning Bosa with duo read. And we’re once again slanting inside to combat it.
Just like before, we know that Bosa will go inside and Kyler will pull the ball. But now, we’re in much more of a pass defense look. Mustapha, who is eight yards off the line of scrimmage, and Campbell will be tasked with playing the quarterback on a pull and forcing him back inside to help.
Unfortunately, on the snap, Warner gets caught up inside by a second-level blocker, Campbell gets blown off the line of scrimmage by a tight end—widening a hole that we wanted to shrink—and Mustapha has been slow to trigger in run support, opening that hole even further.
If we’d been able to hold the line on the edge and push Kyler back inside, the hope is Warner and Ji’Ayir could have cleaned him up for a short gain.
But by the time Kyler has hit the hole, Campbell has been widened from just outside the hash to just inside the numbers, Ji’Ayir and Warner are far too inside to be able to close that distance, and Kyler scampers for a free run of 13 yards that puts the Cardinals into field goal position.
These were well-structured plays that were called at the right time. It’s not easy to know when they’re coming and the option game is always mathematically difficult to stop. But we have got to stop getting beat in critical downs with these kinds of repeat concepts.
Blitzgression to the Mean. I wondered last week if we were going to see more blitzing from our defense to (a) make up for our dwindling depth and mediocre success rates up front and (b) take DeVondre Campbell out of coverage situations. At least for this week, the answer was yes and yes. Unfortunately, the efficacy of those blitzes was not particularly good.
We blitzed on 36% of dropbacks on Sunday, the 10th-highest rate in the league, and a continuation of a season-long trend towards sending extra men.
Unfortunately, those blitzes led to little success. Which is also a troubling season-long trend. Even with all the pressure we generated on blitzes last week against the Patriots’ JV offensive line, our season total numbers when blitzing have resulted in a 67% completion percentage and a league-worst passer rating of 150.2.
Not great, Bob. Not great.
While our scheme was built as a four-man pressure unit, it is possible to blitz and blitz well out of our defense. The Jets have been doing it this season without their holdout edge rusher and their defense is still one of the top units in the league. The Texans have also been upping their rush rate, with Ryans going to the double mug well to great success as of late. So it’s possible. Which is good. Because with two of our three best pass rushers gone from last season, we will probably need to send extras a healthy amount to turn things around defensively.
Mooney Matters. Not quite sure what’s been going on but Charvarius Ward–who was legitimately a top 5 corner last season–has struggled in coverage through these first five weeks. While Isaac Yiadom only allowed one catch on Sunday (it was the big 4th down one to Marvin Harrison Jr.) and Lenoir blanked his matchups, Ward gave up three catches for 75 yards and a 116.7 passer rating.
In 2022, Ward was PFF’s 6th-best corner. In 2023, he hopped up to 5th. Through five games thus far, he’s ranked 89th. Ward’s not hiding from it. After this game, he told the media that he was playing “the worst ball of his career.” Considering one of Ward’s signature games last season was blanketing DK Metcalf against the Seahawks, it would be a good time for him to shake that funk and figure things out.
Return of the Mack? I don’t know how well this would go over with our newly installed DC or if we’d be looking at a "too many cooks” situation with Staley already in the building, but you can’t help but wonder if recently-fired former DC Robert Saleh can get back to Santa Clara ASAP—even as just a consultant.
Saleh didn’t kill it as a head coach in NY, but he unquestionably got railroaded by an incompetent GM, a horrendous OC who was forced on him by a meddling owner, a neverending game of shitty QB roulette, and Aaron Rodgers’ best attempt at late-stage Lebron cosplay. Good luck running zero motion and throwing slants and high-difficulty fades to Allen Lazard 🫡
I’m sure it’ll turn out great.
But if this is the scheme we’re sticking to long-term (or even if it isn’t), it may make sense to get Saleh—one of the best to ever run it and a guy beloved by our locker room—back in the fold.
NEXT UP: THURSDAY DEATHMATCH @ SEATTLE (3-2) @ 5:15 PM
The Mike Macdonald era started with three straight wins before a highly entertaining slop-fest shootout of a Monday night loss against the Lions led to a shocking home loss to a Giants team without Malik Nabers or its starting running back (tbf, their starting running back is Devin Singletary so…). While the Seahawks seem to have taken well to Macdonald’s coaching and his staff has pulled them out of the schematic stone age, it’s tough to tell what’s real and what’s a product of a schedule against some of the worst offenses known to man.
As the godfather of the modern amoeba defense, Mike Macdonald’s scheme is all about varying coverages and fronts while sending (or simming) blitzes from all over the field. He wants his defense to feature many interchangeable parts (kind of like our offense) and so far that’s resulted in a heavy use of three-safety lineups. Macdonald loves to put that extra safety into the nickel while curling up his big-ass corners into press coverage, basically attempting to eliminate the outsides with his corners and letting everyone else create confusion and havoc on the interior. Right now this Seahawks defense is a bit beat up, particularly along the DL, but they had a few of their injured guys return last week and expect a few more to return by Thursday. While they’ll certainly be more formidable at full strength, it’s important to note that this defense has faced off against Bo Nix (in his first NFL start), Jacoby Brissett, Skylar Thompson, Jared Goff—who went 18-of-18 and CAUGHT a touchdown against them—and Daniel Jones—who kinda diced them up while throwing to Darius Slayton. Through three weeks they looked like one of the surprise units of the season. But after giving up 78 points over the last two weeks, we can’t even be certain they’re good. Again, injuries are big here, so the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
Offensively, the Seapenises have imported Ryan Grubb from last year’s University of Washington team. He runs a modern pro-style offense, which means it’s the most advanced thing Seattle has seen since Mike Holmgren was in charge. Kenneth Walker is their bell cow, and he can break a big run at any time (especially if we tackle like we did against the Cardinals), while their trio of pass catchers remains potent. Former Niner Laken Tomlinson has paired with Charles Cross to give them solid play along the left side of their OL but the right side is somewhere between bad and terrible. Their right guard, Anthony Bradford, is graded as PFF’s 69th guard out of 70 qualifiers. Right tackle Stone Forsythe is PFF’s 74th tackle out of 78. Blanketing DK, tackling well, and taking advantage of those two question marks along the line seems like the best recipe for success.
Go Niners 🏈👍