Once More, With Feeling
Over the past 10 years, teams make the playoffs 40% of the time when they finish the season with nine wins, 90% of the time when they finish with ten, and 100% of the time when they hit eleven or more. So a 5-4 finish would be sketchy (at best), a 6-3 finish might be good enough, and anything better than that basically secures us a chance to reclaim our NFC throne.
The good news? We’ve historically finished seasons well. Over the entire ShanaLynch era, we’re 39-21 (65%) in regular season games played in November or later. If we only include games where someone named Jimmy G or Brock Purdy started, we’re 33-7 (82.5%). If we only include games after that cursed 2020 season, we’re 23-4 (85%).
While it would be beyond ignorant to think that just because we’ve had late season success before we’ll have it again, at least there’s precedent. So despite holding a definitionally average 4-4 record and staring down the 4th-most difficult remaining schedule, now’s the time for us to turn the corner and voltron our many parts into the world-destroying (defending?) juggernaut we’ve come to expect… hopefully.
Le Health. Spoiler alert. A lot of the issues discussed below might just be solved by the return of reigning OPOTY Christian McCaffrey and top 10 linebacker Dre Greenlaw. CMC is expected to return against the Bucs. Greenlaw will likely be back a few weeks later. There are also a ton of key players–Kittle, Warner, Mason, Deebo, Jennings–who have been slowed by injuries and should benefit from the week off.
The Deets. Botched plays and miscommunications based on little details–both on offense and defense–have been at the forefront of our sloppy play. On offense, that means timing, releases, and depths of route combinations–especially in bunches and stacks. On defense, switches on the boundaries, hand-offs, and–in general–fewer blown coverages.
The horse is dead. But if we beat it one more time… Understatement of the year: special teams need to improve. We’re not asking for miracles. A bump to simply “below average” could be huge.
OFFENSE
The Niners’ inability to close out games usually gets pushed on its offense because Shanahan runs the offense, but a quick look at the stats shows that–this year–that probably shouldn’t be the case. Yes, it’s a full team effort and the collapse of the complementary football we always talk about is very much to blame for our late-game collapses. But our overall offensive stats vs fourth-quarter splits have remained quite potent.
A few notes before the data table. The darker the green the better it is. The darker the red the worse it is. Kneel-down drives are NOT counted in points per drive stats, so I didn’t include them in this breakdown. I also removed our two successful “game icing” drives from point and scoring figures as it felt weird to punish the offense during the rare case when NOT scoring was better than scoring. Also, the fourth quarter rankings compare our fourth quarter figures to league averages across all quarters. I didn’t break down all fourth quarters for every team. I have slightly more of a life than that. Which is the same reason I didn’t tabulate every team’s TD%.
It’s not all roses, but we’ve generally done our duty on offense late in games.
The Short Game. Needless to say, a shoulder injury affects a running back’s ability to break tackles, especially when the back is a bruiser like Mason. The bye week should help him get at least a tad bit healthier, but–due in part to his injury–we’ve settled into a rather average unit on the ground: 12th in Rushing DVOA, 11th in Rushing EPA/play. But the area we’ve struggled most–and where we (somewhat surprisingly) miss CMC–is in short yardage attempts.
This season, we’re second in the league in adjusted line yards but 17th in % of runs tackled at or behind the line of scrimmage and 20th in success rate on runs on 3rd or 4th and two or less. We’re still busting off medium and long runs at an impressive clip, but it’s the tough inside yards where we’ve lagged. Mason is an absolute battering ram. It’s not toughness or power that he’s missing on these short runs. It’s patience and trusting his blockers. More than a few times, both Mason and Guerendo have gotten caught either turning up field on a should-be bounce or cutting back against their blockers because the first look has been a bit cloudy. That’s natural for a young back getting their first big touches in the NFL, but CMC is a run scheme fundamentalist. I’d still love it if we implemented power or duo into our run game a bit more in these situations, but once CMC returns our short-yardage success rates should improve.
Unsurprisingly, short yardage running is quite important for redzone scoring. And while our redzone TD % has been a much more respectable 61.5% since the Cardinals snafu, CMC’s return will pay dividends within the twenties, both through the air and on the ground.
Quality over Quantity. While we’re on the run game, our fourth quarter run splits in wins versus losses are pretty telling. This does NOT include Purdy scrambles. Only designed runs.
It’s not surprising that we’re running more in wins when we’re more likely to be nursing a lead, but the efficiency disparity is alarming. And it’s not like we’ve abandoned the run in the games we’ve let slip away. If we exclude offensive snaps within the last two minutes of games when we were either tied or behind and hurrying to score, we had 19 total offensive plays against the Rams and the Cardinals. 10 of those plays were designed runs. This points to another problem that we’ll get to on the defensive side. That’s far too few offensive plays to work with.
Don’t listen to Drake. No one should have expected us to consistently move the ball against the Chiefs with Chris Conley, Ronnie Bell, and two rookies as our receiver corps, but Purdy left a bunch of yards on the field in that game because he was too aggressive and careless with the ball. While Purdy has taken massive steps forward in every facet of his game, when he gets into trouble it’s often because he’s forcing the ball or waiting too long for the big play to develop despite options being open underneath. It’s a bit ironic given Purdy’s mislabeling as a checkdown artist, but when his aggressiveness is appropriately dialed he performs like a top 5 QB. When he gets greedy, we can get behind the chains and become turnover-heavy.
Bill Vinovich’s Ghost. Don’t worry, the irony here isn’t lost on me. Despite ranking in the bottom ten in overall penalties, we’re fourth in offensive holds. And these holds often come at the worst possible time. Of the 15 fourth-quarter drives that ended in a field goal attempt or worse, four included a penalty during our last set of downs. Across the entire season, offensive penalties have wiped out four of our touchdowns, easily the worst mark in the league.
It’s something we need to clean up, but it also feels like something that’s likely to adjust to the mean. Or it won’t. Cause the world is terrible.
Matters of Man. At this point, we know what teams want to do against us. They want to run press man, blitz, and crowd the line of scrimmage to deter us from the run game. That will only become more apparent with the loss of Aiyuk, our top outside man-beater. Some teams–like the Chiefs–major in this scheme. They’ll naturally be more difficult to attack because they spend all year repping and perfecting this defense. Others, like the Cowboys last week, may try to dabble. Those are the teams we have to punish.
While the undermanned Cowboys won’t be our stiffest test offensively, it was good to see how quickly we adjusted to the schematic curveball they threw at us out of their bye week. We should see plenty of man-beaters in our playbook coming out of the bye week, and I’d love to get Jacob Cowing–and his speed–involved, even if it’s just in ways similar to how the Rams utilize Tutu Atwell. Also, CMC’s return means linebackers will have to guard him in the passing game, so… 🫡 good luck with that. But on top of the concepts themselves, the way we package plays could prove quite important.
Shanahan always gives Purdy two plays at the line of scrimmage so that he can “kill/can” the first one if the defensive look isn’t right. Usually, that second call is from the same or similar formation so that the play can attack a (theoretically) similar look. But against the Cowboys and their blatant crowding of the box and press man behind it, our second calls often moved us into the gun–to buy time from blitzers–and motioned us into empty–to give us favorable matchups and open up the middle for catch-and-runs. Perhaps the more meme-like a team wants to get in hedging against our run game and what we do best, the more drastic those checks will become to exploit it.
DEFENSE
I want to preface this by saying that I think Nick Sorensen has done a much better job over the past three weeks after an up-and-down first month as DC. Whether or not he’s the man for the job AFTER this season is a question for January (or February yeet yeet), when guys like Saleh and Dennis Allen are officially on the table. For now, patience isn’t just the best path forward, it’s the only one. Saleh had an adjustment period. Ryans had an adjustment period. While improvement in the second half is far from guaranteed, there’s no reason to believe Sorensen isn’t capable of following in his predecessors’ footsteps. So, with that said… let’s look at our chart.
Yeah… Complementary football has played a part in our late game collapses. We put away that Cardinals game if not for Jordan Mason’s fumble in the redzone, and special teams… well, you know. But the defense–for all its improvements in the past month–has gotten consistently killed in fourth quarters. So let’s try and figure out why.
The Long Con. It’d be one thing if our offense was hanging our defense out to dry with short fields based on quick punts and turnovers deep in our end, but of the 8 fourth-quarter touchdown drives we’ve allowed, only one has been under 70 yards in length (a Rams 55-yarder following a missed field goal). And our averages for drive length allowed–both in number of plays (8.3) and yardage (45.7)—are both worst in the league. There’s no real way around it, we’re just getting shredded in fourth quarters.
The Usual Suspects. Ever since 2019, the go-to assumption for any of our defensive struggles late in games has been fatigue–particularly in our pass rush. My assumption going into this was that our pass rush win rate would fall off a cliff in the fourth quarter of games, but 35% of our sacks have occurred in that final stanza. So maybe not.
Remembering how the Cardinals and Chiefs chewed us up on the ground, I then looked at the running game. While it’s true that our splits have been worse in losses…
…I’m not sure those figures are dramatic enough to explain the problem. Yes, our run defense is ranked 19th in DVOA and 14th in EPA/play. Decidedly average. But for every Arizona or Kansas City who closed us out on the ground, there was a Los Angeles, Minnesota, or Dallas who diced us up just as badly through the air despite combining for 45 fourth-quarter rushing yards.
Our run defense as a whole is an issue. Absolutely. But the unfortunate takeaway from all this is that–when it comes to why we’ve allowed 71 points in fourth quarters (or 39% of our season total)—there isn’t one easy answer. The answer is it’s a little bit of everything.
Big Dom Better Watch Out. Let’s talk defensive theory. While all defenses require excellent coordination and connectivity, ours—which relies less on complexity and more on execution—needs it more than most. When our DL isn’t pressuring the quarterback, teams have too long to pass and can find spots in our predominantly soft zone coverages. When we aren’t flowing fast to the ball, our super-aggressive missed tackles don’t force ball carriers back into help, they just allow a lot of yards after contact. And when our linebackers aren’t smothering receivers down the field in coverage… turns out a lot opens up.
Our DL gets all the pub, but for years, our linebackers have been the real unique advantage of our defense. When you can blanket underneath receivers, cloud the middle of the field, and sink deeper than anyone else on intermediate routes, your pass rush has more time to get home, your safeties can play deeper and downhill, and you force offenses to either win their matchups down the field or chip away slowly on comebacks and snap routes outside the hashes.
This year, that has not been the case. But it might be again soon. While Warner is an absolute stud, Campbell and Flannigan-Fowles have been bright red targets on either side of him. That’s given offenses underneath safety valves that allow them to beat (or simply avoid) our pass rush while staying on schedule. With Dee Winters rapidly improving (if he can stay healthy) and Dre Greenlaw returning from injury, those passing lanes may close up in a hurry. And when they do, we might see a ripple effect throughout our defense.
The Burgeoning Back. The other reason for optimism here is the youth movement that we’re seeing in our secondary. While there have been hiccups and blown plays off of miscommunications and assignment issues early, there has also been stellar play from rookies Renardo Green and Malik Mustapha. Through the ShanaLynch era we’ve rarely (if ever) had three strong cornerbacks. Even when our defense was at its best, the weakness was usually “find a way to block long enough to try something deep over our second outside cornerback.” Whether it was Ahkello Witherspoon, Ambry Thomas, or anyone in between, there’s long been the belief that the one true weakness of our defense is that—if you play your cards right—you can get a big one over the top against us down the sideline.
Over the last three weeks, Renardo Green has taken over that third cornerback position on the outside. Right now, he’s PFF’s 7th-ranked cornerback. Sample size is important here, but he has looked STICKY in coverage. As long as we can hammer out the sporadic assignment/communication issues that have plagued us in the first half of the season, our secondary could be peaking in an impressive way come playoff time.
4 > 5. The NFL has largely moved to a five-man pressure league, and—over the first month of the season—our blitz rate seemed to follow that trend. By week four we were peaking somewhere around league average, sending blitzes upwards of 30% of the time. Well, not so fast.
After dialing back our extra rushers in a big way over the last four games, we’re back down to a 17.3% blitz rate. Good for third lowest in the NFL and right on par with our 18% blitz rate last season. And the main reason for that? We’re terrible at it. When we send extra men, we have the lowest defensive EPA in the NFL.
We’ve never been a big blitz team, but when we’re at our best the blitz has been a highly effective change-up. This has not been the case under Sorensen. But I do think a lot of the blitz-burning that’s torpedoed our EPA was from the first month of the season when we were figuring things out. And–as our young players develop and we get closer to full strength–perhaps we can get back to blitzing from time to time and actually be good at it.
We didn’t make a big splash along the DL at the trade deadline, only adding Khalil Davis—an athletic one-gapper who is familiar with our scheme from his time in Houston. But, with Yetur Gross-Matos returning and Sam Okuayinonu starting to get deployed in more inside-outside work as a pass rusher, we should be capable of doing a bit more mixing and matching on passing downs. Fronts and stunts on long downs and distances are always going to be more foundational to how we generate pass rush than blitzes. But if we can just get okay at blitzing, we open a much bigger playbook for Sorensen. And the ability to have a change-up that we don’t get absolutely shelled when deploying could help close out some games.
The defensive fourth quarter splits are undeniably bleak, but there’s reason for hope that we can turn the corner as we exit the bye week and get healthier on both sides of the ball. Based on the schedule ahead of us and the missed opportunities behind, we’ll have to do just that in order to make another run.
Go Niners 🏈👍