Dolphins 43, 49ers 17

The lasting impression from this game, no matter how hard you try to forget… [USA Today]

This one will be short.

While it’s unlikely our offense or defense ever looks worse than they did on Sunday—at least at the same time—we are fully behind the eight ball and dead last in the NFC West as we enter the toughest part of our schedule: a seven-game stretch against teams with a combined record of 24-6—including three of the NFL’s five remaining unbeatens.

Our defense will get healthier, with key reinforcements arriving as soon as next week. Jimmy G will improve as his ankle does, although to what level of play remains a big TBD. We won’t look this bad again. But if we want any chance of making the playoffs, our passing attack will need to take exponential leaps forward, and we’re all out of bad defenses and bad teams that’ll let us make that progress at our own pace.

While it’s not worth spending too much time dwelling over or looking at what was—based on expectations—the single-most disappointing performance of the Shanahan era, public expectations have already started shifting towards a somewhat cursed down year. We’ll know within the next few weeks how much those expectations match reality.

OFFENSE

Jimmy “Goddammit Don’t Make Me Start Looking Up Film of Trey Lance In October” Garoppolo: It’s impossible to say how much the ankle injury led to what was almost certainly the least accurate performance of Jimmy Garoppolo’s career. While past subpar Jimmy G performances have largely centered around poor decision making leading to interceptions, it was Garoppolo’s wild inaccuracy that led to interceptions on Sunday. Was this an aberration due to injury? An ongoing trend that began week 1 against the Cardinals? It’s hard to say, but either way, this is a major prove-it year for Jimmy G.

Garoppolo is locked up through 2022 on a team-friendly average annual salary of $27.5M. As of now, he’s the 12th-highest paid quarterback in terms of AAV salary—$2M below Ryan Tannehill, $500K above Matthew Stanford—but that undersells his relative value. If you’re comparing Jimmy G’s value you have to first take away any starter on a rookie contract. The rookie wage scale depresses their value, and teams like the Ravens, Bills, and Cardinals are joining the $35M+/year club sooner rather than later while teams like the Browns, Broncos, and Racial Slurs have expensive decisions to be made shortly as well. So if we’re counting only veterans, there are just seven (and a half, if you count Nick Foles) veteran starting quarterbacks in the league who make a lower average annual salary than Jimmy Garoppolo; five of them make $25M+ a year, so they’re within a negligible $2.5M/year of Jimmy. The other two (and a half) are Foles, Teddy Bridgewater, and Ryan Fitzpatrick. So while moving on from Garoppolo would be financially easy after this year (only $2.8M in dead cap in 2021), replacing him would be a much harder task. Let’s look at the options.

If they’re allowed to hit the open market, would you be willing to pay top dollar—under a pandemic dampened cap—for Philip Rivers, Cam Newton, or Dak Prescott (fresh off a brutal season-ending ankle injury)? If you’d prefer cap savings, maybe you could attempt a Ryan Tannehill-esque revival of a former young starter like Marcus Mariota, Jacoby Brissett, or (shoot me in the fucking face and don’t bother burying the body) Jameis Winston? You could try and acquire a former starter who’s getting supplanted by a rookie next year— guys like Sam Darnold, Daniel Jones, Gardner Minshew, or maybe even Matt Ryan now that Quinn is gone could be available. But is that an improvement? And if you’re getting one of them on the back-end of their rookie deal, are you confident about making a big money decision on them after a single season? Lastly, there’s one other option: you target a quarterback in the draft. I’m not going to get into the specifics of the draft in early October, but this is a very strong quarterback class with at least three top 5-10 talents and various value picks on the second (and potentially even third) days; if we find someone we like, package the appropriate draft capital to secure them, and feel confident about their long-term trajectory, that still means we’d be starting a rookie in a Kyle Shanahan offense. Immediate returns would be highly unlikely.

Regardless of how well or poorly we finish this season as a team, the remainder of 2020 is very much an audition year for Jimmy G. By end-of-year he needs to at least hit last year’s levels while showing a trajectory for further growth. Because if he’s not our guy that will greatly effect how we approach a critical off-season.

Pass Pro Woes: They continued this week, to the tune of 5 sacks and 8 QB hits allowed, but unlike past week’s blunders these weren’t all execution issues—some were communication/assignment issues instead. Like above with Jimmy G, I’m not sure if that’s better or worse, but it ultimately resulted in another underwhelming game in pass protection—this time to a team with a bottom 10 passing defense and a middle-of-the-pack pass rush.

It’s not always easy to tell who is messing up their assignment and why on the offensive line, but sometimes a heady center can help in that regard. While there’s been few updates on the rehab of our guys on the PUP list, they’re all eligible to be activated this week, including Weston Richburg. In two years with the team, Richburg has yet to hit the highs of an elite pass-blocking center that he showed while with the Giants, but—if healthy—he could (finally) provide a boost in that department. 

Edge Game: The only real positive on offense was the performance of our run game. The Niners carried the ball 19 times for 131 yards on a healthy 6.9 ypc clip. While the score differential would imply some of that was due to garbage time, our run game was largely effective even when the game was close.

The Niners forced the issue in getting to the edge, utilizing sweeps and tosses to outflank the Dolphins front and create creases for our running backs. While toss looks are much worse for play action purposes, and thus less useful than handoffs in opening up our passing game, they did allow Mostert to bust a 37-yarder down the sideline to set up our first score of the game. In his first game back from an MCL sprain, Mostert was one of the only bright spots on offense, putting up 90 yards on 11 carries and consistently getting positive yardage regardless of the type of run.

As stated before, there’s really no reason why our rushing attack should be any worse than last year’s so hopefully we can keep the momentum going on the ground. Leaning on a rejuvenated run game would be quite the useful crutch for a team whose quarterbacks have—over the past two games—turned the ball over six times.

DEFENSE

Never mind, bring back Dontae Johnson: On most defensive plays, it’s hard to isolate a single player who’s totally at fault for letting up a big gain. This was not the case on Sunday. Whether it was fades, slants, or even more fades, Brian Allen—our practice squad call-up to replace the injured Sherman/Moseley/Witherspoon/Johnson—was isolated early (the first play) and often (multiple times per drive). The result was an individual roasting worse than I’ve seen in quite some time.

On the first four drives the Dolphins ran 23 plays, secured 9 first downs, and totaled 221 yards en route to a 21-7 lead. During that time, Brian Allen allowed 5 catches, 124 yards, three first down completions, two first downs off of 31 yards of penalties, and one touchdown. The series after the touchdown he was pulled for a one-legged Witherspoon, only for Jamar Taylor—K’Waun Williams’ practice squad call-up—to allow a completion of 70 yards. I know it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy to pull out big plays and examine the others separately, but the stats are stark enough here that they’re worth pointing out. Even if you take out the yardage from Allen’s penalties, he and Taylor gave up 194 yards, four first downs, and a score on only six plays for a HEALTHY 32.3 yards/play. On the 57 other plays our defense ran—including the ones where the Niners had largely called it in—the Dolphins gained 242 yards on 4.2 yards/play.

You can’t really blame these two as they are—with no exaggeration—our seventh- and eighth-string cornerbacks. They should never be playing in regular season games. And while Taylor has had positive snaps in the past, Allen was simply outclassed on the field. At some point you have to either pull him or get him some help in coverage—even if that opens things up elsewhere. By the time he was yanked the Niners were already down 14 points and had allowed over half of their yardage on the day. The damage was done. Some of that is on Robert Saleh/Tony Oden. As was the case with Witherspoon late last year, they kept someone in too long in hopes that they’d work it out, and it put the Niners in a hole. In this case that hole was simply too deep and the rest of the team too out-of-sorts for the Niners to climb out of.

Granted, if they’d pulled Allen perhaps they had no one to replace him with? After the game the coaches admitted that Witherspoon was suited up only in case of emergency and took the field only after pleading his case to the coaches. But isn’t Ken Webster also on the active roster? While he came from the Dolphins practice squad and they’d surely know him well, could he have been any worse? And if so, why didn’t the Niners have any other cornerbacks on the active roster? My guess, they’re tapped out of DBs on the practice squad, are expecting the return—very very shortly—of some combination—or all three—of Richard Sherman, Emmanuel Moseley, and Ahkello Witherspoon, and didn’t want to fill a roster spot for a single game only to let that player go again a day later. Which seems to assume they wouldn’t need another corner against a team like the Dolphins. Which feels like a microcosm of this entire game.

For the sake of our sanity, let’s hope this was the wake-up call that last week should have been and that we’re not only healthier but considerably more effective for our Sunday night matchup with the Rams.

Go Niners 👍🏈