Bills 34, Niners 24
![This guy tied a career-high in catches [Christian Petersen/Getty Images]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e40f3a094d5fa3ebbbedb09/1607474050096-5S6MVXDWBGM67SZA7ER9/diving+bills+TD.jpg)
This guy tied a career-high in catches [Christian Petersen/Getty Images]
It’s hard to say what was the most telling stat of this game: was it the 449 yards allowed, the 31 first downs(!), the near-ten minute disparity in time of possession against a team that averaged 3.0 yds/carry, or the sixth straight game where we’ve had at least two turnovers?
All that matters is that all those things happened, and it resulted in a game that was a fledgling shootout until it wasn’t. Now, the Niners’ margin of error for making the playoffs is practically zero.
OFFENSE
Save for two clunker drives in the first half—one ending on third down with an open Jordan Reed incidentally blocking the pass to an open Kendrick Bourne—our offense moved the ball very effectively in this game. With 402 yards on 60 offensive plays, we actually had more yards per play (6.7 to 6.6.) than the Bills did, but in what ended up being a purely offensive affair, we simply didn’t capitalize on enough opportunities.
The Run Game. On our first drive of the game, it looked like we were going to shred the Bills on the ground. Even though we started the drive from our own three and had our ill-fated third down and fourth down runs get stuffed short of the goal line, we had 10 carries for 44 yards on that drive—more than half of our total rushing yards on the day.
But when you look back at the film there are some pretty clear reasons for the Niners’ apparent lack of success in the ground game. First off, we got down in a hurry in the second half so game flow dictated we get away from the run. We threw a pick on the second play of the drive following our half-opening field goal, meaning we were looking at a 17-point deficit by the time we got the ball back. This in a game where the opposing offense was methodically dicing us up and had shown the ability to milk clock without an effective run game. Naturally, we had to lean more pass-heavy. While our first drive featured just over half of our rushing yardage on the day, it also featured just under half of our total carries. That’s clearly not what we wanted.
Secondly, our raw stats of 21 carries for 86 yards on 4.1 yard/carry don’t hop off the page, but the efficiency rate is deflated due to the many carries we had inside the opposing 5 and the issues we had with those—which we’ll get to a bit more further below. Take out the runs inside the five yard line, which amounted to a troubling six carries for 0 net yards, and you’re looking at a healthy 5.7 yd/carry. While you could do the same for any team and help their averages—after all, the potential for yardage is hard-capped by the yardage that’s left on the field before scoring—it at least helps differentiate our problems in this game from “run game” to “short yardage run game.”
For the former, we had our opportunities for bigger runs, with issues on the interior forcing at least three edge runs to be turned upfield early for short gains and a few edge block miscommunications/mishaps—including Aiyuk’s difficult-yet-horribly executed attempt at a seal block which led to a 9-yard loss from Tevin Coleman (poor Coleman came in for two plays and got buried on both)—cutting down our yardage as well.
Here’s a toss right that shows a number of those issues all at once,
It’s a four yard-gain. Not terrible by any means. But now let’s look at how it had potential to be much much more.
We’re in your standard I-form with a wing TE, running a lead toss to the strong side. Wide of the frame on the right side is Deebo, who will join us later. As discussed before, our goal on these toss plays is to hook everyone and ride them laterally down the line of scrimmage. The best case scenario is that we create a runway for Mostert. Otherwise we allow him to find a hole on the backside and gash up the middle for a good gain.
As you can see here, the majority of our offensive line has put themselves in strong position, with their hips and shoulders positioned the correct way and taking away the outside of each defender. Deebo has also come in along the right side, ready to work up on the safety. The path Mostert wants to take — a rocket launch outside of McGlinchey, is in red, and was very close to actualizing if not for two problem areas, circled in blue:
First off, on the edge, Charlie Woerner (who had his first NFL catches on Sunday 👍) has great initial positioning. But the ensuing handoff between him and Juice—one of them is supposed to work up to the edge defender while the other is supposed to stay on the edge man—gets muddled. Both of them end up passing the edge man to work up to the second level, meaning Mostert would have had to weave inside an unblocked man on the line of scrimmage to fit into the outside hole. While possible, it’s not what we’re looking for.
Secondly, Colton McKivitz has gotten turned and lost outside positioning. Look at his shoulders and hips compared to every other lineman engaged or approaching their blocks. If this was a second or so later and Mostert had time to stretch the defense out wide, then we’d have had alleys to run through and it may not have been as big a deal. But since this happened so early in the play, we lose that horizontal stretch that thins out the defense and Mostert has to cut upfield far earlier than he’d have liked to.
Mostert is athletic enough to bend inside of McKivitz and plunge forward, but with the timing and blocking angles thrown off, the unblocked trailer on the backside is able to get first contact, and other defenders—who were being blocked correctly based on play design—are able to help finish the job. The result is a 4-yard gain instead of what would have put Mostert—with a ten yard head start—on a single cornerback in the open field. That’s a house call more often than not.
As for our short game, our problems in short-yardage runs were largely due to interior dudes missing blocks on the second level and linebackers, without the threat of misdirection, committing hard to shooting gaps. And—of course—one glaring weakness…
The Goose. People who know me know that, when it comes to football, the one thing I have in common with your drunk uncle whose best advice is for “somebody to hit somebody” is that we both believe heavily in the QB sneak. When it’s crunch time and you’re inside the one, get outta the gun. That’s why, when the Niners’ opening 97-yard drive was stuffed on the goal line after a failed fourth down run out of shotgun, I was beyond myself.
That is, until I saw Mullens’ attempt a QB sneak in the second half. Six starts into this season, Mullens’ two most notable sneaks have been one where he jab-stepped off the snap and the false start that was sandwiched between an overturned KB touchdown and the ensuing pick in the end zone that effectively ended this game. Needless to say, neither were effective.
I get it, the Niners have had a rotating door at center and now have Daniel Brunskill, who was listed at 260 pounds(!) by some outlets as recently as earlier this year, manning the position. QB sneaks also rely on your guards to get push, and while Tomlinson is surely built for that, I think we can all agree that right guard is a problem spot. That said, we need to get better at QB sneaks. If for no other reason than to present enough of a threat that the defense will condense three dudes over our interior OL and open up other things when we line up under center. Things such as:
While there was zero chance the Bills were expecting a sneak on first and goal from the six, the reasoning behind going under center still stands. While I’m not necessarily against goal line shotgun snaps—except for inside the one, where I am almost always against them—our run game in the 80 yards between the 10’s is aided by space and misdirection. There’s inherently no space near the end zone, but when we’re under center we can better take advantage of the aggressive downhill play of linebackers via play action.
Even if we’re not gonna sneak. Which we should get better at.
Roll the Dice? While Mullens is never going to be the most consistently accurate quarterback—the announcers made the very correct claim that if he’d led his receivers near the goal line the Niners would have scored instead of turning the ball over—he’s taken clear steps forward since his early-season goings.
Yes, he fired out of the gates by pantsing the now-actually-decent Giants, but it’s only recently where he has seemed comfortable enough both to execute the offense and for Shanahan to give him the opportunity to sling it a bit more. Against the Bills, he moved around in the pocket very well, made off-schedule throws, wasn’t sacked once, and his QBR—which, as a stat, is probably slightly more legitimate than you would think given Trent Dilfer was consulted in helping build the metric—was 70.4, less than 5 points shy of Josh Allen’s.
The Niners want to run the ball, but teams continue to commit all their resources to stopping just that. We’re not heading the way of the Air Raid, but it’ll be interesting to see if we get more spurts of the hurry-up, wide-open style of offense that Mullens was piloting deep in the third quarter. The same offense which led to three straight drives of 70+ yards, each lasting under three minutes in length.
We always knew that we’d need an uptick in the passing game to open things up on the ground. Perhaps mixing up tempos and letting Mullens get the ball out quick and with confidence out of more open sets will become a more routine change-up moving forward. While we don’t want to get away from the core strengths of our offense, it’s not hard to see how those adjustments could both help our ground game and even keep Juice involved, albeit split out wide a bit more often.
We should know sooner rather than later. The Racial Slurs, who have a claim to the best defensive line in the game, are up next, and it will be tough sledding on the ground.
If it makes you feel any better, here’s a clip of Brandon Aiyuk dusting dudes down the field. He needs to improve his hands, particularly in traffic, and he could do a better job of high-pointing on deep balls to draw flags (which would have assured a penalty in the first clip instead of leaving it up to the refs), but he is getting the attention of DC’s across the league.
In each clip, he’s the furthest outside receiver at the top of the screen.
DEFENSE
After back-to-back masterful game plans and performances, our defense fell back to earth quite a bit on Monday. That’s not to say we’re no longer a strong defense, but is to say that there’s a pretty clear formula for putting up points when offenses can execute it: no pass rush + high-level QB who can throw on the run.
Pass Rush. There have been a handful of instances this year where our pass rush has been nonexistent, and we’ve been absolutely diced up by a high-level quarterback. The Packers game certainly comes to mind. The Seahawks game to a lesser extent. But this was the clearest evidence yet that there is only so much you can do when you truly have no pressure on a quarterback who is comfortable throwing both on- and off-script.
Josh Allen entered this game averaging the second-most time to throw (TTT) in the NFL (3.02 seconds/dropback), and if anything this contest improved his ranking. The game plan was clearly to take away the deep ball and force the Bills to move methodically down the field, which is exactly what I would have done given the matchup. However, the strategy simply doesn’t work when the offense can drop back comfortably each play, deliver second-level passes on-time and in-rhythm, and—when they feel any hint of pressure—calmly flush out of the pocket and complete those same passes off-script.
Saleh attempted to change things up by sending extra men, but these blitzes were largely picked up with ease—many not even accelerating the clock beyond what our four-man rush had been accomplishing. Which unfortunately, wasn’t a lot.
Of the 31 first downs we allowed, 26 were through the air. That should tell you all you need to know about how we defended the pass in this game.
Curl-Flat 4Ever. I’ll admit, the announcers were pretty spot-on in this game as to what the Bills were doing. While they started out by attacking the seams a bit more and working deep crossers, they eventually realized that the Niners had no real solution to simply attacking the soft spot in the curl-flat repeatedly.
In essence, the Bills leaned into what the Cardinals did back in week 1. While the path to get there was different (and much more effective), they played off the big-play reputation of their wideouts, let our cornerbacks bail, then threw all manner of passes underneath them that were too wide and/or too deep for the curl/flat defender to get under.
Unlike in the game against the Cardinals, the Niners have grown more accustomed to playing man coverage, which was a change-up they used sparingly in this contest. However, in that game against Arizona we had Dee Ford and Nick Bosa. In this game, we clearly did not. While the commentators believed that the Niners could have shifted to man earlier—then quickly pointed out that they were getting beat in those looks regardless—the defense was put in a bind by the fact that (A) man coverage is useless without a pass rush as all deep crossers are likely to be open and there’s only so long you can cover a receiver, and (B) we had a late-week scratch that put Dontae Johnson in the slot in lieu of Emmanuel Moseley.
I’ve been hard on Dontae in the past, but to be clear, he did not play poorly in this game. He was active near the line of scrimmage and willing to mix it up in a largely foreign position. But as a 6-2, 195-pound corner who hasn’t played meaningful snaps in the slot since 2014, he is a boundary corner through and through, and the fact that dialing up more man coverage would often mean he’d be locked one-on-one with Cole Beasley—who pieced us up en route to a career game—likely deterred Saleh from leaning too heavily into man coverage until he absolutely had to.
Pretty much just a mustache with glasses. While we’d excelled at disguising our coverages in the past few games, this time it seemed like the Bills had all the answers. On a short week when so much was going wrong on defense, I’m not gonna dive in to try and see what exactly were keying, but I can make some guesses. If we’re accepting the idea that we were leaning away from man coverage until forced into it later in the game, then the Bills’ game plan of hitting us with second-level completions along the sidelines is largely effective regardless of what zone we were in.
As stated before, when it comes to coverage we are inherently a top-down, cover deep-and-play forward type of secondary. We want to stop the deep ball first. We’ve had our current run of success in part because we’ve been able to oscillate between Cover 3, quarters, and man, but if you take away that last option, things change quite a bit. While disguising Cover 3 and Quarters makes it difficult for offenses to diagnose and throw deep down the field, both coverages have a natural weak spot on ~10-15 yard passes along the sideline. If you know you have the time to throw it, have the speed outside to create a cushion, and believe the defense is unlikely to lean heavily into man-coverage, it becomes pitch-and-catch rather quickly.
The good news? We’re still not eliminated from playoff contention. The bad news? We need to win AT LEAST our next three games (potentially all four if the chips fall the wrong way), in order to make the end-of-season tournament.
Go Niners 👍🏈