Mid-Season Breakdown
Can we win a game here plz? [Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group]
We are (about) halfway through the season now, and—while a top-heavy NFC and a seventh playoff spot make a post-season push still well within the realm of possibility—it’s hard to imagine our squad in its current form doing much of note if given the opportunity.
Considering our expectations entering the year, our current 3-5 record—and the way in which we’ve gotten there—has been quite the shocker. So what’s gone wrong? And is there any hope to salvage this season?
Below are six reasons why we’re currently tied for last in the NFC West and five things to look for in the back half of the season.
6 SIGNS OF SADNESS
Brain Drain. We’ve had some excellent coaches come through here in the past few years, and we may be starting to feel the effects of just how many of them we’ve lost. Both the success of our own coaches (Saleh in particular) and the spread of Shanahan’s scheme across the league have made our staff ripe for the poaching.
Saleh is a clear upgrade over Ryans. The latter could get there eventually, but there’s a reason every team with a head coach opening wanted to talk to Saleh last spring. Not only did he excel at film study and scheming to team’s tendencies, but he was also the emotional hype man of the coaching staff, and—in a season in which we’ve been maddeningly inconsistent—losing that high-energy presence shouldn’t be underestimated.
Saleh took Mike LaFleur, John Benton (OL), and Tony Oden (DBs). Oden’s departure was the second straight DB coach to last only one year in SF, with Joe Woods—architect of the drastic turnaround in our secondary during the Super Bowl run—leaving for the Browns the year before. While it’s hard to make any judgment calls on their replacement, Cory Undlin, particularly in a year when our secondary has been ravaged by injuries on all levels, it’s not a stretch of the imagination that we’d be a bit more secure in that area under Woods or Oden. Woods had the benefit of a generational pass rush as he shaped our secondary, but has done good work in Cleveland since leaving. While Oden dealt with seven different starters at cornerback, but still patched things together to help us to a top 5 passing defense in 2020.
Former quarterback coach Shane Day left for a QB coach/passing game coordinator promotion with the Chargers. Johnny Holland had to step down just before the season due to a re-emergence of cancer—meaning the linebackers lost both their position coaches after Ryans was promoted. This isn’t to say our new coaches aren’t good or don’t have bright futures, but some of them—like Ryans—will need some time to settle into peak coaching form, and there are always growing pains with large-scale staff turnover.
Injuries at our deepest positions. In true Niners fashion, even our two deepest position groups have been wrecked by injuries. And that’s led to major issues on the field.
We already talked about how our string of running back injuries derailed offensive continuity in the first quarter of the season. We not only drafted two running backs this year but released a perfectly capable backup on cutdown day simply because we ran out of roster space. That depth dried up quickly, even if it’s (knock on wood) getting healthier by the day.
Just as impactful—if not more—have been our injuries along the interior defensive line. Excluding Armstead, who is more of a defensive end, we entered the season with five seemingly capable interior linemen (and another on the PUP list preparing for an early-season return). Now, it’s a position of weakness.
While Kinlaw hasn’t developed into the pass rusher we’d hoped, he’s been a vital piece against the run. In games that he’s played, we’ve allowed 86 yards rushing to backs and receivers. In games that he hasn’t, we’ve allowed 110.
Kevin Givens went down early this year and has only now been rotating back in, but his play isn’t up to the level that we’d grown to expect given his two-year upward trajectory. Part of that could be lingering injuries. Part could be that he’s at his best when paired beside a space-eater so that he can really operate as a one-gap penetrator. Kentavius Street hasn’t taken a major step forward. Him, Givens, and the now-released Zach Kerr have had their issues getting washed out against the run. The new guy (Charles Omenihu) was a nice value trade, but he’s more of an Armstead type. Giving him snaps inside as a situational pass rusher isn’t going to help our run defense.
DJ Jones has been his usual reliable self, but when he gets dinged up and has to come off the field, we really feel it. On the second level, the return of Dre Greenlaw—who has been a remarkably consistent tackler through his short career—should help against the run. But maybe our best hope to bolster our front-line (other than Jones staying healthy) is a speedy return from Maurice Hurst, who was very disruptive against the run in the two games he’s played in this year. Unfortunately, those games have been bookended by injuries. Any way you look at it, our interior DL has underperformed.
The Snowball Effect. Let’s try and chart our defensive philosophy and approach through DeMeco Ryans’ up-and-down first season as DC.
We go through the pre-season expecting to play more man coverage and blitz more because of the strength of our STARTING cornerbacks and the fact that we need an added pass rush boost upfront. Verrett goes down in week one, which makes us bring in aging veterans Josh Norman and Dre Kirkpatrick to fill his void.
Still lacking an ideal pass rush, we continue to be aggressive and run more man, and we even have some success in doing so—like against the Eagles and in a stellar first outing against the Cardinals. But our historically bad pass interference rate on deep balls pulls us away from that. Although even when we play zone, receivers eat up our cushion in a hurry and force one-on-one jump balls down the field, a strategy that reaches peak frustration during the rain-soaked Sunday night shitshow in which seemingly every Colts scoring drive was buoyed by a deep shot penalty that set up a first-and-goal.
So against the Bears, a team that—in contrast to everything Matt Nagy stands for—had started slinging the ball down the field to cater to its rookie quarterback’s strengths, we began deploying huge cushions underneath. We’d been absolutely devastated by deep ball pass interference calls for a month straight, so the mentality shifts to allowing underneath passes and rallying up to them. The result was Justin Fields’ most productive game as a starter. Then, last week—against a team who wants nothing more than to dink-and-dunk you to death in the short game—the same general game plan led to one of our more embarrassing defensive displays of the past three years. Afraid of being toasted deep by the Cardinals backups—and rightfully worried about our replacement safeties having to play man coverage against speedy slot players like Rondale Moore—we allowed the Cardinals to do nothing but complete short passes then eviscerate us on yards after the catch. If you think that’s an exaggeration, we’ve missed 10+ tackles in both of the past two games, and last week, Colt McCoy’s average depth of completion was a “laughable-if-it-hadn’t-worked” 3.5 yards down the field.
Through eight games, Ryans has had his good moments and his bad moments. Injuries have put him in some unenviable positions, but you only have to look to last year to see what an elite DC can do to adapt to those problems. At the moment, I don’t think Ryans’ job is in jeopardy because of three games post-bye. But for our sake, we have to hope his adjustment period speeds up and he finds some answers despite our depleted secondary.
Who should know better, more? The 33-year-old corner or the 42-year-old coach? [Kyle Terada-USA Today Sports]
Leading the league in backbreaking plays. We know about the penalties. Despite playing soft the past two weeks in an attempt to discourage the deep ball we—unsurprisingly—still lead the league in defensive penalty yardage, pass interference penalties, and pass interference yardage (and pass interferences declined because they resulted in catches anyways). And that’s having played one less game than most teams. Many of these penalties have been on deep balls and many have come on third downs. Needless to say, these are backbreakers.
But if it seems like our penalties are more backbreaking than most, that would be because they statistically are. We’ve had 17 defensive penalties that have resulted in automatic first downs, which is (only) fourth-worst in the league (although two of the teams ahead of us haven’t had their bye weeks yet), but we’re the single worst team on third down, third and long, and “desperation” situations.
While penalties can be backbreaking, nearly all turnovers are. When it comes to our turnover differential, the 49ers sit at -9, which is tied for second-to-last in the NFL with the Jaguars and the Chiefs—who have eked their way to 5-4 on the back of close wins over the Giants and Jordan Love making his first career start. Offensively, we cough up the ball too much and often in crucial situations—like the two fumbles last weekend while we were dicing them on offense. Defensively, we just don’t generate takeaways. This is obviously a stat that is the result of multiple different things going wrong, but it’s also a great way for a good team to lose more games than they should and a bad team to stay afloat.
All this at least provides a numerical explanation for why our advanced efficiency metrics are shockingly strong—9th overall in DVOA, 6th in Offense, and 17th in Defense—and calculate that we should have 5+ wins on the season despite our on-field results inverting that projection.
Our counterpunch lacks knockout power. Every good defense knows that our bread-and-butter is the outside run game. To make sure teams can’t cheat too heavily to stop that, we like to deploy our quick game between the hashes and take play-action shots over the top.
The problem is that teams no longer care if we’re completing a ton of 8-to-12-yard passes underneath because they’ve realized that (A) they’d rather allow that than be bludgeoned by 5-to-10-yard gains on the ground and (B) when they load the box against the run, they’re also creating tighter passing windows for our quick game because we so often throw inside. In essence, they’re killing two birds with one stone—selling out against the run while simultaneously shrinking our strike zone on the slants and in-breakers that Shanahan likes to employ because of how many bodies they have crammed in the box. And so far, our quick game counterpunch hasn’t been effective or explosive enough to get teams away from this strategy.
But wasn’t that basically our offense in 2019? Now we have a re-emerging Brandon Aiyuk, and a third-year Deebo, and Jimmy G, who—by many measures—is actually playing better than he did during that Super Bowl run? If anything, shouldn’t we have fewer issues?
The biggest difference between then and now is that teams are fully committing to that defensive strategy and have become so aggressive with their box alignments that it’s difficult to get the ball onto the perimeter with the stretch run handoffs that set up our play-action game. By lining stand-up defensive ends far outside our tackles and tight ends, putting down linemen outside shade of everything, and utilizing aggressive slanting, we’ve often been forced to resort to relying on crack tosses—condensed splits from wideouts and quick pitches to the running back—to get the ball outside faster than on a normal handoff. While that’s led to plenty of decent gains on the ground, pitches are terrible for play-action purposes and open up fewer cut-back opportunities for our backs.
Part of the benefit of our outside run game is that it stretches the defense horizontally for our play-action game behind it. That’s why we so often spring wide-open crossers going against the flow of the play. Or we used to. But you can’t really do that when you have to rely so heavily on pitches to outflank the defense. Pitches also allow the defense to see run immediately, which means the linebackers and other second-level defenders can fast flow towards the outside gaps without the threat of being punished backside or over the top.
That isn’t to say we should never be running pitches. After all, some variation of crack toss was behind most if not all of our explosive runs in the past two games, but a heavy reliance on tosses means a less effective play-action game. And since our play-action game is basically the only way that we can threaten teams deep, leaning on the crack toss means we’re forced to choose between running more effectively into loaded boxes or forcing defenses out of those loaded boxes in the first place.
Unfortunately, this once again comes down to some combination of Jimmy G’s talents and what Shanahan is comfortable calling while he’s under center. Teams know we won’t drop back and throw the ball outside the hashes or deep down the field. They know that our deep ball comes off of play-action, which is at its best when we can show stretch looks to create more space horizontally on crossing routes. So they choose to commit fully to stopping our #1 threat, the outside running game, knowing that in doing so they’re slowing down our second threat as well and—when they get us out of our play-action game—our third threat on top of that. Right now, the primary difference between us and the currently-more-successful Rams and Packers’ offenses, is that opposing teams know those offenses can drop back and dice them in the passing game if they load up against the run. Currently, we can’t do that. And until we can, teams will continue to force us out of the stretch handoffs.
That doesn’t mean the rest of 2021 (or however long Jimmy G is our quarterback) is hopeless. Despite all the issues, our offensive metrics are still high. In that hideous game against the Colts, one of the bright spots was how well we ran the ball with our split blocking in the backfield. In a non-monsoon, the offense could have had quite a performance that night. And even though it feels like ages ago, we’re less than two weeks removed from absolutely gashing a strong Bears defense, in part because Jimmy was able to hit a deep pass or two over the top and pull their safeties out of the box. But at the moment, when teams sell out against the run, we have to be playing flawlessly to string together long drives via our intermediate passing game while threading the ball between underneath defenders. And whether it’s drops or penalties or—in the last game—backbreaking fumbles, we haven’t executed nearly well enough to keep those drives alive.
Reactive versus proactive roster building. There is no such thing as a “luxury pick” in the NFL. As a hard salary-cap league with large rosters and a rookie pay scale that keeps young players’ pay rates artificially deflated, the best teams remain consistently competitive by choosing to make roster decisions ahead of when they have to make them. In other words, they fill holes on the backend of their roster in the present before they become problems in the future. The Niners, in two specific positions that they’ve had issues at for years, have failed to fill those holes, and the entire team has suffered because of it.
After Chris Jones annihilated our interior OL in the 2019 Super Bowl, we knew that we had to improve our interior pass protection. At right guard, Mike Person was a stellar run blocker, but he had issues in pass protection. Ben Garland, our backup center, was much the same. That off-season, we hoped that Weston Richburg would return healthy at center and that star swingman Daniel Brunskill would take over right guard duties. But instead of adding a starter-level player or a promising young developmental prospect at either position—whether to start now or later or even just to push the incumbent—we brought in elder veteran Tom Compton and fifth-round pick Colton McKivitz, who many considered a reach on the interior due to his lack of ideal movement skills. Richburg never played another down of professional football, we had a new center every week, and McKivitz is currently on the practice squad.
With our interior still a mess this off-season, we added Alex Mack—who has played well and given a big boost to our pass protection but is also 36 years old—and second rounder Aaron Banks, who—like McKivitz and Skule before him—scouts considered a bit of a reach while questioning his movement skills in our system. After missing much of the preseason due to injury, Banks has yet to take meaningful snaps in a game. While it’s far too early to write him off, we clearly took him where we did with the expectation that he’d be a starter by now. If we’d properly addressed the position the year before, he wouldn’t have to (or wouldn’t have been picked in the first place).
Moving forward, we’re about to see an additional ripple effect from all this, and it may not be pretty. If Banks was comfortably starting, or if we’d added playable interior depth this year or the year before, or if we’d moved on from Shon Coleman years ago when it was clear he wasn’t going to contribute, then maybe we’d be more confident in how we’re going to patch up the giant hole at right tackle that now exists due to Mike McGlinchey’s season-ending quad injury. For all the shit McGlinchey gets on social media, he has steadily improved after a tough start to the season and was really rounding into shape as a strong two-way tackle when he went down against the Cardinals. After his injury, we got absolutely abused along the right side of the line, with his replacement (Compton) and Brunskill acting as turnstiles for Cardinals defenders. It seems clear that Brunskill is not only at his best as a swing substitute, but could be best outside—where he had lots of success on both sides of the line during our Super Bowl run. If Banks (or someone else) were ready on the interior, perhaps shifting Brunskill outside would be the best move to patch up our OL. But now, our best hope may be playing a promising rookie who has taken mostly (if not entirely) snaps on the left side of the line up until this point.
Similarly, cornerback has been an area of concern for at least the past three off-seasons. Ahkello Witherspoon’s brutal sophomore season meant we entered the 2019 draft with a still-recovering Richard Sherman and giant question marks opposite him. Hoping that Witherspoon would rebound, we took a low-risk flyer on Jason Verrett and added the injury-prone Tim Harris in the sixth round. Witherspoon fired out of the gates, and—after he went down to injury and came back a shell of his former self—we struck gold with the emergence of Emmanuel Moseley opposite Sherman. But entering the 2020 off-season, the cornerback position looked like a UDFA with half-a-season of good play under his belt and two aging and injury-riddled veterans (one who hadn’t played in three years) across from him. Yet we didn’t address the position at all through free agency or the draft. In fact, the biggest cornerback move we made was letting DJ Reed go to waivers during training camp. He was promptly swooped up by the Seahawks and has started 16 games for them since.
When Sherman went down in week one last year, we again struck gold with the re-emergence of a finally healthy Jason Verrett, who—against all odds—returned to a Pro Bowl form that let us play more man coverage and blitz to offset our many defensive injuries. But entering this past off-season, with Sherman’s play dropping and his injuries accumulating and Spoon off to the Seahawks (and then the Steelers), we found ourselves with Moseley and Verrett—a top-level corner who has missed about half of his career to devastating injuries. Once again, we had injury concerns with our starters and question marks behind them. We didn’t add anyone in free agency, choosing to address the position in the draft, but we waited until the end of the third round—at the tail of the run on defensive backs—to take a player who had opted out of last year’s COVID season and was seen by most as a 2022 contributor rather than a 2021 one. Then a fifth-rounder.
Once again, in the first week of the season, Verrett went down. With Moseley already dinged up, that left us with a fifth-round rookie and veteran journeymen at one of the most important positions in football. Anyone who has watched us play this year knows how that’s gone.
I fully believe in drafting for value over need, but—just like anything else—it’s a balancing act. A pick like Nick Bosa or Deebo Samuel—a high-level selection used on a high-level player at a position of need, is obviously the dream—but that’s not always possible. The best teams stay strong year-to-year by hoarding mid-round picks to accumulate depth and patch up roster holes ahead of time before they become massive problems down the road. Because when your team’s weak spot becomes a hole and then a genuine problem—as we have at cornerback or on the right side of our offensive line—there’s no hiding it (or fixing it mid-season) in the NFL. And that’s what we’re seeing this season.
Either of these guys doing dope shit would help [Getty Images]
5 KEYS FOR THE SECOND HALF
Shanahan and Lynch aren’t going anywhere. The calls for their heads have grown loud since the bye week, but that’s not happening. Nor should it. Despite mistakes in the draft and our woefully disappointing first half of 2021, we just traded three first-round picks for a quarterback who Shanahan hand-picked with the intent of sitting his entire rookie year. Now that Shanahan finally has his quarterback—one who is dripping with physical tools and potential—why would we boot him to the curb in lieu of a new coach who may not like our new QB, or lacks the ability to build an offense around him, or wants to rebuild the team in their image with all the first-round picks we no longer have?
We’ve got a lot of high-end talent and should be performing better than we have. And if we flop next year and are looking at three straight years out of contention despite said talent, then we can start looking at making moves up top. But until then, understand that we’re less than halfway through the season and are only ONE GAME out of the final playoff spot. Things could get much worse and are far from unfixable.
Play the young bloods. It’s one thing to let Trey Lance sit for the majority of his rookie season. We’re already all-in on him as the future. If he sucks, we suck. That’s the deal we made. But guys like Aaron Banks and—now that McGlinchey has gone down—Jaylon Moore need to see the field at some point this year. Same with some combination of Deommodore Lenoir and Ambry Thomas. Because, even if they’re not totally ready, we need to know what we have in these players so that we know how to approach free agency and the draft.
Part of the reason we’re in this situation in the first place is that we’ve been overly optimistic with our self-scouting. Whether that’s with injuries (Tim Harris, Jalen Hurd) or talent level (McKivitz, Skule) or simply valuing aging veterans over their younger, greener counterparts (Compton), we need to make sure we don’t repeat those same mistakes as we enter a crucial 2022 off-season. The worst possible outcome is that we enter next year as we did this one—unrealistically optimistic about our ability and health in crucial positions and then struggling through the year for patchwork options to offset our suspect depth.
With few draft picks and little cap room, every personnel decision is going to matter more. I’m not saying we throw in the towel and give up on the season (once again, we’re one game out of the playoffs), but we gotta see what we have from our latest draft class.
Have successful knee surgeries. Jason Verrett. Raheem Mostert. Javon Kinlaw. Things would look a tad different if we had even one of them healthy this year. With Verrett, the future is very cloudy. He’s on a one-year deal, has a long history of knee injuries, and it’s too early to know how successful the surgery has been or what his timetable for return might be. But despite also having lengthy injury histories, the other two present a bit more hope.
Both Mostert and Kinlaw were shut down and opted for surgery because they believed that going under the knife was the best way to eliminate the lingering knee issues they’ve had over the past two years. Bite the bullet now for the promise of better long-term health. Will that be true? Who knows. And Mostert at least is in the last year of his contract.
But if both guys can come back truly healthy (and with surgically repaired knees that are more likely to stay that way), that’s a huge boost for our future prospects.
Maximize QB return. This could mean a lot of things, but for the remainder of the season, our goal for the quarterback position isn’t just “win as many games as possible.” Obviously, that is important. The growing “throw-in-the-towel” crowd really needs to look at how detrimental that can be to a group of talented veterans and how ineffective that is when you don’t have your next two first-round picks. But our unique quarterback room means we have other priorities as well.
Obviously, we want Lance to be put into the best position to succeed next year and in the years after that. Whether that means he should play sooner or later is up for interpretation. If anything, Mahomes’ significant drop in play this season lends credence to the idea of sitting Lance for most (if not all) of the year. Mahomes has been way too aggressive and has been forcing ad-libbed plays out of the structure of the offense—in part because he’d gotten away with all of those “oh my god Mahomes is the best” throws in the past. But variance has caught up to him. And while I’d still build a squad around Mahomes before most, his current slump really points to how much he could have flopped if he hadn’t sat for a year behind one of the smartest, most professional, and most risk-averse veteran quarterbacks in the league.
I’m not saying we should or shouldn’t start Lance (although I would like to see him in subpackage work). I’ve already had my say on that, and I have to have faith that the coaching staff knows what he can do right now and is doing what’s best for his development. But the “do everything off-structure, it’s way better” crowd has certainly taken a hit this year. The ability to extend plays and create positives out of would-be negatives will always be effective, and it is part of the massive allure of Lance, but if anything this year has once again confirmed that you need to win within the structure of an offense before you can think about making plays outside of it. Otherwise, you dig yourself into a hole that’s hard to dig out of.
The other side of this coin is Jimmy Garoppolo. Part of the inherent value of the Trey Lance trade is in what we can get in return for Jimmy. And with so many of our high picks now gone, the higher the draft pick compensation the better. At the moment, I’m not sure what (if anything) he’d get on the trade market. Large QB classes in the past few years mean most teams have established or young quarterbacks on their rosters, and Jimmy has been good but not great. But if he does hold off Lance through the rest of this year and helps the Niners surge into the playoffs, we could be looking at the kind of second-day draft pick compensation that we desperately need to offset what we gave up to pick Lance. It’s far from unreasonable to think that someone like the Panthers, Steelers, Packers (post-Rodgers), Racial Slurs, or Browns(?) could see value in acquiring Jimmy G in the off-season. But only if he finishes the season strong and healthy.
If you love something, you set it free. If there’s one silver lining to this year, it’s (hopefully) that Shanahan and Lynch can finally let 2019 go. It was a great run cut short by some knocked-down passes and the complete inability for anyone to call a hold. In 2020, when we returned nearly all our team, it made sense to try and run it back. Even this year, when the COVID cap and injuries the year before depreciated the value of many of our veteran players, it made sense to believe that—if we could only avoid repeating as one of the single most injury-riddled teams in the past two decades—we could rekindle some of that Super Bowl run magic. But our commitment to the status quo for the past two years has hampered our continued evolution both schematically and as a team.
The fact of the matter is that we’re old at some critical positions, and our commitment to sticking with those veterans means we haven’t properly developed the talent behind them. We once again will have a lot of free agents at the end of the year and big extensions looming in the near future for Nick Bosa and Deebo Samuel. That means making hard decisions elsewhere and letting go of some players that you like while accumulating value through the backend roster turnover required of teams that want to become perennial contenders.
It also means changing things up schematically to match our ascending talent, opening up offensively to match the changing way games are officiated and keeping an open mind to what needs to change for us to take that next step forward. In short, by finally letting 2019 go, we free ourselves to make the evolution needed to contend again.
Go Niners 👍🏈