Niners 23, Rams 20
LUL
Despite becoming NFL vagabonds as they boarded the flight to Los Angeles, not knowing the availability of key starters until game time, and surviving an onslaught of ugly turnovers, the 49ers did just enough to execute yet another brilliant game plan against the Rams—asserting that (A) the Shanahan/Saleh duo really really has Sean McVay’s number, and (B) the Niners are somehow still within realistic striking distance of the playoffs.
As of now, the Niners are a single game outside of the final spot in the NFC playoffs and will share a temporary residence with the current seven-seed—the Arizona Cardinals—before battling them again in week 16. There’s a lot of football to be had between now and then, and—by virtue of a deep roster, competitive spirit, and strong coaching—the Niners run the risk of falling just shy of the playoffs while damaging their draft positioning just enough to put a potential first-round QB out of the picture. But that’s something to worry about for another day. For now, the Niners just swept the NFC West’s division leader and did so in impressive (albeit sloppy) fashion.
OFFENSE
The Niners were far from pretty on offense, struggling with their running game after the Rams committed to stopping it above-all-else and turning the ball over an alarming three times. But our 348 yards of offense were the most the Rams have allowed since (checks notes) the last time they played us, and the two scoring drives to cap off the game were—if not the prettiest—a statement that perhaps this offense, as banged up as it is, can get to where we need to be to make a late season push.
What a Difference a Deebo Makes. No disrespect to Raheem Mostert and Jeff Wilson who—despite losing a fumble each—contributed far more than their middling stats would indicate, but my god this offense looks different with Deebo on the field.
Deebo has been fully healthy for three games this season. In those two matchups against the Rams and one against the Patriots, the Niners are 3-0 and averaging 402 yards/game—a figure that would rank just two yards per game shy of the Cardinals’ second-best offense if extrapolated over the course of the season.
Deebo’s rare ability to run past and over defenders gives the Niners a horizontal stretch threat that they simply lack with any other combination of players on the field. On both touch passes, screens, and slants Deebo showed the ability to regularly create more yards than a play was designed to get and often in spectacular fashion. His 11 grabs and 133 yards were both career highs, and while his playmaking didn’t exactly open running lanes up on the inside—the Rams committed fully to stopping the run late in the second quarter and dared the Niners to pass—Deebo himself converted enough crucial plays to give the Niners just enough late-game offense to pull out the win.
The Donald Dilemma. Actually, it’s not really a dilemma. The dude just beat the absolute shit out of the right side of our line.
Here’s a a cut-up of four plays from a six-play stretch over the second and third quarters. To be clear, this is four snaps of his over six CONSECUTIVE plays:
Here he is later in the game, making an even bigger impact on back-to-back snaps.
When it comes to Donald there’s only so much that we can do, particularly when forced to drop back and pass because the Rams are committing so heavily against the run. It’s not like we didn’t double team him. We did twice in the above clips and—in part cause of massive off-sets by McKivitz—he split both of them. It’s not like we didn’t try to screen away from him, but he was so explosive off the line he messed that up anyways.
While there’s only one Donald and we won’t have to play him until next year (or the playoffs), the best way to protect against the kind of havoc that he wrecked on our offense in the mid-game is to (a) have your players get better—which is certainly possible given this was McKivitz’s second game playing legitimate minutes and first-ever start—and (b) have the other elements of your offense improve enough to take our offense out of the situations that let him flex as the most dominant player in the NFL.
Mullens Meter: Tepid. I don’t think anyone came out of this game thinking Mullens was the long-term answer at quarterback, but I did exit with more optimism for the next few games until Garoppolo gets back.
Mullens wasn’t amazingly accurate, tossing one pick, gifting another that was dropped on an overthrow, and missing a few open receivers—sometimes on crucial downs. But he also showed some ability to get away from the rush, minimize big losses off sacks, and even create some offense on his own while off-script. Most importantly, he didn’t whither under that pressure—literally or figuratively—and that’s something we can build on.
The turnovers are likely just going to be a thing that happens with Mullens from time-to-time—especially when we don’t have a team totally outmatched talent-wise or schematically—and it would be overly optimistic to assume Mullens is going to become incredibly consistent from week-to-week. But it’s not out of the question that he will get more comfortable in his role and improve. I think he did just that this game, and that was without Brandon Aiyuk in the lineup.
While it wasn’t flashy, Mullens finished the game a quiet 9-of-11 for 87 yards on our final two offensive drives—both leading to field goals that would become the difference between a win and a loss. Against a defense as tough as the Rams, that means something.
Broncos Fiasco. Okay, so what happened with the Broncos—where their entire roster of quarterbacks were pulled off the practice field the day before the game and they had to start a practice squad WR at QB with zero reps—has nothing to do with the 49ers. But after a reporter asked Shanahan if he would think about isolating a quarterback in case of a COVID outbreak (his answer was a resounding “no”), Shanny said that if he had to he’d likely start Jet McKinnon at quarterback. Which got me thinking…
Obviously, we would never actually want to see a non-quarterback have to play quarterback for an entire game, but Jet was an All-American QB at Georgia Southern. Sure, that was in an option offense and he only completed 28 passes over his last two seasons, but he also tossed 11 touchdowns during that time frame. So if the Niners had to play a game without a quarterback and had—unlike the Broncos—some actual time to prepare for it, this would be my best guess as to what that offense would look like: a wing T / single wing option-based scheme (from Shanahan’s Saratoga days) with Deebo splitting time in the backfield and as a wing back, Aiyuk running a lot of fly sweeps, and the majority of the passing attack coming off pop passes, rollout sail route combinations, and the occasional tunnel screen.
Anyways, COVID amirite?
DEFENSE
Back-to-back masterpieces from Robert Saleh, who at this point has to be a front-runner for any number of head jobs this off-season. His unit held the Rams to 308 yards, their lowest offensive total since (checks notes again) the last time they played us, and 124 of those yards came on three big plays that should have been snuffed out for shorter gains. While last year’s defense was better, this year’s coaching job has been more impressive. Any questions about whether it was just a case of talent winning the day have been full squelched. It’s impossible to guess what kind of head coach Saleh will eventually make, but it would be even more ludicrous to claim he hasn’t yet earned that shot.
Safety switching. Just like last game against the Saints, Jimmie Ward spent more of his time down near the line of scrimmage while Tarvarius Moore played primarily as the deep safety. Ward has effectively been playing strong safety (with a dash of nickel) while Moore has been playing free.
This change has allowed Ward—who had a slow start to the season—to be at his most effective, leaning on his wide breadth of coverage experience he gained from the incessant position-switching of his first years in the league. While his injury history and body type make for potential long-term concerns once we matchup against more power run-based offenses, letting Ward play near the line of scrimmage and in the nickel has really shown off his versatility and has led to more of the splash plays that he’s always critiqued for not creating enough of.
Likewise, playing deep has given Moore the chance to use his tremendous length and speed to take away any threat of deep passes over the middle, even if his issues with deep safety tackling angles reared their ugly head again on Sunday.
As noted before, 124 of the Rams’ 308 yards of offense came on three plays. For all three of those plays, Moore was at least partially responsible. He got caught watching routes in front of him when he should have sunk to take away the deep out on a bootleg sail, took a bad angle in support on a pass to Cooper Kupp—leading to an additional 15 yards—and triggered downhill too quickly then gave up the inside shoulder on Cam Akers’ 61-yard run. The Rams only scored on three offensive drives. The big plays above made up the majority of yardage on each of those drives.
While Moore’s struggles with tackling angles from the high safety position are worrisome, the Ward/Moore combo is tantalizing enough that I’d let him ride it out. If it’s something that he can improve with more reps—this is only his second season at free safety and sixth start at the position—then we’ve shored up a big question mark for next season.
Dat DL depth. Despite missing both DJ Jones and Jordan Willis to the COVID list, the defensive line was absolutely dominant this game. While only tallying two sacks, the Niners registered six QB hits and had seven-and-a-half tackles for loss on the game—absolutely bottling up the Rams’ outside running game and making Jared Goff throw into the teeth of a defense that he simply couldn’t figure out.
With two sacks and four QB hits on his own, Kerry Hyder has almost certainly played his way out of re-signing with the Niners this off-season (if the team moves on from Dee Ford then that may change). He’s a half-sack away from tying his career high in sacks and is on pace to be quite the unlikely double-digit sack man for the Niners. For now, we can only hope Hyder continues to shred and nets us as high a comp pick as possible.
In his first career start, Kevin Givens continued to assert himself, totaling two tackles, one for loss, a fumble recovery, and a QB hit that forced Goff into one of his two interceptions and secured fellow defensive lineman Javon Kinlaw his first-ever touchdown. There is no question he’s become a big part of our defensive plans moving forward.
Despite heavy losses, our d-line has been performing at a high level throughout the year, which is both a testament to the depth that we’ve acquired at the position—often at little-to-no cost—and the coaching of DL coach Kris Kocurek. If Saleh does get a head job this off-season, Kocurek’s name has been brought up more than once as the heir apparent, but I’m not quite sure. Kocurek has been a DL coach in the NFL for ten years now, and there’s a chance he’s one of those position coaches who simply wants to be very very good at just that—being a defensive line coach.
After all, this is the same guy who Arik Armstead described as:
“He's a football junkie, but more than that I would say he's a D-line junkie. It's all he cares about in life when it comes to football. He's addicted to D-line play. That's all he thinks about, all he cares about. That's like his high in life. He'll tell us, 'I only slept for an hour last night because I was thinking about this stunt or this play.' That's how his brain works."
Regardless of what his role may be next year, he’s absolutely a guy we should be thrilled to have on the Niners staff.
A taste of our(?) own medicine. After the Saints adjusted to our fly sweep/edge game with nickel blitzes triggered by motion, we deployed something similar against the Rams on Sunday.
Here’s a counter run out of a double tight formation.
The Rams are looking to use the fly motion to fake a fly sweep and pull attention the wrong way while looping the tight wideout (#11) across the formation as the kickout block on a counter run the other way. Theoretically, they have 8 blockers against 7 men in the box; the numbers advantage is even more severe if they believe the fly motion will pull a box defender out of the play.
However, upon seeing motion, Sherman now has no one to his side other than an in-line tight end. With the Niners perfectly happy with letting a safety or linebacker handle that player if he goes out on a pass, Sherman cat blitzes off the edge, getting enough depth quickly enough that he makes for an impossible kick out block and in general just mucks up the work with the timing and execution of the play.
As you can see from the end zone angle, the Rams’ numbers in the box were overwhelming, and a giant hole was created… but none of that mattered since the play was blown up at the point of attack.
We also did something similar later in the game by deploying what resembled a squeeze-scrape—or the gap-switching edge technique that teams often run against shotgun, zone read attacks—against the Rams’ fly/handoff combo runs.
Sick of our team speed beating them to the point of attack on their zone and stretch runs, here the Rams are once again trying to run counter opposite a fly sweep fake, but this time they’ve pulled a tight end off the field and replaced him with a receiver (outside of frame, to the right of the screen, wide of Jimmie Ward).
This means that the outside corner can’t cat blitz to blow the play up at the point of attack so the Niners do something else to replicate that kind of edge disruption.
The Niners are slanting the majority of their defensive line towards the fly motion and letting their second-line defenders play their run fits away. This is particularly important on the back-side, where Arik Armstead and Jimmie Ward are basically squeeze-scraping, or switching edge responsibilities.
Slanting linemen and switching gap responsibilities isn’t something insane or new, it’s part of the foundation of any defense, but this backside gap switch is particularly effective against the inside/out threat that the Rams present with their run game.
Just like Sherman on the CAT blitz, Ward immediately aims to get penetration so that he can mess up the play’s timing, avoid any kickout block, and play the bootleg in case of play action. The Rams also made the critical error of putting a tight end on Arik Armstead in the run game, and that tight end is beat immediately to the inside.
While the running back would awkwardly spin out of Armstead’s reach as he was being blocked, the back’s momentum was fully stopped, he had nowhere to run, and he spun directly into the waiting arms of Kentavius Street.
Throughout the game, the Niners’ secondary confused the Rams with edge blitzes and filled hard in the alleys when called upon. This not only shut down the Ram’s rushing attack (outside of the 61-yard run, the Rams totaled 65 yards on 27 carries for 2.7 ypc) but also confused Goff in the passing game.
Masters of Disguise. When Goff gets in a rhythm and is confident in what he’s seeing, he can dice up a defense, but when he has to double take or finds himself coming out of play action fakes and seeing something unexpected, he can get thrown off in a hurry. Thus, disguising our coverages is tantamount to throwing the Rams’ QB off his mark, and we did that beautifully on Sunday.
Here is a simple but marvelously executed example of exactly how these kinds of disguised coverages can throw Goff off his game.
Pre-snap, the Niners are showing Cover 3, with a clear single-high safety, Sherman playing off and looking inside, and Verrett—while showing press—in a position where he could easily turn and bail at the snap. So the Rams have a Cover 3 beater called against it, hoping to high low the top of the formation, hit the crosser behind the linebackers or play pitch-and-catch on either of the comebacks against corners playing deep thirds.
But the Niners are not in Cover 3.
They’re actually in Cover 1, with a linebacker squatting to help on any crossers and Moore deep to help on anything down the field. The return of Sherman—who is as comfortable in man or zone off-coverage while eyeing the quarterback as any corner in the league—helps us really sell that Cover 3 look. While there’s a chance the Rams could hit the quick out against man with a great release, this is already a play-calling win for Saleh.
After the snap we can see the second level of the defense’s deception. Fred Warner has timed up the snap count and lunged forward as if he’s blitzing, all the while locking eyes with Goff as the Rams QB looks right of formation at the high-low read.
But once Goff looks left at his crosser and comeback (and Warner is out of his peripheral), our All-Pro linebacker stops his blitz and widens out. He’s actually in man coverage on the running back and is sniffing out the supposedly safe check down route.
Goff sees that nothing’s open and turns to the swing pass—believing it to be an easy completion since Warner was coming on the blitz. But by the time Goff gets his eyes on the swing, both he and Warner have the exact same thing on their minds: a case of deja vu from last December.
Effectively trapped, Goff looks upfield to see if anything has opened up off schedule. Given the nature of the routes, the timing of the play, and the fact that he is squarely in the pocket, it comes as no surprise that every receiver is blanketed. With the defensive line closing in on him, the terror in his eyes is apparent.
Thus he gets the anime teardrop treatment.
Through the past two years and four contests, these are Jared Goff’s averages against us versus every other opponent he’s played during that time.
And that’s including the wildly out-of-character first half of the December 2019 game, when the Rams went heavy on screens and bootleg passes and Goff threw for nearly as many completions (16) and yards (191) in a single half as he’s thrown for in any other full game against us in the past two years. Take out that outlier and the stats are considerably more grim.
Not great, Bob. Not great.
Pour some for Taylor. Jamar Taylor going down to an ACL tear was a heartbreaker, both because he was a journeyman who worked hard to make the practice squad, then the active roster, then takeover the starting nickel role, and because he was playing well enough that he could have potentially secured himself a multi-year extension in the off-season. For any journeyman in the NFL, getting any kind of multi-year deal is huge.
With Richard Sherman and Jason Verrett starting outside, Emmanuel Moseley slid into Taylor’s nickel slot when he went down. Moseley doesn’t really have the kind of lateral quickness that you typically look for in a nickel corner, and he was targeted early on before he could get situated—especially in hurry-up situations just after Taylor went down. However, Moseley has played in the slot in the past—albeit only in training camp—and he’s such a quick study that you have to imagine he’ll be more prepared going forward, even if it’s not his natural, nor likely long-term, position.
Yet another impressive team win against the Rams has us once again thinking we may be returning to form, but in order for that to materialize into an actual playoff berth, there’s no room for error. Next up, a Bills team that’s sitting 8-3 and on top of the AFC East.
Go Niners 👍🏈