Farewell, Coach Ryans

It seemed written in stone as early as September, but there was always the selfish hope that few enough jobs would be available or enough out-of-touch owners would hire Jeff Saturday for us to get one more year of DeMeco Ryans as our defensive coordinator. Alas—the man who was labeled a “future head coach” before he was even our DC was never long for the Niners, and he just signed a six-year contract to become the next head coach of the Houston Texans.

Congratulations to Coach Ryans. The promotion was well deserved, and he will be sorely missed. Ryans took a defense that was a top ten unit in back-to-back seasons under Robert Saleh, successfully maneuvered it through the landmine that was our cornerback room in 2021, then rode late season momentum and an improved secondary to a #1 defensive rating in every metric imaginable this year. Universally lauded for his brilliant scheming, innate leadership qualities, and the ability for him to routinely get his guys playing like their hair was on fire, Ryans played a big role in the emergence of Fred Warner, Dre Greenlaw, and Azeez Al-Shair. After crossing paths with Coach Shanahan while in his playing days in Houston, Ryans was one of Shanahan’s first hires, quickly ascending from a defensive quality control coach to an inside linebackers coach, and—after five short years with the Niners—is now off to lead his own team. While Houston is kind of a shitshow and their owner is the unlikeable real-life version of Tommy Boy, the team is loaded with draft capital and cap space and—with a few smart moves—can contend more quickly than people think (it helps that they reside in the AFC South).

Lastly, since DeMeco Ryans is the second minority member of our staff to get poached this off-season (Ran Carthon was named GM of the Titans) we’ve got more third-round comp picks incoming. While there’s a weird, kind-of-bullshit loophole in the rule that says we get three picks over three years rather than four over two (the standard rate is two comp picks over two years per hire), it’s still a massive deal for a team that finds itself light on early round picks next year. I believe we’re the only team to be affected by this loophole (and this is the second time we’ve run into it in two years) because of course we are, but oh well. Score one for us. Score one for finding absolute beast coaches by not being racist. Hooray!

As for what happens next, that’s what the rest of this write-up is for. Unlike in 2020 when Robert Saleh left and we had Ryans ready to take the mantle, there isn’t an obvious candidate to replace our departed defensive coordinator this time around. But given we were just the #1 ranked defense in football, have All-Pros on all three levels, and have sent two DCs to head coaching jobs in the past three years, one would think we won’t be short on potential candidates.

What We’re Looking For

First and foremost we’re looking for an excellent coach. This isn’t the olden days of the NFL where a team could get by with an average play-caller on one side of the ball. If you don’t believe me, who’s the worst OC or DC from this year’s final four? How about last year? Or the year before that? When the names that come across your head are the Bengals’ head coach Zac Taylor/Brian Callahan or three-time Super Bowl winner Steve Spagnuolo you know you can’t get by with a scrub on one side of the ball, and I doubt Shanahan—one of the game’s most analytical minds—has any interest in bringing in someone who isn’t buttoned up with their shit to the highest level.

Other important notes include:

• They can work with the wide 9 and Kris Kocurek: Our DL could shuffle through a lot of bodies this off-season but Kris Kocurek’s ability to milk plus play out of older veterans or discarded guys on rookie deals is one of our greatest advantages as an organization. When you can manufacture depth at one of the league’s most expensive and important positions despite massive turnover in your two deep every season, you have an innate competitive advantage, and we have that with Kocurek. Thus, it’s important that any new DC’s scheme meshes with our aggressive one-gapping front-of-preference.

• They run primarily zone: The greatest personnel advantage we have compared to anyone else in the league is the insane range of our linebackers. While Warner and Greenlaw can stick with guys in man coverage as well, we best utilize their talents allowing them to eliminate the middle of the field in a way that most teams—who minimize the importance and value of off-ball linebackers—cannot. Perhaps more importantly, our secondary—with the exception of Charvarius Ward—is much more suited for zone coverage. It would be a shame to waste a talent like Hufanga running down the field in man coverage on speedy slot receivers when he could be patrolling, reading patterns, and making plays on the ball.

• Clear communicators. Strong motivators: By now I think a lot of the fire that comes from our defense is pretty inherent in leaders like Fred Warner, so I’m not super worried about that. But the ability for our defenders to play aggressive and physical is often tied to their preparation and confidence in their assignments. Saleh and Ryans were excellent communicators. The next DC must be the same.

Familiar Faces

If we’re looking in-house, secondary coach Cory Undlin is the most likely candidate. The 51-year-old has been a defensive coach in the NFL for nearly twenty years and—since he’s been our defensive pass game specialist for the past two years—is already closer to a coordinator than the other defensive assistants. Our secondary has two coaches—and safeties coach Daniel Bullocks has a strong reputation—so, as always, it’s hard to give anyone accurate credit for anything, but our DBs have vastly improved over the past two seasons. While the outside corner position was a nightmare for the majority of 2021, Ambry Thomas emerged from the rubble as a solid option down the stretch and second-year players Deommodore Lenoir and Talanoa Hufanga showed explosive growth in 2022. 

Undlin actually was a defensive coordinator as recently as 2020, so he has experience in the role, but that was with a 5-11 Lions team that fired its head coach midway through the season. Unsurprisingly, the results were ugly:

2022 - DVOA - 32nd // Pass - 32nd // Rush - 27th // Pressure Rate: 32nd

As for any of these ratings, it’s best not to put all the blame or all of the credit on the defensive coordinator—especially when the head man gets fired mid-season—but that’s a tough resume when stacked up against the big names that we’re bringing in for interviews.

If there’s another in-house candidate it’s probably Johnny Holland, as he was the run game specialist under Saleh and has been with the team as a linebackers coach since Shanahan’s arrival. However, Holland had to step away from the team for parts of last year for multiple myeloma treatments. While the players love him and the linebackers in particular consider him family, who knows how interested Holland would even be in taking on greater stresses and responsibilities as a defensive coordinator? My guess would be he sticks around as our linebackers coach, which will be as important as ever with Ryans moving on.

While not an internal candidate, another guy we’d be familiar with is Joe Woods. He was the DB coach and passing game coordinator during our Super Bowl run, but he departed shortly thereafter for the defensive coordinator position under Kevin Stefanski in Cleveland. Largely credited for updating our coverage schemes on the back end, there was talk that the Niners tried to keep Woods by telling him he would have been the next man up when Saleh got a head gig. However, that’s only speculation—especially given there was already talk back then that Ryans was the likely heir apparent—and it’s TBD how interested the Niners would be in a reunion after three lackluster years as a DC in Cleveland.

2020 - DVOA - 23rd // Pass - 25th // Rush - 23rd // Pressure Rate - 24th
2021 - DVOA - 11th // Pass — 7th // Rush - 23rd // Pressure Rate - 17th
2022 - DVOA - 23rd // Pass - 16th // Rush - 28th // Pressure Rate - 27th

While the Cleveland Browns are still the Cleveland Browns, that’s still a defense with one of the top edge rushers in the game and decent talent along the defensive line and in the secondary. A reunion where Woods took over a spot in the secondary from a departed assistant may make some sense, but we wouldn’t exactly be buying high on him if we were to make him a DC.

cooking up ways to murder slant routes

The OGs

The most popular name that’s been getting circulated basically since DeMeco Ryans turned down a second head coach interview with the Vikings a year ago is our guy Vic Fangio, who is slated to meet with the Niners later this week. Niners fans know Fangio well, as he was the architect behind our nasty Harbaugh defenses, and—when he didn’t take a DC position last year—many stamped him as our DC-in-waiting. Currently serving as a defensive consultant for one of his many proteges in Philadelphia, Fangio’s defense is as sought after as Shanahan’s offense. His footprints are all across the league, and it’s not surprising why.

Here are the splits from Fangio’s last stint as a DC in Chicago (pressure rate wasn’t recorded before 2018)…

2015 - DVOA - 31st // Pass -  25th // Rush -  31st // Pressure Rate - n/a
2016 - DVOA - 22nd // Pass - 18th // Rush - 28th // Pressure Rate - n/a
2017 - DVOA - 14th // Pass - 15th // Rush - 18th // Pressure Rate - n/a
2018 - DVOA - 1st // Pass -  1st // Rush - 2nd // Pressure Rate - 12th

…and, just for fun, here are his splits from his time in San Francisco before that.

2011 - DVOA - 3rd // Pass - 8th // Rush - 1st
2012 - DVOA - 4th // Pass - 7th // Rush - 1st
2013 - DVOA - 13th // Pass - 11th // Rush - 15th
2014 - DVOA - 5th // Pass - 6th // Rush - 10th 

While there was a clear adjustment period in Chicago as he retooled their defensive personnel and shifted them from a 4-3 to a 3-4, the end results were classic Fangio. But that adjustment period is worth noting. Fangio loves the Niners. He’s visited team headquarters multiple times over the past year and—back in 2017—he wanted to leave Chicago to return to the bay under Shanahan, but the Bears blocked his request. Yes, “sources” claimed Fangio had committed to the Dolphins just days ago, but the idea of him flipping to the Niners is very much a possibility.

While Fangio’s interest in the position seems legitimate, the bigger question is how likely his scheme meshes with Nick Bosa and Kris Kocurek. Fangio’s defense has evolved in step with the passing attacks that now run rampant through the NFL, and it’s not impossible to pair his defense with more one-gap and wide nine principles (case in point: Eagles). Also, his defense—like all others—spends a large amount of time in nickel formations due to the decreasing size and increasing speed of offenses across the country, and nickel defenses typically differ less than base sets. But after our 2022 performance and the four-season run we’ve had on defense, we are definitely in “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” territory. I have to assume much of Shanahan’s conversation with Fangio will be as much about what Fangio would NOT change as what he would bring to the table.

But if that meeting goes well and there’s a healthy middle ground that Fangio and our current staff are excited about, this would be a home run hire. Fangio may not be an up-and-coming head coaching candidate or a minority candidate who—if he left for a head coaching job—would net us more of those sweet sweet third-round comp picks that we love so dearly, but there’s a very real world where Fangio just wants to settle in and coach bomb ass defenses until the end of time. And if that’s the case then, yeah, it would be pretty sick if he was on our team.

Another guy who we’re bringing in for an interview this week is Steve Wilks, long-time Ron Rivera protege, and—most recently—the Carolina Panthers’ interim head coach. Wilks was a finalist for the head coaching gig in Carolina, had near unanimous support for the gig from his locker room, and did an admirable job finishing 6-6 while piloting a team that started 1-5 and played sad quarterback roulette with Baker Mayfield, Sam Darnold, and PJ Walker this season. This is a team that was a DJ Moore helmet penalty away from a playoff berth this season, and while they—like everyone else in the NFC South—weren’t actually “good,” the job Wilks performed was far better than anything the Panthers ever could have imagined.

Wilks has bounced around for a while after his last shot as a head man saw him getting saddled with the worst OL in NFL history, a rookie Josh Rosen, and an impatient owner with an affinity for Big 12 coaches with losing records. Before that, he was a part of Ron Rivera’s golden era of Carolina Panthers football, coaching DBs for 5 years and being an assistant head coach for 2 before adding defensive coordinator to his resume in 2017. That season the Panthers had the following splits:

2017 - DVOA - 8th // Pass - 11th // Rush - 6th

Wilks had one more stop as an NFL DC in 2019, when he was with the Browns for one year…

2019 - DVOA - 24th // Pass - 18th // Rush - 30th // Pressure Rate - 12th

…before they cleaned house and brought in Stefanski. Not the most impressive numbers in Cleveland but—like with the Panthers this past season—it’s hard to blame the coordinators when the ship is sinking right before their eyes. This was, after all, the Freddie Kitchens year.

Speaking of former head coaches being put in tough spots due to no fault of their own, Gus Bradley is a name that may get connected to us if we don’t hire someone from the three outsiders that we’re known to be interviewing this week. Although our defense has greatly diverged from the Seattle 3 scheme that Bradley took over after Dan Quinn departed the Pacific Northwest, the former Jaguars head man did pilot a top ten defense as recently as 2018, and that was while working under then-Chargers head coach Anthony Lynn.

I’m not going to list the stats of all three of his years as DC with the Chargers (let’s just say, 2018 was the peak) because I think we secure one of the three dudes interviewing in the next few days. But when Lynn’s staff was cleaned out, Bradley hopped between the Raiders and—last year—the Colts, putting up very respectable numbers as DC considering they fired their coach mid-season and hired a dude with zero experience to take over.

2022 - DVOA - 14th // Pass - 18th // Rush - 16th // Pressure Rate - 15th

Again, I don’t expect Bradley to be the guy.

The Young Bloods

Consider this the “likely future head coach” section. These dudes are younger, less proven, and lack head coach experience, but they have been getting the kind of talk that DeMeco Ryans was getting just a year or so ago.

First up is the last of the three names who have been confirmed to be getting interviews this week and that’s Washington’s defensive backs coach Chris Harris. The seven-year NFL vet just wrapped up his third season as the Commanders’ DB coach after spending another four as the assistant DBs coach with the Chargers under Anthony Lynn. This is where my knowledge taps out as it’s basically impossible to evaluate a relatively new position coach working for teams that I couldn’t care less about, but—with requests to be interviewed by both the Titans and the Bears—he’s clearly a rising star in the coaching circuit who Lynn certainly vouched for.

That said, this would be a massive promotion for Harris, as the rumors connecting him to the Titans and Bears are for pass game coordinator/secondary coach roles, NOT a defensive coordinator position. That’s not to say this couldn’t be the right hire (after all, we are the team that promoted DeMeco Ryans to defensive coordinator within three years of his first coaching gig), but it would be a huge career jump with lots of question marks.

The final candidate that I’m cramming in here is a bit of a homer pick, but I also think he’d be a slam dunk hire. Ejiro Evero, who just wrapped up his first season as the Broncos’ DC and who took head coaching interviews with four of the five head coaching openings this off-season, was the DBs coach when I briefly played at UC Davis, and his work on the defensive side of the ball was the only bright spot in the horrid dumpster fire that was the Broncos’ 2022 season.

2022 - DVOA - 10th // Pass - 7th // Rush - 20th // Pressure Rate - 26th

For a big chunk of the season the Broncos were ranked in the top three of a lot of these categories, but eventually—as defenses with no support and fired coaches tend to do—the unit started to crack down the stretch. Even still, a top-10 mark in one of the better offensive divisions in football is nothing to take lightly and Evero has been getting rave reviews all season while helping Justin Simmons and Patrick Surtain to All-Pro honors despite his top two edge rushers going down early to injury or getting traded for picks. Evero came up through the coaching ranks under Monte Kiffin, Dom Capers, Wade Phillips, Raheem Morris, and—over five seasons as an assistant with the Niners—Vic Fangio, and he’s been lauded for his flexibility to fit his scheme to his personnel, his strong communication skills, and his ability to keep the defense focused in a season when the offense regularly turned the ball over and put up the fewest points in franchise history.

I have no idea if Sean Payton will attempt to retain Evero, if Evero will want to stick around after being passed up for the Denver head coach job, if the Broncos will even let him interview with other teams (they blocked the Falcons but that was before they hired Payton), or if the Niners have any interest, but I think he would be a great fit. And, FWIW, while Coach Evero wasn’t my position coach in school, I can vouch that he is incredibly smart and a super nice guy.

Time will tell what direction the Niners go with their next defensive coordinator, but given how much talent the incoming coach will have to work with, I wouldn’t be surprised if they make a hire within the next few days.

Go Niners 👍🏈

Niners Post-Mortem 2022

Same, bruh. Same

When every commentator and talking head starts parroting back the phrase “you have to give the Eagles credit,” you know that if one thing is certain, you do NOT have to give the Eagles credit. They showed up and did NOT lose the only two healthy quarterbacks on their roster. They showed up and did NOT get absolutely hosed by a trash officiating crew all game. But they DID gloat and talk shit all day—as if beating a team without a quarterback was somehow an impressive achievement—and then, as Trent Williams boiled over and summoned all challengers, they promptly decided they were NOT really about that action and backed away. V impressive. Much tough.

Welcome to an extra salty edition of Niners Nonsense, as this was possibly the most frustrating Niners game of my life. There’s not going to be much in-depth analysis of the atrocity of last weekend because it really comes down to this: you can’t win without a quarterback. Not figuratively. Literally. When you no longer have an operational quarterback on the roster, you’re not going to win.

Luck (or lack thereof). This was basically the definition of a game where “nothing goes your way,” and it just happened to occur against a team that is probably one of the luckiest that we’ve seen in quite some time. Luck is not a truly quantifiable stat, but I’m backing that claim by checking in on a stat that—in a sport as violent as football—is largely attributed to good (or bad) fortune: injuries. 

Every single member of the Eagles’ 53-man roster was healthy enough to play on Sunday. Not a single player held an injury designation. And of their original two-deep, only Derek Barnett—who went down in September and is a part of the team’s deepest position—wasn’t healthy enough for this game. In a conference championship weekend that was hugely affected by the Niners running out of quarterbacks, injuries to Mahomes, Kelce, and a handful of the Chiefs receivers, and a Bengals offensive line that just recently had to shuffle in three new starters, the Eagles being 100% healthy was an outrageous product of good fortune. 

Speaking of luck, let’s update the list of quarterbacks that the Eagles have beaten this year: Jared Goff (before he was good), Kirk Cousins, Trevor Lawrence (before he was good), Carson Wentz (long after he was good), Kyler Murray, Cooper Rush, Kenny Pickett, Davis Mills, the ghost of Matt Ryan, an injured Aaron Rodgers who didn’t finish the game, Ryan Tannehill, Justin Fields, Daniel Jones (3x), and N/A. Their losses were to Andy Dalton, Taylor Heinecke, and Dak Prescott. This team is about to go to the Super Bowl after beating a sixth-seeded Giants team that finished the season 2-5-1 and a team with no quarterbacks.

If that’s not luck, I don’t know what is.

They are who we thought they were… One of the most frustrating elements about this game was the fact that it appeared that our coaching staff came in with a superior game plan, but the quarterback injuries prevented us from ever taking advantage. 

It’s impossible to say what our offense would have looked like when our quarterback went down six plays into our first drive, but it’s worth noting that we’d already picked up two relatively easy first downs and had made it to midfield prior to Brock Purdy’s injury. Even when Josh Johnson was thrown in (and he looked terrible), our offense was still springing dudes open—particularly in the second level across the middle of the field. But Johnson—as we probably should have expected given he’s a fourth-string journeyman who we picked up off the street two months ago—just couldn’t get them the ball. 

Despite a complete inability to throw the ball after the first series, there were seams on the ground. Christian McCaffrey picked up 84 yards rushing on 15 carries for a healthy 5.6 average—numbers that you can only assume would have improved if the Eagles weren’t allowed to send all 11 men at the running game for an entire half of football. Again, it wasn’t a big enough sample size to see what the Niners had planned on offense, but the early returns were quite promising before our season dissolved behind a torn UCL. 

On defense DeMeco Ryans and his staff had a strong enough game plan to win this contest—effectively reverse-engineering what the Eagles do on offense and punishing them for their simplicity. But as the game went on and the defense’s execution wavered with exhaustion, sloppy penalties, and just plain shitty penalties, the Eagles were able to take advantage in a quantity-over-quality approach.  

The Eagles may have scored on the first drive but nearly half of their yardage on that drive was due to the 29-yard fourth-down catch that wasn’t actually a catch. That non-completion would wind up Jalen Hurts’ only deep ball of the game. With a game plan that involved us hemming Hurts into the pocket, making him beat us with his arm, and keying the limited route combinations that the Eagles run, we successfully eliminated that entire facet of their offense. Hurts finished 15-of-25 for 121 yards on a 4.8 yards per attempt average—his worst passing performance of the season. Take out that deep ball that wasn’t a deep ball and he threw for 92(!) yards. While I have enough faith in Hurts’ approach to the game and work ethic to believe he very well may develop into the passer that his 2022 statistics would indicate he already is, we basically pantsed this passing attack and showed massive flaws in its competency level and long-term structure. Are there any teams left in the bracket that are talented enough on defense to watch this film and take advantage? TBD. But a massive Hurts extension is coming soon, which means the Eagles won’t be able to skirt by on talent alone. They’ll need to evolve their offense heading into next year or else they may risk hitting a Goff-Rams wall.

As a runner, Hurts did find some room on the ground… once we were already down three touchdowns. Even that success—in a desperate attempt to make it sound like Hurts had more to do with this win than he did—was overstated by the announcers. He finished with 39 yards on 11 carries. Not exactly world-beating numbers. 

The most successful element of the Eagles’ offense was clearly their running game as a whole, but even that should be taken with a massive grain of salt. The Eagles carried the ball 44 times for 148 yards on 3.4 yards per carry. They wore us down with quantity and found some nice seams on the backside cutbacks, but they were greatly aided not only by our lack of a quarterback to keep our offense on the field but by how each of their offensive drives was extended—sometimes multiple times—by trash penalties.

…and we let em off the hook. The officiating crew dominated us on defense. Yes, we had some dumb fouls. But it’s worth noting that—of the Eagles’ five scoring drives—four included first downs due to penalty and the only one that didn’t was the drive that had the fourth down “completion” that clearly wasn’t a catch. Massive assist from the zebras in this one, and while the final score was well out of reach, the way each bad call went against us in pivotal moments of the game was comical.  

On the day, the Eagles gained 6 first downs through the air (5, if you don’t include the non-catch) and 7 first downs via penalty. Three of those penalties—the Jimmie Ward three-yard “pass interference” on third-and-7, the roughing the kicker that should have been—by definition—running into the kicker because it was contact on his kicking leg, not his plant leg, and the Dre Greenlaw unnecessary roughness when he was trying to punch out the ball before the whistle was blown—gave the Eagles a new set of downs after they had already been stopped on either third or fourth down. Even if we gift the Eagles a long field goal conversion regardless of Greenlaw’s penalties, those flags led directly to 14 points. 

In a game where we didn’t need any more obstacles, the refs repeated an absolutely pathetic trend that continued all the way to the final whistle of the afternoon game—reacting to crowd noise from a home fanbase because you’re too scared to do your job correctly. I wouldn’t work in crane lifts if I was afraid of heights. Maybe find another vocation if you don’t have the guts to go against the drunken dude screaming from row eleven. That’s not actually Randall Cunningham yelling in your ear, that’s Big Ted from the warehouse who’s no longer allowed within a hundred feet of schools or Wawas.

They should teach this in training: If a play is over and you haven’t thrown a flag, but—after hearing noise from the crowd—you think you should, treat it like your dick and keep it in your pants. Cause no one wants to see that shit.

Boston called, they want their “incorrigible people as a personality” back

Am I gonna have to root for the fucking Chiefs? Nick Sirianni has done a great job with this football team, but that dude is skyrocketing up the NFL’s “punchable face” power rankings. Raise your hand if you don’t know a convicted felon who looks just like him. An uncle who’s not allowed to Thanksgiving anymore? Did they pick him out of the local drunk tank or did an AI create him from aggregate off of every henchman in a Scorsese knock-off whose one line is calling someone a “broad” or a racial slur? 

Word of advice: if anyone ever describes a man as someone who “embodies their city” and that city is Philadelphia, make sure not to let that man date your sister, watch your dog, or operate any kind of heavy machinery without supervision. If Sirianni doesn’t have “frat bro with a psychosexual affinity for hazing who blacks out and breaks down crying twice a week” energy, I don’t know who does.

But of course, since he coaches for a team whose city’s own nickname is a play on how everyone in that city is a raging asshole, get ready for two weeks of puff pieces about how being a dick is somehow synonymous with charm. I’m sure Sirianni isn’t as bad as the cartoon character he seems to be, but I’ve said it once and I’ll say it a thousand times: there is no positive correlation between being a dick and having success. If you’re great at something, it’s not cause you’re a dick. You just like being a dick.

Cheesesteaks are cool tho. 

Until next time. This wasn’t a game where we ran out of steam. Or where our quarterback shelled up. Or where—like last year—we ran out of bodies and couldn’t overcome a talent deficit. It was just terrible, terrible luck on all fronts. And it’s only made worse by the fact that I absolutely thought we would have won that game and—for the second year in a row—felt we would have had a good matchup in the Super Bowl. Last year we were the hottest team by the end of the season, but not the best. This year, there was a legitimate claim that we were both. This was another lost opportunity for a Super Bowl title, and championship windows are notorious for being smaller than anyone expects. That’s why this game stings the way it does.

On the bright side, we’ve been to three of the past four NFC championships, the core of our team is strong (and mostly young), and our two-deep at quarterback is about to cost 1/4 to 1/5th of the price of upcoming contracts for Jalen Hurts, Lamar Jackson, etc. The impending departure of DeMeco Ryans will hurt, and there’s lots of roster maneuvering and shuffling to be had, but we’re not going anywhere. 

I’m well aware that patience is harder to preach in the game of football than in any other sport. The short careers, the single elimination playoffs, the way games, seasons, and sometimes franchises seem to hinge on one bad bounce, bad play, or bad call—everything about the sport hammers home the importance of the now. But the lessons of the past help shape the future. They make up the foundation upon which great teams are built. After every setback, this team and this locker room have come back hungrier and stronger. Here’s hoping this disappointment—like the many before it—fuels this team for greater things to come and that—when our luck finally matches our ability—we’ll be prepared to seize the moment.

I, for one, believe that will be the case. 

Go Niners 👍🏈

NFC Championship Preview @ Philadelphia

Date: Sunday, 1/29
Time: 12:00 PT for some reason
Location: Lincoln Financial Field (where they threw snowballs at Santa Claus)
Opponent: Philadelphia Eagles

At 14-3 (13-1 with their starting QB), the Philadelphia Eagles are the league’s winningest team. With a +133 point differential and no losses by greater than ten points, they’re the league’s most consistent team. And with six first- or second-team All-Pros and an MVP finalist at quarterback, they’re the league’s most talented team. But it’s worth noting how they got here.

The Eagles are one of the rare organizations who had a wide-open championship window, but—other than one special post-season—flubbed it enough to get their Super Bowl-winning coach fired, then rebuilt their coaching staff and roster and created a second championship window—all in the span of five short years. 

Head coach Nick Sirianni—whose “I got a bone to pick” press conferences, sideline demeanor (I had to pause an All-22 clip after seeing him yelling at an opposing player), and hilarious alleged interactions with civilians are as Philly as it gets—deserves a ton of credit for rejuvenating the Eagles. So does his excellent coaching staff. But GM Howie Roseman deserves a shoutout as well.

Roseman, who was both the architect of the Eagles’ Super Bowl run and the primary hand behind a slew of personnel follies that prevented them from returning to the promised land, easily could have been canned alongside Doug Pederson in 2020. In fact, I thought he should have been. But Roseman—who is also as Philly as it gets—fully accepted his many mistakes and—in the two years since—has moved with incredible speed to rectify them.

Months after Nick Foles led them to a Super Bowl, Carson Wentz was anointed with a massive contract as the next sovereign king of Philadelphia—only for it to turn out that he was a weirdo who nobody really liked, who killed a bunch of ducks (way way too many ducks), and whose MVP-caliber season was a mirage of statistically unrepeatable variance. So Roseman drafted Jalen Hurts, despite this openly affecting Wentz’s play and his relationship with the organization, and—two years after Wentz left—Hurts is an MVP front-runner.

The Eagles were probably the only team (other than the Cardinals lol) who did NOT get a stud wideout from the 2019 and 2020 drafts, as Roseman drafted JJ Arcega-Whiteside over guys like DK Metcalf, Terry McLaurin, and Diontae Johnson, then tried to fix that mistake a year later by selecting Jalen Reagor one pick before Justin Jefferson and with guys like Brandon Aiyuk, Michael Pittman Jr., and Tee Higgins still on the board. Roseman jettisoned both the wideouts he drafted then traded a first- and third-round pick for AJ Brown to pair with 2021 first-rounder DeVonta Smith. Now, Brown and Smith make up one of the best wide receiver pairs in the league.

In the post-Malcolm Jenkins era, Philly played musical chairs in the secondary in hopes of patching over a weakness at a key position. In the past two years, Roseman has traded for Darius Slay, signed James Bradberry from the rival Giants, and sent two third-day picks to the Saints for nickel pest Chauncey Gardner-Johnson to form one of the best cornerback trios in the country. 

These massive positional overhauls, combined with the continued bolstering of the core of their original championship window (elite offensive and defensive lines) with draft picks (Landon Dickerson, Jordan Davis) and savvy veteran adds (sack-leader Hasson Reddick, Ndamukong Suh, Linval Joseph) has led to an Eagles team that is top-to-bottom as good as any in the country. 

OFFENSE

Offense DVOA: 3rd
Weighted: 6th 
Pass: 9th
Run: 1st

The league’s second-highest-scoring offense is back at full strength with the return of MVP finalist Jalen Hurts and First-team All-Pro right tackle Lane Johnson. This unit put up 400+ yards of offense in a whopping 11 of 18 games (including last weekend) and boasts—by DVOA—the NFL’s top rushing attack. According to Football Outsiders, the Eagles’ rushing attack is nearly 50% better than second-best and is as valuable as the league’s #2 and #7 rushing attacks combined.

When Jalen Hurts has been healthy, the Eagles have rushed for upwards of 100 yards in 13-of-16 games, over 200 yards five(!) times, and over 300 yards(!!) once. These guys like to run and everything they do stems from that. But that doesn’t mean their passing attack is lacking. In two of the three games the Eagles didn’t eclipse 100 yards rushing, they threw for upwards of 300.

Fun stuff.

Beauty in simplicity. I’ve always believed that in order to field a championship-caliber offense in today’s NFL you have to have a certain level of complexity in your scheme. The league is too smart and too good and when defenses are given two weeks to prepare (like for the Super Bowl), offenses that are too simple in their approach (2018 Rams, 2015 Panthers) tend to have their tendencies and weak spots exploited. 

But the Eagles hope to have found somewhat of a loophole in this argument by developing an offense that employs largely simple plays and concepts but with enough variety and versatility that it has answers for whatever defenses throw at it. In doing so, they’ve created an offense that is simple in its plays but multiple in the many ways it can attack defenses that try to take away those plays. They have embraced an identity of flexibility.

At their core, the Eagles want to predict and assess what defenses are trying to take away from them then pivot to something else that’s more open. While that can be said of many good offenses (and, on some level, any good offense), the Eagles differ in that their entire playbook is built like a closed-loop rock-paper-scissors game—with relatively simple answers to different fronts and coverages—and they have the utmost confidence and commitment in deploying heavy doses of any one of their answers if the moment calls for it. 

But ultimately, they want to run the ball.

It’s basically the triple option. Other than incredible talent across the board, the Eagles’ option run game has been so successful because—unlike a team that dabbles in the zone read here and there—their zone reads are foundational to their playbook and designed like the 2022 equivalent of a triple option.

The traditional triple option has (surprise) three options: the dive to the fullback, the QB keep, and the pitch to a tailback outside. While the Eagles don’t use a fullback and run their scheme mostly out of the gun, their “triple option” attacks defenses in a similar way to the traditional one—by presenting a give option up the middle, a QB keep option off-tackle, and an outside option that replaces the tailback pitch.

In the original shotgun zone-read system, that third “pitch” option was the bubble screen. With time—and a shift to the NFL—that bubble screen has largely been replaced by RPOs, which aim to stress alley defenders on quick hitters if they commit to the run. The Eagles love RPOs but those are largely eliminated with tight man coverage, so they’ve leaned heavily on having a tight end or wideout come in motion (or start in tight and delay release) before doing a quick shoot route to the flat. This serves the same purpose as the bubble screen or the traditional tailback pitch—it presents a third option on any given play that stresses defenses laterally. And considering the Eagles’ have two 1,000-yard receivers and one of the better tight ends in the game running this shoot route, it’s proven to be quite effective.

This variation of the triple option also lets the Eagles build their option looks directly into their play-action bootleg game, which relies heavily on sail route combinations (streek-deep out-flood). Since a flood is basically the same as a shoot, teams may think they’re guarding the Eagles’ triple option, but once they realize it’s actually a play-action pass, the Eagles have already completed the deep out over their head.

Reactive but Rugged. In the absolute simplest of terms, this is what the Eagles would like to do versus what they will likely do depending on the looks they get. 

• What they would like to do… Run the ball, run zone read, and generate easy sideline reads and deep shots off of play action.

• If shown one-high safety man coverage… Run the ball, run zone read with the weird shoot thing, and rely on crossers and deep jump balls to your stud wideouts.

• If shown one-high safety zone coverage… Run the ball, run zone read with RPOs, and challenge alley defenders with sail routes and in-breakers.

• If shown two-high safeties… Run the ball and run zone read.

This isn’t to say the Eagles can’t just sit back and throw the ball when teams leave that wide open, but they want to run the ball. That makes sense given they have the best offensive line in football—with no real weak spots across the front five—a talented backfield, and one of the best running quarterbacks in the NFL.

Given their heavy heavy use of option runs and option looks, the Eagles typically have a numbers advantage on the ground. Against any two-high shell, that number advantage is multiplied. If you want to play one-high and start sending edge guys to stop the option, they’ll RPO you to death and make your second-level defenders run sideline-to-sideline chasing deep outs from the slot. If you play man, they have two dudes out wide who can win on all three levels, one of the league’s top two-way tight ends, and a quarterback who can gobble up yardage on the ground when defenders turn and chase their men downfield.

Again, this is an oversimplified version of the Eagles offense, but the strength of the scheme isn’t that they catch you by surprise, it’s that they already have answers baked into what they do best (and those answers happen to be the thing that they’re “second-best” at).

summoning Shooter

Definitely Not Carson Wentz. Equally as impressive as their offensive balance is the fact that the Eagles have shaped their entire system around the strengths of their personnel while hiding their weaknesses. That starts at quarterback, where third-year signal-caller Jalen Hurts is likely to be the winner or runner-up for the MVP this year.

Not since Lamar Jackson’s breakout year with the Ravens have I seen a team so fully commit their scheme to maximizing a young quarterback’s talents, but—unlike the Ravens’ scheme—the Eagles’ system also seems poised to let their young quarterback grow to his full potential as a passer. 

Hurts doesn’t have a great arm—he turfs some balls and doesn’t have crazy zip—and his accuracy is improving but wavers at times. But he’s an elite-level runner with tremendous instincts in the open field, an intelligent student of the game, and he’s shown the fastidiousness and work ethic-bordering-on-psychopathy that is often required of elite quarterbacks. 

The Eagles offense heavily features Hurts’ legs, both in the option game, on designed runs, and with a heaping dose of bootlegs. Whereas less athletic quarterbacks are often taught to get more depth on their bootlegs—with the hope that as long as they get outside the end they’ll have enough time and space to throw—Hurts often sprints laterally to get width on his bootlegs—forcing shallow defenders on the boundary to either commit to him as a run threat or guard the receiver who is almost certainly shooting to the flat or crossing on a shallow from the backside. They want to put you in a run-pass bind in as many ways as possible.

In his first two seasons, Hurts famously just did not throw the ball over the middle. While he’s improved in that area, it’s still not a strength, and the Eagles—whether it’s on bootlegs or not—throw mostly levels (sails, so many sails) and high-low concepts outside the hashes. While I don’t want to knock him for something he’s not asked to do much, my guess would be that Hurts is a better vertical processor than a horizontal one, thriving on passes like sails, high-lows, and shallow-digs versus full-field progressions that make him read left to right or vice versa. Thus, the Eagles have built mostly passing concepts where the side of the formation that Hurts is throwing to is determined by defensive alignment, relying on his penchant for film study and knack for pre-snap diagnoses to effectively split the field in half for him post-snap.

Pessimists may say these facts—and the unreal talent surrounding him—make Hurts a “system quarterback,” but that’s massively shortchanging both him and the Eagles coaching staff for creating such a well-balanced and explosive offense.

DEFENSIVE KEYS

Don’t let them do that thing they’re the best at. Obviously, stopping the run is easier said than done against a team that spams option runs and has the top offensive line and rushing attack in the country, but the one major constant of this Eagles offense is that if you can’t stop the run, they won’t stop running. However, if you get them into third-and-mediums and third-and-longs—where play action and RPOs are less effective—their playbook shrinks considerably. 

This will be the biggest test yet for our front seven and making sure we are decisive and sound in our option responsibilities, rush lanes, and run fits, will be a constant point of emphasis throughout this week. This shouldn’t be a “sell out to stop the run and deal with the pass later” approach. The Eagles are too explosive through the air for that strategy to be successful. But if we can slow their running game without committing more bodies to the box or abandoning our pass coverage responsibilities, then we’ve got an excellent chance at slowing down what can otherwise seem like an unstoppable train.

That means stopping Hurts on scrambles as well, which has been an issue for us over the years. Last year, in what was a physical defensive battle, a green Hurts was largely ineffective through the air, but he led all rushers with 82 yards and a score on ten carries. That’s not something we can let happen again.

Bosa Breakout? While the term “breakout” may not apply for the odds-on favorite to win DPOTY, Bosa has had only one QB hit and zero sacks in the past two games. Much, if not all, of that is due to teams game-planning and devoting extra attention to him. In fact, in this game, I would assume he’s made the unblocked read key more often than not.

But while the Eagles’ OL is the best in the business if they have a weakness it’s in the pass pro of left tackle Jordan Mailata. Due to that, I’d expect heavy snaps from Bosa opposite Mailata and hopefully he can bust out of his “slump” in a big way.

Win the alleys. Our defense may be built from our defensive line out—and they’ll need to win some battles at the point of attack for us to have success against this offense—but our outrageously fast linebackers are what makes our defense truly unique. The Eagles rely heavily on option runs and RPOs against zone coverage—which we run more than almost anyone in the country—so whether it’s disguising our fronts and slow-playing mesh points on options and RPOs to muddy the reads, preventing small gains from becoming big ones on the ground through proper angles and strong tackling, or taking away large swaths of ground in the passing game, our linebackers will be paramount to our success on Sunday. 

Last weekend, Dre Greenlaw and Fred Warner’s ability to cover slot receivers deep down the field allowed us to disguise coverages and blitzes in a way that few—if any—other teams are capable of doing. This week, Ryans will once again need to gamble at times with matchups that—on paper—are less than ideal, and Greenlaw and Warner’s unique skillset will once again be relied upon to minimize the potential downside when we roll the dice. Against an offense that is capable of attacking so many different fronts and coverages, the added flexibility and range from our linebackers will likely be a major factor in our defense’s performance. 

Go’s and Gooses. Due in part to a few blown coverages and losses on jump balls down the stretch run, the Niners’ have one giant statistical weakness on their defense, and that is that their deep ball defense is bottom ten in both DVOA and EPA ratings. Expect the Eagles to test that weakness early and often with their dynamic duo of wideouts—both of whom excel at coming down with deep balls and generating big plays down the field. But don’t sleep on Quez Watkins. The Eagles’ third receiver (but fourth option at best) is typically used to stretch the field vertically—often in the slot—with his 4.3 speed. I’d guess the Eagles take at least one shot with him, whether that’s targeting a safety out of the slot or out wide in one-on-one coverage if Philly slides Brown or Smith inside for a play or two. 

The Niners’ other statistical weakness is that they’re 31st in the league on third-and-short defense. Against a team that runs the ball so well, has one of the league’s top option attacks, and loves loves loves the QB sneak (which they often do out of a formation that almost looks like a kneel down), stepping up on third- and fourth-and-short could prove pivotal in this matchup. 

Force intermediate dropback passing. The Eagles’ strength in the running game and top marks in short-yardage situations are enough reason to emphasize keeping them out of third-and-shorts. But if we can force them into downs and distances where RPOs and quick game aren’t viable, we start to push them into an intermediate passing game that doesn’t play to their strengths.

We’ve talked about how Hurts has improved targeting the middle of the field, but it’s still not a strong suit, and it says plenty that it’s an area of the field that they largely avoid outside of RPOs, slants, and the occasional shallow-dig. While his work ethic and astronomical improvement over his short NFL career suggest that he’s likely only getting started, at the moment I think he’s a better preparer and pre-snap guy than he is a fast processor. To me, that’s one of the reasons why they bootleg him so often, throw so many sail and high-low concepts, and often split the field. And that’s likely why they still avoid the middle of the field in true dropback game. At the moment, going quickly through horizontal progressions just isn’t one of his strengths, and—as stated before—they want to cater to their quarterback’s strengths.

But the Eagles’ commitment to (and avoidance of) certain concepts has led to some odd statistical marks, which (hopefully) are markings of potential weaknesses. Hurts has spent all season eviscerating defenses that try to simplify option responsibilities and take away RPOs by playing man coverage, but his EPA/dropback falls from third overall to 21st when facing zone looks. And that includes the easy yardage he’s gotten off the quick screens with numbers and RPOs that the Eagles deploy against zone looks. Against four or fewer rushers, Hurts is 5th in EPA/dropback, but against five or more that drops to 19th. And against zone coverage with five or more rushers? He ranks 32nd out of 33 qualifying passers.

I’m not saying we immediately become the throwback zone blitz-crazy Steelers. But zone coverage is what we do best and what we do most of the time and under Ryans we’ve blitzed at a rate that’s about league average. So it’s in our wheelhouse. If we can’t get home with four then pairing zone coverages with the occasional well-timed blitz could be crucial to get the Eagles off the field. But in order for that to be an option, we have to force them into traditional dropback passes.

Reverse engineering? There’s one other thing that may not even be a thing, so I hesitate to even bring it up, but if anyone’s gonna figure it out it would be DeMeco Ryans (or possibly a future Super Bowl opponent because they’d have two weeks to study film).

The Eagles offense is built like a triple option. It’s reactive to what the defense does in order to generate the best possible look. In the triple option, if the end stays home, the fullback gets a dive up the gut. If the end crashes down on the fullback, the quarterback pulls it and runs. And if the end crashes down on the fullback and the alley defender hits the quarterback, the QB pitches it to the tailback out wide.

Proponents of the option claim that the option is never wrong. How could it be with all those reactive elements based on its read keys? But the option in all of its forms has one very distinct weakness. When other people know those same read keys, they can basically force you to do what they want. They end up calling your plays.

Take for example a zone read with Lamar Jackson (with knees) at quarterback and Practice Squad Joe who runs a 5.3 forty at tailback. In theory, option plays allow Practice Squad Joe to run against better numbers while Lamar can pull whenever his read key tells him to and scramble for a big gain. But in practice, the defense knows the read key and just forces the tailback to get the ball every play. And then your best player winds up with zero carries.

This is a little bit like what we talked about last year against the Packers. Rodgers and Adams feasted off of a mental link that operated outside of the playbook. They both knew what to do and how to adjust against each alignment and depth they saw, and the result was a bevy of fades, nine routes, and slants—regardless of what play was called. So in that divisional matchup, the Niners—knowing exactly what Rodgers and Adams were keying—decided to regularly show one look then rotate into something else on the snap. They knew that Adams against press man would get a fade. So they had a safety lineup in the box to goad the fade, then sprint over the top to double Adams at the snap. They knew when Adams was doubled opposite trips Rodgers would go the other way. So they showed a double then rotated off it at the snap to effectively force Rodgers to ignore his best receiver.

I’m not saying this is the case with the Eagles offense. The schemes they draw up and the way that they make decisions are considerably more complicated than a triple option or a dynamic forged over the years between an elite quarterback and receiver. But I am saying that a scheme that relies on simple answers against specific looks runs some risk of a savvy defensive coordinator—with a full season of film to determine tendencies—showing one look pre-snap, predicting the counterattack, then rotating into a trap once the ball is snapped.

Would be sick.

lol

DEFENSE

Defense DVOA: 6th
Weighted: 9th
Pass: 1st
Run: 21st

Spent a ton more time on the Eagles’ offense because (1) I am busy and running late on this post and (2) this defense is very familiar, but make no mistake, the Eagles D is just as loaded as talent as its offense.

While DC Jonathan Gannon came with Sirriani from the Colts he is actually a Vic Fangio protege. Since Fangio probably has his fingerprints on as many defenses across the league as Shanahan does on offenses, this is a scheme that we’re well familiar with. They are a 3-4 base with a ton of split safety looks who can pressure with four or more (middle of the pack in blitzing). They a more varied in their man vs pattern matching zone coverages than many Fangio schemes, but—overall—they’re not super tricky.

They’re just supremely talented and well-coached.

Pass Rush. First things first, we gotta talk about the Eagles’ defensive line. It’s long been a strength of the franchise, and while this unit may not quite reach the level of singular talents as their Super Bowl-winning squad, it’s hard to imagine this isn’t their deepest crop over.

The Eagles totaled 70(!) sacks this season, which is 15 more than second-best in the league, and two shy of the all-time record set by the 1984 Chicago Bears (in one less game). Their overall pressure percentage is a fraction shy of the best in the country (literally, one-tenth of a percent less than the Cowboys’ mark). They have FOUR players with double-digit sacks, which maybe has happened before but—if it did—I can’t remember when. Their rotation genuinely goes eight-deep with real guys. Not just randoms. Real guys. And seeing as this is a Fangio scheme and they will certainly be keying our run game, that means we’re likely to see a ton of five-man fronts.

Like any Fangio scheme, these guys can line up around the line, stunt, and play games, but the Eagles honestly just are so deep along the d-line that much of their pass rush success relies on them trotting dudes out, pulling them before they’re tired, then trotting out another unit that’s nearly as strong.

Island life. While much of the Eagles’ #1 pass defense metric can be credited to their relentless pass rush, the secondary shouldn’t be slept on. The Fangio scheme is notoriously friendly on cornerbacks (after all, we started Tarrell Brown and Carlos Rogers and were tops in the league) but the Eagles’ duo of Darius Slay and James Bradberry have done plenty well for themselves in man coverage as well. While their play has dropped off a tiny bit since the early portion of the season—when they were 1 and 2 amongst cornerbacks in nearly every metric imaginable—they’re still arguably the best cornerback duo in the country and they make it very difficult to throw outside against the Eagles.

Chauncey Gardner-Johnson will man either the free safety spot or nickel corner (depending on Avonte Maddox’s health) and is—per usual—a disruptive force in playing the ball (his six interceptions lead the team) and playing his way into the mind of opponents. Since our team is devoid of diva receivers, all of our guys block, and he’ll be lined up over George Kittle half the time, I’m not worried about how much he talks, but Vegas odds are high that CGJ and Jauan Jennings will have words in this game.

Their safeties are very well protected in this scheme, but they also don’t seem like liabilities. From what I’ve seen, they perform their roles well and can hold up enough in man coverage to let them ditch zone coverages more than most Fangio disciples.

But what about that run defense, hmmmm? Based on their DVOA rating and the general narrative around this team, the obvious potential weakness in this defense would be its play against the run, but I don’t think their issues are as pronounced as their ratings may imply.

They had significant issues against the run in the first half of the season, but—after nose tackle Jordan Davis went down to injury—they re-stocked the cupboard with Suh and Linval Joseph. On the basis of EPA/play, their run defense has actually been one of the best in the league since the addition of Joseph, and—now that Davis is also back healthy—it’s not the glaring weakness that it may look like on paper.

OFFENSIVE KEYS

But yeah, we still gotta pound that rock. Despite what I just said… we should definitely run the ball in this game. We’ve faced multiple Fangio defenses this season (the Rams and Chargers being two of them) and we know that their goal is to take away the big play through the air, rally up to shorter passes, and force you to manufacture long drives down the field to score. Luckily, long drives with plenty of runs is kinda our thing.

Granted, the Fangio defense and its five-man fronts have caused issues for many a Shanahan system in the past. This is very much a game where we have to stay balanced in order to keep the run game viable. That may mean we have to open things up a bit early before settling into the run game late. Or it could mean we need to keep things balanced from the jump with a good collection of chunk plays and intermediate routes. But getting the defense to a point where we can rack up major carries would be a big win for us.

I do think we have a chance to get outside on this defense. When the two big-time additions that moved your run defense from one of the league’s worst to one of its best are massive waiver wire DTs in their mid-30s, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say they’re not going to be running sideline-to-sideline on you for forty snaps a game. Both the Cowboys and the Packers seemed to find some holes in the Eagles’ run defense on outside zone looks—they just didn’t always have the outside blocking or execution to fully capitalize. I have more faith in our receivers as blockers, and if we can find some success on outside runs, that could open up cutback lanes. After all, if the benefit of putting five and six dudes on the LOS is to fill every gap, the innate drawback is that you oftentimes only have a single linebacker on the second level if a running back breaks through, and—even though I really like TJ Edwards—that’s a lot for any one linebacker to handle.

This is a game where successful incremental gains are going to be our best way to move the ball down the field. How better to do that than with a successful run game?

Play the slots. My guess based on their personnel and the success the Cowboys just had against us with heavy man coverage is that the Eagles are going to come out with more press-man than usual. In doing so they’ll hope to nullify as much misdirection as possible, keep guys tight on receivers to prevent YAC yards, mess up timing in our quick-to-intermediate passing game, and—in doing so—let their defensive line get after Purdy.

Last week, the Cowboys did just that—largely eliminating our outside receivers with blanket coverage—and pressuring Purdy on 16 out of 33 dropbacks. When pressured, he completed only 4-of-12 for 55 yards and two sacks. If the Eagles aim to replicate that scheme, we may pivot to attacking them from the slots.

Other than the occasional double move or play action shot play against an overzealous corner, I’d guess our plan is to largely avoid work outside the hashes and instead focus on the interior, where I think—if you can block it—there is space to be had, particularly on digs and second level balls between the hashes. While Kittle and CMC naturally cause problems with matchups on linebackers and safeties, it will be interesting to see if Shanahan devises more ways to get his outside receivers—in particular Deebo—off of outside man coverage and into the middle of the field via motion, formations, personnel shuffling, etc.

A side of beef. Our unique set of skill players and our affinity for 21 personnel will be something to watch in this matchup. While the Eagles have performed well against two-back sets, it’s not something they’ve seen a ton of throughout the season, and I’d expect us to try and use our swiss army knife skill players to hunt for matchups on the ground as much as through the air.

The Eagles have done a good job of eliminating YAC yards (the natural funneling system of two-high looks helps in that regard) and—if they go man coverage—they’re certain to hope that they can deny passes and tackle our ballcarriers before they get going. But I don’t know how well these DBs will hold up when they’re repeatedly put in compromising positions in the run game. The Eagles have missed some tackles this year, and Shanahan is creative enough to mix and match his personnel to pull linebackers out of the box and/or use motion and closed formations to force cornerbacks to play the role of play-side fill defender or back-side pursuit against the cutback.

If we can start beating on some DBs in the run game, the Eagles will need to make a decision about whether or not they have to match our physicality with size. And if they start subbing out nickels for seldom-used additional linebackers or playing coverages and fronts that protect their corners more in the run game, that opens up space for us through the air.

To sling or not to sling. It’ll be interesting to see what Shanahan’s confidence level is in both Purdy and our passing attack against a historically productive pass rush and the #1-ranked passing defense in the country. After all, this is a pass defense that has allowed upwards of 200 passing yards only five times on the season and upwards of 300 only once (to the Cowboys in December).

The Eagles are deep enough along the DL that they could feasibly start three tackle-like bodies along the interior, load the LOS with five or six, and dare Purdy to pass while they bluff and disguise who on that line is dropping back into coverage to try and rob slant routes. Just like against the Rams last year, they could sell out completely and quite literally force the Niners to pass. If that’s the case, don’t be shocked to see the Niners motion into some empty sets to force the Eagles’ bigger players to run more while hoping to create quick passing lanes for Purdy before the rush gets home. Again, that will depend on how heavily the Eagles key the run and how confident our staff is in throwing on early downs.

Regardless of how we get there, if we can keep things balanced and keep Purdy upright, there will be openings through the air, and our young QB will have to take advantage. The name of the game isn’t volume, it’s efficiency, and as scary as the Eagles’ pass defense may appear, elite QBs have had success against them. This isn’t to say that Brock Purdy is an elite QB, but since Halloween, the Eagles have faced Kenny Pickett, Davis Mills, Taylor Heinecke, the ghost of Matt Ryan, Ryan Tannehill, Daniel Jones (3x), Andy Dalton, Dak Prescott, and Aaron Rodgers.

The absolute max number of those quarterbacks who you could qualify as “good” is three, and Rodgers left the Packers game due to injury while Dak threw for 347 yards and three scores on the Eagles while going a perfect 24-of-24 for 300 against their zone coverage looks. Again, this is a tall task for Purdy and for our passing attack. But it’s not impossible to move the ball through the air on these guys.

[cartoon jumping sound]

OVERALL

Top-to-bottom, the Eagles are the best team that we’ve played all year and—on paper—the best team in the NFL. While we’d be the last to shed a tear over missed snaps from starting quarterbacks, they easily could have finished the season 16-1 if not for Hurts’ injury.

While Philadelphia’s the favorite for a reason, they’re far from bulletproof, and I have to wonder if the same simplicity of scheme that helped catapult their offense and defense to such elite levels so quickly has any blindspots that have gone unnoticed (or incapable of being exploited) as they buzz-sawed through the regular season.

But—magical cipher or not—this is a stylistic matchup we can work with. We can play stout defense, run the ball, throw haymakers, and make things messy. It’s part of our DNA. Teams aren’t 0-15 the week after playing us for no reason. Win or lose, you know the ice baths are gonna be ready to go.

Go Niners 👍🏈

Divisional Preview v. Dallas

Date: Sunday, 1/22
Time: 3:30PM PT
Location: Levi’s Stadium (Santa Clara, CA)
Opponent: Dallas Cowboys

Despite our offense driving up and down the field at will, Seattle Seattle-d their way to a one-point first-half lead in the wildcard round, doubling down on the ground and loading up with designer runs to minimize possessions and keep the game (in typical Seattle fashion) annoyingly close. But after entering the half celebrating like the Cleveland Cavaliers getting not-swept by the 2016 KD Warriors (“Cavs in eight”), the Seahawks—just like those Cavs—promptly folded under superior talent and coaching. Now we face the Cowboys.

But first, a few quick hits on our victory over Seattle:

From a simmer to a boil. Brock Purdy started a little off, missing some dudes and showing nerves a bit more than we’ve been accustomed to. But then, as he has done up until this point, he clicked into gear, and once that happened our offense was unstoppable. The 505 total yards and 41 points were both season-highs for our offense, and the 324 passing yards were our second-best output of the year. 

Once again, Purdy showed that his deep ball may not be great (he missed a wide-open TD to Jennings early then barely fit the ball into Jennings on that third quarter toss), but the fact that he throws it opens things up for us offensively. And his ability to extend plays in the passing game let him find two wide open running backs for scores in the redzone. 

Perhaps the most telling part of how this offense has evolved to its current state was in Shanahan’s fake pitch naked bootleg touchdown to Deebo, a call that faked out the entirety of the Seahawks defense and once again added credence to the idea that Shanahan—and this offense—are more willing and able than ever to be aggressive in putting feet on necks when they smell blood in the water.

Someone’s never watched Friday. Shit-talking is equal parts art and math equation. There are some guys who are easy targets because you believe you can get under their skin and throw off their game. You hope that the sweet nothings you whisper in their ear will make them fold into a fit of rage where they get out of rhythm, their play falters, and/or they make dumb mistakes. Doing that well is the art. Picking the time, the place, and the target is the math equation. Pick right and your opponent’s play suffers. But if you pick wrong…

Granted, twisting a recently sprained ankle post-play is a bit more than shit-talking. And doing that to the dude who just broke four tackles to secure a first down, has a highlight reel composed of plays that resemble a power running back, and is the emotional leader of an offense that’s just itching for a reason to break things open makes for some fuzzy math to say the least. There’s a reason someone like The Rock can walk down the street alone and not get mugged. It’s cause most people just aren’t that stupid.

It’s not a coincidence that Shanahan called five straight runs after the incident that caused Trent Williams—who ranks incredibly low on the “would want to start shit with in an alley” power rankings—to rush to the defense of his star receiver and start a team-wide skirmish in the process. Nor is it a coincidence that the Niners would rack up three straight touchdowns and scores on all four of their second-half possessions after that occurred. And it wasn’t a coincidence that—after Deebo started hunting down and chirping in the ears of defenders after every big Niners play then cemented the victory himself—Seattle’s only retort was to let out their feelings on a helpless yard marker.

the grounds crew wants a word

The eyes have it. Just weeks after erasing DK Metcalf in Seattle, Charvarius Ward wound up on the wrong end of a number of big plays to Seattle’s star receiver—the most obvious being the 50-yard go route that gave the Seahawks an early 14-13 lead.

It was all-in-all a forgettable game for Ward, but what stood out the most was that he was clearly keying back shoulder passes down the sideline. This got him tangled up and opening early and/or at the wrong angle on Metcalf’s vertical stems. And from there he was too out of position to makeup the ground. My guess would be that DK was using head or eye fakes—triggering the DB coaching point of turning for the ball when the receivers eyes look up for it—before continuing up the field. Based on what we’ve seen from Ward the majority of this season, the hope is that this is more of an aberration than a long-term issue.

On the plus side, Deommodore Lenoir had an excellent game after being picked on a bit over the past month. The second-year corner gave up two grabs for 16 yards, held Geno Smith to a 20.8 QB rating when targeted, and picked off a pass intended for Tyler Lockett. More deep balls are coming for both of these guys. But it was nice to see Lenoir with a strong outing as we move onto more explosive offenses.

Slim Charles. In a game where Bosa not only failed to register a sack but —for the first time in his career—failed to register a pressure, Omenihu came up big with two sacks and the red hand slap that forced the game’s first turnover and sent the Niners off to the races. 

Omenihu, who we got from the Houston Garbage Fires for a sixth-rounder last year (and whose 98th percentile DE arm length would make even Trent Baalke blush) has quietly put together a nice pass-rushing season in year two under Kris Kocurek. After the Texans bulked him up to play more on the interior, the Niners asked him to slim back down and play an outside-in role on their defensive line. He obliged, shedding 15 pounds to get down to 265, and—despite a modest 4.5 sacks on the season—his 54 pressures rank 20th among all edge rushers.

This was Omenihu’s second career multi-sack game. The first? Last year’s wildcard win over the Cowboys, when he put up 1.5 sacks and forced another fumble.

And that’s what we call a segway!

trying to save the world from seeing this again

THE COWBOYS

Long a playoff laughing stock, the Dallas Cowboys are fresh off a 31-14 thumping of the Buccaneers, their first road playoff win in thirty years and just their fourth playoff win since 1996. Given an entire generation has been born and joined the workforce since the Cowboys were a true contender, it’s easy to poke fun at them (and, to be clear, I’m not saying you shouldn’t), but it’s worth remembering that the clean and tidy narratives that we give to players, coaches, and teams are often lazy shorthand for what’s really going on—the Sparknotes version of an actual accounting of the facts. And for all of us who “read” Shakespeare during school, we should know how reliable cursory skimming is versus the actual unabridged text.

Sports narratives are largely the result of an echo chamber of talking heads and mercenary bloggers turned “reporters.” Some of their takes are never true. While those that are true, only exist that way until they’re not. Jim Harbaugh can’t beat Ohio State… until he does so in back-to-back years in emphatic fashion. Phil Mickelson can’t win a major… until he wins three Masters in seven years. You can’t win championships with three-point shooting… until the entire NBA does exactly that. All this to say, feel free to laugh at the Cowboys, but don’t overlook them. Sports memes and five-second hot takes are far from predictive. This team is as talented as we are. And now that the playoff monkey is lifted off their back, we’ll need to bring our A-game to make sure last week wasn’t a stepping stone towards their ascension to the Super Bowl contender that they’ve long been thought to be. 

OFFENSE

DVOA: 15th
Pass: 13th
Run: 10th

All offenses operate somewhere on the spectrum of (1) building an attack around an identity and (2) being multiple to keep defenses off-guard. Regardless of the direction a team leans, it can have success if the execution and the details of its choice are on point.

Imagine a graph (that I was too lazy to make) with offensive efficacy on the x-axis (horizontal) and offensive identity on the y-axis (vertical). A team like the Niners or the Eagles—with potent offenses stemming from clear identities—would be in the upper right quadrant. A team like the Ravens would be even higher on the identity scale but would skew left with decreased offensive success (depending on if we include Lamar Jackson in their performances, it would skew A LOT left). A team like the Chiefs would be in the lower right quadrant. Super effective and very multiple in their attack. A team like the Raiders would be a little less multiple and a decent chunk less effective. And a team like the Chargers would reside in the bottom left. No identity and—given the talent at their disposal—little offensive efficacy.

Teams in the upper right quadrant—like us—build their playbooks around what they want to do (in our case, run the ball and generate YAC yards in the passing game) and then layer in lots of misdirection, window dressing, and counter punches to keep defenses honest. When an offense built that way struggles, it’s often because those counter punches aren’t varied and/or effective enough to keep their bread-and-butter offensive identity viable against the opposing defense that’s keying it.

Conversely, when a team in the lower right quadrant—like the Chiefs—struggles on offense, its often because their wide array of plays isn’t working, and—since they’ve gone wide instead of focused in their offensive approach—they either aren’t practiced enough in their many concepts and/or lack the ability to lean back on the bread-and-butter “staples” that a team with high identity has more readily available. 

The Cowboys very much fall into that latter camp. And while their offense isn’t as highly touted as in the past, that’s largely due to Dak’s early-season injury and consistency issues. When they’re on, they’re as explosive as any team in football, as evidenced by the 35.5 points per game that they’ve scored against opponents who made the playoffs since Dak returned from injury mid-season. 

The greatest constants this Dallas offense has schematically are that they want to stay balanced, they want to set up the run, and they want to use those two things to get Dak into rhythm as quickly as possible so that they can hum on all cylinders.

Same backs, different roles. 2022 officially marks the last year that Ezekiel Elliott will be drafted ahead of Tony Pollard in fantasy leagues, as the latter clearly emerged as the Cowboys’ top back this season. With his speed and ability in the run and pass game, Pollard’s become one of the most dangerous big-play threats in the league, and the Cowboys do a great job of being creative in getting him the ball in multiple ways. If there’s any way in which the Cowboys have definitely improved this season on offense, it’s largely due to their increased utilization of Pollard. He’s measured out as the more efficient and dangerous of the two Dallas runningbacks for quite some time, but 2022 was when the coaching staff finally was willing to accept that.

Throughout the regular season, Dallas was careful in keeping Pollard’s total touches and hits down, but now that we’re into the playoffs he should be more of the lead back than ever. But don’t sleep on Zeke Elliott. The Cowboys like to deploy both of them at once and the elder statesman still led the team in carries and rushing touchdowns. He’ll be used heavily whenever the Cowboys are looking for less of a chef’s knife and more of a meat tenderizer.

Shuffleboard. Part of the inconsistency of the Cowboys’ offense has come with the decreasing health and increasing permutations of their offensive line. A torn ACL to starting LT Terrence Steele caused a late-season shakeup that—in addition to C Tyler Biadasz going down with an ankle injury in week 17—has left the Cowboys scrambling to reassemble what has long been a strength of this team.

In the wildcard game against Tampa Bay, Dallas made the bold move of trotting out a starting OL arrangement that they hadn’t used all season. This was due in part to necessity but also to accommodate the healthy return of Biadasz. The resulting lineup of (from left to right) Jason Peters—Tyler Smith—Biadasz—Zack Martin—Tyron Smith proved formidable on Monday, limiting the Bucs to only one sack early in the first quarter, and the decision to move former LG Connor McGovern—their OL’s biggest weakness—to an auxiliary sixth lineman role—where he can play jumbo fullback/wingback and kick out linebackers and defensive ends—has paid early dividends.

From the one-game sample size, the Cowboys’ sporadic offensive line issues seem to have been solved, but the Niners’ front seven is a whole different beast than Tampa Bay’s.

The Housewives are on the field! This AT&T commercial may be the best of their “hybrid sports viewing” ads, but—if we’re being honest—it’s mid at best. Advertisement quality notwithstanding, the idea of keeping Prescott uncomfortable to stymy the Dallas offense is a legitimate one.

Dak has a tendency to start games slowly, with his accuracy a little off, balls sailing high, and his reads a tad fuzzy (0-4 with one sack against the Bucs on Monday). But once he figures out what the defense is doing and gets going he can heat up in a hurry (25-of-29 for 305 yards and 4 TDs the rest of the way), and when Dak is playing like a Tier 1 quarterback, this offense is operating like a Tier 1 offense. 

In order to get Dak into rhythm the Cowboys like to start with heavy doses of the running game and by utilizing motions, various formations, and delayed TE releases to generate a bunch of easy bootleg passes to the flat. It sometimes makes for a slow build-up offensively, but the return is well worth the investment. 

Dak is an interesting case because he seems like a solid dude, a well-liked leader, and a good NFL quarterback. But the lack of team playoff success, the spotlight that is constantly put on Dallas quarterbacks by the media and ownership alike, and the never-ending debate about whether or not he is a “great” quarterback have probably—at least to some degree—contributed to a season that’s been largely out of character.

Dak has historically protected the ball well, made smart decisions, and put up the occasional monster stat line, but the knock has always been that he hasn’t made enough big-time throws to elevate his team when the stakes are highest. I have to believe that—in conjunction with some injury rust—this narrative has played some part in a season that saw Dak—despite playing in only 12 games—lead the league in interceptions, lose 2+% off his completion percentage, and set career-highs in picks and lows in YPA and passing TDs during the three-year Kellen Moore era. 

In short, he’s pushing the issue too much, trying to fit the ball into tighter spots than he should, and taking more risks than needed. Granted, these issues aren’t all the time. Dak has put up plenty of good tape this season. But until last weekend against the Bucs, he'd thrown a pick in seven straight games. The Cowboys know that in order to get the best out of Dak they need to establish the running game off the jump, stay balanced in their attack, and give him a few lay-ups early so that the doesn’t feel the need to push and play hero ball as the game goes on.

DEFENSIVE KEYS

The Last Time… In our 2021 wildcard matchup with the Cowboys, our defensive line basically feasted, sacking Dak five times and hitting him 14 times while our defense held the Boys to 77 yards rushing on 21 attempts (w/ 27 of those yards coming from Dak himself). While Dallas would put up 17 points and make things interesting late, their scoring drives were largely the result of Josh Norman being the only dude in the building not expecting a fake punt and a Jimmy G being returned to our 28-yard line.

The Lamb Plan. CeeDee Lamb ascended to the Cowboys’ No.1 receiver role last year and rightfully so. But the off-season jettisoning and then weird shit-talking of fellow starting wideout Amari Cooper left a massive hole opposite Lamb. Michael Gallup is that No.2 wideout, but while Gallup can run and make the occasional splash play, the drop-off from Lamb is steep.

How the Niners guard Lamb will be a major factor in how they do in pass coverage on Sunday. We’ve seen Charvarius Ward shadow a top wideout like DK Metcalf, but the Cowboys are aware of their wide receiver room and do a much better job of moving CeeDee into the slot and putting him in motion to avoid shadow corners. Also, as one of the most zone-heavy defenses in the league, there’s only so much true shadowing we can do while still adhering to the principles that make our defense elite. 

Regardless, Lamb is a genuine three-level threat at wideout who can both run after the catch and high point the ball down the field, and allowing him to go off is the easiest way to ensure Dak is comfortable all game. 

Test the new blood. Surprise, surprise, if we dominate the LOS the way our defense has been assembled to do, this offense will have tough sledding this weekend. The Cowboys employ one of the best guards in the league and two tackles with a shot at Canton once they retire, but those tackles are getting long in the tooth and we applied plenty of pressure last year against a more established starting five. There are bound to be hiccups in communication with players shuffling to different positions and the stunts and slants that we are so adept at along our DL—along with the mug looks and simulated pressures we like to employ on passing downs—will be an excellent test to see how solidified this Dallas front really is. 

That applies to the Dallas tight ends as well. They have two guys with good athleticism who can both run and catch the ball, but neither are exceptional blockers. Dalton Schultz is often the barometer for their offensive success and their safety blanket as their No.2 option in the passing game. If we force him into pass pro to account for heat from our DL, that’s an absolute win for us. I’d expect to see Bosa get a lot of chip blocks and delayed releases, with the Cowboys trying to get the best of both worlds (slowing down Bosa and getting a quick outlet to the flat). Some of those will be unavoidable, but slants and stunts can help in the matter—particularly on passing downs. 

In the run game, it’s more of the same. While our run defense is one of the best in the league, teams have had some success pounding the ball for short gains if they can stick to it and show enough different looks. Save for Javon Kinlaw—who is only now getting his sea legs after being out with injury—we’re a relatively small front seven on top of being a wide 9, so we’re only okay on short-yardage runs and generating tackles for loss. Where we excel—and are best in the league—is in using our team speed to limit runs of 5-10 yards and 10+ yards. The Boys like to run out of double-tight sets. If we pound them on the edges and force them into more 11 personnel, they lose a big chunk of their play-action game and may have to abandon the looks that let them run the ball inside.

Show don’t tell. Dak is an elite-level pre-snap player. He’s great at diagnosing what defenses are presenting and checking into plays that attack the defense’s weaknesses. But he sometimes gets caught up in his pre-snap read, and that can get him into trouble. Hiding coverages and rotating safeties late—although not too late, as they like to run tempo—will be important. 

I expect teams to attack our defense by trying to throw over us in the secondary and over our linebackers on deep crossers (or outside alley shots) off of play action. If we can stay disciplined with our eyes and eliminate those big plays outside, then we should be at an advantage inside the hashes. While the Cowboys are certain to try and scheme up some shot plays and one-on-one matchups between Lamb and one of our safeties out of the slot—our rangy linebackers mean there’s little room for error in the middle of the field. This is doubly the case against Prescott, who has struggled with picks across the middle of the field throughout his career. 

As stated in last year’s write-up, Prescott has thrown 18 of his 25 picks prior to this season across the intermediate and deep middle zones of the defense. While I don’t know how many of his 15 picks this season were between the hashes (thanks for nothing Gamepass), I know both of his interceptions against the Packers were late throws taken away by DBs jumping routes. In this game in particular, those hidden coverages could result in valuable takeaways. 

Make them break tendencies. Despite their weaponry and the various route combinations and gadget plays they draw up, the Cowboys were torpedoed in last year’s playoffs in part because the Niners heavily keyed their formational and situational tendencies. I don’t know if those tendencies still exist to that level, but if they do, you’d better believe the Niners are aware of them. 

Our two worst defensive performances this season were against offenses with multiple attacks who employed misdirection well enough to generate shot plays and neuter the aggression and speed that feeds our defense. But in order to do that successfully, you need to regularly break tendencies. Otherwise, all your effort to scheme up a wider array of plays is done under by the fact that the opposition is expecting them.

let’s avoid this

DEFENSE

DVOA: 2nd
Weighted: 6th
Run: 5th
Pass: 3rd

Cowboys DC Dan Quinn is a hot head coaching candidate for a few reasons: (1) he’s done the job before, and some teams (see: Broncos) remain shell-shocked from their recent whiffs on inexperienced HCs; (2) he quickly turned a bottom-of-the-league Cowboys defense into one of the best units in football; and (3) he sustained that success while continuing to change and evolve the scheme in his second year in Dallas.

Once synonymous with the 4-3 Under Cover 3 system that he created alongside Pete Carroll (and that gave berth to the Legion of Boom and the golden era of Seahawks football), Quinn’s defenses in Dallas have been much more variable in their approach.

At its core, the Cowboys’ defense wants to cycle a deep crop of defensive linemen into mostly four-man fronts, leaning more on stunts—which they run at one of the highest rates in the league—than blitzes to generate a top-five pressure and hurry rate while playing a well-balanced mix of Cover 1, 2, and 3 on the back end. They are very much a penetrating one-gap scheme that is aggressive up and down the field, and they’ve pushed aside mass cynicism from the analytics community—who felt their ability to generate turnovers would regress to the mean this year—to lead the league in takeaways for the second straight season—a feat that hasn’t been accomplished in at least twenty years.

The Cowboys are better known for their offense, but their defense is the more consistent group, and it’s only getting better. While Dallas has been diced up a few times over the past months by the Jags and the Hurts-less Eagles, they have since returned two key contributors—340-pound defensive tackle Jonathan Hankins and starting mike linebacker Leighton Vander Esch—and their performance against the Bucs should be a more accurate indicator of their ability than the four weeks before it.

The man in the mirror. On paper, the Cowboys’ use of four-man fronts, heavy DL rotation, a general reliance more on stunts than blitzes to generate high amounts of pressure, and variable coverages on the back-end sounds familiar. Because that’s what our defense does. But there are a couple of key differences.

Our coverage preferences lean heavily towards zone, and—all else being equal—we’re most likely to sit in Cover 3 and Cover 4 and rally up to the ball. While it’s impossible to get inside Dan Quinn’s head, I think he would like his coverages to skew more aggressively toward pressing wideouts and jumping routes. 

Against the Bucs, they did exactly what I would have (and what I think they’d like to do in any given week if the matchups allowed it). They sat in Cover 2 and man, were physical at the LOS to mess up route timing, and dared anyone on that Tampa Bay offense to beat them with speed. Unafraid of the Bucs’ nonexistent run game, they were totally fine deploying two-high safeties on early downs because they know how hard it is to throw the short game (Brady’s favorite) into those Cover 2 windows, and they knew the Bucs couldn’t throw the ball deep given the pressure up front. 

Cover 1 and Cover 2 need to be paired with a strong pass rush because they’re both susceptible to multiple long-developing routes down the field, but Dallas believes their pass rush can consistently get home (which it largely has) before those deep crossers or multiple verticals can spring open. Additionally, the ability to oscillate between Cover 3 and Cover 2 looks means the Cowboys can show a soft corner pre-snap and then sneak that man down into the flats to jump balls and create turnovers. Given this defense is very much built off of a strong pass rush and turnover-hunting, those coverage combinations make a ton of sense. 

Conversely, we’re more of a Cover 3 and Cover 4 team because of the incredible range that our linebackers have in coverage. When the underneath run defenders can get the depth that our guys can, we can play a bigger shell over the top, force shorter passes, and fly to the football for minimal gains after the catch. This is a more conservative coverage approach that allows our safeties—who are not known for their pure speed—to have extra support deep so that they’re less likely to get picked on down the field in 1-on-1 matchups. 

Dudes at DE. This Dallas defense is powered by its deep rotation of pass rushers and supercharged by the NFL’s #1 defensive freak, Micah Parsons. Nick Bosa’s greatest competitor for the DPOTY award is an absolute monster of an athlete and—in his second year in the league—Quinn has moved him more and more toward the LOS. Last year Parsons played off-ball linebacker about 60% of the time and the rest at defensive end. Now, he’s about 80% along the DL and 20% off-ball. Much of that is matchup dependent and—with Parsons playing five or fewer off-ball snaps in 10 of 18 games—there are some weeks where Parsons basically only plays along the D-line. It makes sense, given Parsons is at his best and most disruptive laser beaming toward quarterbacks with his 4.3 speed. 

Opposite Parsons, don’t sleep on DeMarcus Lawrence—whose counting stats aren’t as impressive as in past years but who is still plenty disruptive. He’s the lead dog of the rest of the defensive line, which includes five dudes (four of them defensive ends) with over 23 pressures on the season. For any fans of PFF ratings, they have six dudes on the DL whose pass rush grades rate in the green (for good), and they use all of them in a healthy rotation.

Despite Tampa Bay having a top-three Pass Blocking Efficiency (PBE) rating (an ESPN metric given to OLs for how frequently they can block the pass rush for 2.5 seconds), the Cowboys absolutely harassed Brady all night. This is what Trent Williams and the boys will be up against.

LVE FTW. Mike linebacker Leighton Vander Esch has had an interesting career, going from ascending superstar as a rookie to injury-prone and largely-lost replacement level player through various schemes, before cementing himself this year as the unquestioned leader of the Dallas linebacker corps. LVE’s emergence (or re-emergence) likely has played a part in Quinn’s comfort level sliding Parsons down to DE more often, and when LVE missed the last month of the season, he left a sizable hole.

The Cowboys have played 194 def. snaps this season without LVE. And while on/off field splits can have some noise. The dropoff in success rate is *steep*:

Def. Rush success (w/ rank)
On: 65.3% 2nd
Off: 47.3% 32nd

Def. success
On: 61.5% 4th
Off: 55.8% 26th

(via @TruMediaSports) https://t.co/hjlzqHzsog

— Nate Tice (@Nate_Tice) December 20, 2022

When Parsons is on the DL, Anthony Barr typically is his replacement at weak-side backer. When LVE went down and Barr had to man their linebacker corps solo the results were… not great. Excluding the week 17 game against the Josh Dobbs-led, Derrick Henry-less Titans and the week 18 matchup against a Commanders team where half the team didn’t dress and the other half played like they didn’t dress—the LVE-less Cowboys got gashed for 40 points and 503 yards by the Jags and 34 points and 442 yards by the Gardner Minshew Eagles. While the defense still generated a whopping 7 takeaways in those games, they lose a lot of their fundamental drive-stopping ability without LVE. 

Realistically, the depth the Cowboys have at linebacker is opposite what they have along the defensive line. They just don’t have anyone with the range and recognition skills to do what LVE does, and that’s part of why they lean so heavily on extra DB personnel sets and have safety Jayron Kearse regularly moonlight as an extra LB. 

Moar Shuffleboard. While cornerback Trevon Diggs’ otherworldly interception numbers from last year have regressed to the mean, he’s put together a more well-rounded 2022. Diggs still has great ball skills (three picks, 14 pass deflections this year) and will still gamble at times, but he’s no longer the dude with the binary outcome of “generate a turnover” or “get roasted.”

Granted, there’s been less of a reason to hard target Diggs this year given the dire situation opposite him. Anthony Brown started the season as the Boys’ second outside corner, and—while he wasn’t exactly killing it—his replacements have been getting dunked on with regularity. Kelvin Joseph came in and got roasted by the Texans and the Jags. Nahshon Wright replaced him then gave up 157 yards in completions to receivers catching balls from Josh Dobbs and Sam Howell. Trayvon Mullen got a shot to close the year and promptly gave up two grabs for 58 yards before getting hurt.

So for the wildcard round, the Boys decided to approach things differently. Just as the Cowboys offense pulled OL weak-link Connor McGovern and put him into a support role as they attempted to play their best five linemen forward regardless of position, the Dallas defense shifted rookie DaRon Bland—who has had a strong first season playing almost entirely in the slot—to the outside corner opposite Diggs. Bland was peppered with targets and wasn’t a lockdown presence by any means, but the defense had one of its best performances in months.

OFFENSIVE KEYS

Last time… the Cowboys opened up with Cover 3, were promptly torched by a balanced attack as we ran the ball and hit the alleys in the quick game, and then promptly moved to an aggressive Cover 1 for much of the day. That led to a few tough third-down completions, then—once Jimmy got banged up—an airmailed long incomplete to Aiyuk, the pick, and a more conservative approach from there on out.

Stay on the sticks. As always, keeping our offense balanced and on schedule will be key to keeping us operating at a high level. Against the best pass rush we’ve faced all year, that will require some extra effort. This is a great litmus test for our revamped interior offensive line as well as Mike McGlinchey—who has settled into a solid season at RT—but also for our rookie quarterback.

While Brock Purdy’s ability to extend plays has greatly increased the ceiling of our offense, he’ll need to be careful about scrambling into trouble against this team and—in particular—the edge duo of Parsons and Lawrence. Purdy has a tendency to flush outside the pocket when pressure comes—rather than step into it—and it will be considerably harder for him to turn back shoulder and get outside of the athletes that Dallas employs on their edges. In this matchup, every time Purdy chooses to lose ground and bounce outside rather than stay in the pocket and keep his eyes downfield, the cost-benefit analysis will be calculated in a way that he hasn’t yet seen in the NFL.

While Purdy has been up to the task since taking over the starting gig, he’s done so largely against average-to-below-average defenses. The Bucs were a bit banged up when he faced them in his inaugural start. While against the Commanders— a top 10 unit—our offense was greatly aided by Taylor Heinecke, and we settled for far too many field goals. This Dallas defense—now at full strength—is unquestionably the best defense Purdy has seen in his young NFL career. 

That Hangover meme. It’ll be interesting to see how Dallas mixes up their coverages against us this time around. We’re clearly adept at attacking Cover 3—as much of our passing attack thrives on putting alley defenders in binds versus the run and pass—but it’s hard to show two-high against us and stop the run with any consistency. 

Cover 1 clearly worked the best against us last time as it not only gives numbers in the box but also lets a linebacker or the occasional safety sit in the hole as a rat defender and try to jump the underneath routes that we love so dearly. But that game plan is tougher to implement in 2022. Aiyuk is a year better and has excelled against man coverage, CMC is now on the roster and is a matchup nightmare one-on-one, and the presence of McCaffrey and a healthy Elijah Mitchell means Deebo now moonlights as a back—by choice, rather than necessity. We’re just much more capable than we were last year at mixing and matching personnel and offensive looks to find matchups that we like.

Perhaps Dallas tries to stick mostly to man but hide it more pre-snap, hoping to confuse our rookie quarterback. Or maybe they sprinkle in more Cover 2 to clog the underneath passing lanes and tell their safeties to fill hard against the run—deep ball be damned—as a way of daring us to throw it down the field with any consistency. That doesn’t seem fundamentally sound to me, but people have done crazier things against Niners offenses. Whatever Dallas does, I can’t imagine they’ll be able to keep things simple against us. 

Seconds plz. Regardless of what coverages Dallas deploys it will be worth targeting second linebackers and second cornerbacks in the passing game. This Cowboys defense is well-coached and talented, but they’re lacking in depth. DaRon Bland has had a promising rookie season in the slot, but he is largely unproven outside. While the Bucs threw the ball 66 times last week, Bland still gave up nearly 100 yards receiving. Guarding Aiyuk down the field while tackling Deebo on underneath routes will be quite the task. If the Boys stick to last week’s lineup then will Jayron Kearse—who has played mostly box safety and bonus linebacker—be able to cover our guys in space in the slot? The same question could be asked of Israel Mukuamu, who was mostly a backup safety this year but played a season-high snaps as Dallas’ dimeback against the Bucs.

Likewise, at linebacker, Anthony Barr has never been a stellar coverage guy. When Parsons slides down to defensive end—which could be the large majority of the game—can we make Barr chase CMC out of the backfield while trying to drop deep enough to stop Kittle on digs and crossers? LVE is a talented linebacker, but if he doesn’t have any coverage support from his fellow LBs, how much ground can he really cover?

There are matchups to be had, and much of our success in the passing game—past the line of scrimmage at least—could be determined by how well Shanahan’s multi-tool of death matches up against the Cowboys’ linebackers and their menagerie of safeties.

The Shanny Special. Despite the return of a healthy LVE and Johnathan Hankins, I think we can run on this team as long as we stay diverse in our schemes. Against a defense as aggressive as this one—which likes to shoot gaps and get upfield to create havoc—all those little Shanahan wrinkles and misdirections could pay dividends.

Fly motions that freeze backside pursuit and force the linebackers to shift over just a hair right before we snap the ball, split zone looks that give cross-flow backfield action, weave back tosses and faux pulling guards—anything that freezes the flow of the linebackers for just a split-second could pay dividends against this team because that could not only lead to missed assignments but may prevent them from playing as aggressively as they want to. I think that if we can take away the confidence and speed of their reads, we can out-physical them in the box. 

When running outside, I think we can get the edge against this team with pitches and condensed formations, and I’d expect a heavy dose of motion across field and crack blocks to create closed or faux-closed formations that make their corners have to take on the point-of-attack run game responsibilities that often fall on safeties and linebackers. I don’t know if these Dallas corners can hold up as tacklers if put in that position on enough tosses and powers. 

Speaking of powers, gap runs should be a healthy part of our run game in this matchup, both because they are a natural complement to our zone runs and because they can punish teams for big gains when they shoot upfield or stunt too aggressively. At full health, this Cowboys defense has been stout against the run—I don’t want to make it seem like it will be easy sledding on the ground—but when you can get push off the line they’ve struggled to tackle on the second level. The Boys have allowed the fourth-most runs of 10+ yards this year, and—despite our newfound quest for offensive balance—gashing teams for big gains on the ground is quite literally the first foundational tenet of Shanahan’s offense. 

SUMMARY

There are a number of different ways to look at this Cowboys team. You can say they’re products of variance and that they aren’t fundamentally better than the temperamental squad we saw slap-dick through narrow wins over the Texans and listless Titans. Or you can say they’re an early-season juggernaut—who has won or been in every single game—and who is just now getting healthy and playing their best ball of the season. Perhaps last week’s performance was a monkey off their back that will allow this team to finally live up to its potential. Or perhaps it was an aberration against a horrid Bucs team, and they’ll lay their playoff egg in this round rather than the last.

In some ways, this game will seem like a litmus test of what’s more legit: the Cowboys as a genuine contender—envigorated after shedding years of playoff baggage—or Brock Purdy as a QB who can contend for a Super Bowl despite his age and limited tools. While many expect one or the other to turn into a pumpkin at any given moment, that doesn’t need to be the case. And although the talking heads will almost certainly peg the results of this game as a statement of fact against the legitimacy of the Cowboys, Brock Purdy, or whatever draws the SEO clicks, there’s very much a world where this game is—like so many other football games—a matchup of two good teams that comes down to a few key moments and lucky bounces.

I don’t know which Cowboys team we’ll see on Sunday, but I know that at their best, Dallas is one of the top teams in football and a difficult out. Luckily, so are we.

Go Niners 👍🏈

2022 Playoff Preview

After a year-long hiatus, I just couldn’t help myself. The Niners are back in the playoffs so this blog must be reactivated. For numerous reasons, I won’t be able to do weekly previews for each matchup, but I wanted to take a quick look at how the team has changed over the past year, how those changes could help us finally get over the hump, and what obstacles could blue ball us once again in our pursuit of the Lombardi Trophy.

But first…

More like Game…ass: The NFL has done countless things worse than screw over my blog, but one of the reasons this site has been dormant for the past year—other than my overall busy life and hectic schedule—is because the league basically bricked NFL Gamepass, which was the paid subscription All-22 service that I used to illustrate my play breakdowns. 

You used to be able to look at an entire play-by-play sheet of each game and click on a specific play to watch its footage. Now, they’ve removed all means of sorting or selecting footage and crammed every play from each game into a single, unsearchable, 30-to-40 minute video clip. Since I don’t get paid to do this—and since the new “scroll and guess” method leads to some fat buffering times—that was a dealbreaker. So sadly, there won’t be any in-depth breakdowns of plays in this write-up. 

This ends my rant about things no one cares about. Now, on to the rants about things that people maybe care about.

OVERALL

According to Football Outsiders’ DVOA, we’re the #2 ranked team in the country. Based on their weighted DVOA metric—which aims to adjust for how well teams are currently playing—we’re #1 overall. Like every ranking system, there’s some statistical noise in DVOA, but it’s generally a strong barometer for team performance, and it should come as no surprise that we—in the midst of a ten-game winning streak—are at or near the top of its rankings.

But there are a few caveats worth noting. While DVOA accounts for the quality of competition in its calculations, according to pure wins and losses, we had one of the easiest strengths of schedule in the NFL. That’s due to the fact that the NFC West had a rare down year, our intraconference crossover was with the lowly NFC South, and we finished third in the division last year—meaning we played the third-ranked teams in the NFC East and North this season. Realistically, you could make the argument that we’ve only really played one truly elite team (the Chiefs), and that happened to coincide with our last loss of the season. But if we’re noting that then it’s only fair to also comment on how our plus-173 point differential was best in the league and so was our 5-1 record against playoff opponents. So while the competition is about to take a step up, there’s no reason to think we shouldn’t be up for the challenge.

OFFENSE

Offensive DVOA: 6th
Weighted DVOA: 2nd
Passing: 3rd
Rushing: 13th

In what is quickly becoming a Niners tradition, our offense started slowly before picking up steam mid-season and finishing the year with an elite unit. While our 26.5 points per game gave us the nation’s sixth-best scoring offense, when looking at Purdy’s five starts (plus the Miami game where he entered in the first offensive series), that number jumps to 33.5 ppg—which would have been best in the league by 4ppg.

All this to say, we’ve hit our stride at the right time.

levitation = intangibles

Purdy Good. We obviously have to lead this section with our boy Brock—first of his name, (originally) fourth on the depth chart, whose Mr. Irrelevant draft status is required by law to be mentioned multiple times in every broadcast and who looks like he’s twelve years old. He leads us into battle against Seattle this week, and for us to get to where we want to be, he’ll need to fight back a lot of historical ineptitude from his draft cohorts.

To give you a sense of how rare it is for a quarterback drafted this late to have any type of NFL success—much less as a rookie who was thrust into play with functionally zero practice reps—here are a couple of fun facts. Since the turn of the century, there has only been a single quarterback drafted in the 5th round or later to start a playoff game (TJ Yates in 2011). During that same time frame, non-Purdy quarterbacks drafted in the seventh round have gone a combined 1-14 in their rookie years (ironically, Ken Dorsey has that single win while playing for the Niners). If you Google “best seventh-round quarterbacks,” your search returns are filled with non-sarcastic namedrops like Trevor Siemian, Matt Flynn, and Tim Rattay. Purdy’s run as our starter is already unheard of. If he has any success whatsoever in these playoffs (and/or beyond), ESPN will shit themselves before drawing straws to determine which of their unintelligible talking heads declares him the next Tom Brady and/or the second (third?) coming of Jesus Christ. 

So why has Purdy had so much success so early in his career? Well, the scheme, the surrounding talent, and a supporting locker room that’s used to powering through massive injuries to key positions are a fat piece of that puzzle. But it would be absurd to believe that the only factors contributing to Purdy’s success have been external ones.

Mentally, Purdy plays like a veteran. He’s smart, reads the field quickly and accurately, and—whether it’s scrambling and sliding with the ball extended to ice a game late in the fourth, throwing from a lower arm slot to work around a defensive end trying to disrupt a quick screen, or spinning outside of a DB blitz then squaring up to make a safe throw out of bounds—Purdy does a lot of little things well in a way that you just don’t see from young signal callers. His game and field awareness are advanced, and—based on stories of him going over every play call of team drills in his mind after practice while piloting the scout team—his preparation is equally as precocious. Much of that is likely attributed to him being a dude who doesn’t have ideal size or physical tools and who started 46 games at Iowa State—a historic Big 12 doormat which he helped lead to its most successful string of seasons in school history. When you’re that guy playing for that team, you kind of have to be better on the preparation side otherwise you’re never going to have success.

While his typical “measurables” don’t pop off the page (height, weight, arm strength, etc.), Purdy’s quick release, ability to throw from multiple arm slots, and sneaky athleticism and pocket presence have greatly aided in his ascent. While no one would mistake him for Trey Lance as a runner, Purdy has good short-area quickness and elusiveness and a great sense of feeling and avoiding initial pressure. We’ve talked a lot about how improvisational ability greatly increases the snap-to-snap floor of Shanahan’s notoriously complicated offense. While Lance could pick up yardage on the ground and Jimmy was connecting on more off-book plays this year than in seasons past, Purdy has been consistently strong at buying time and keeping plays alive since taking over the lead job. By turning negative plays into positives or net zeros and net zeros into small or large gains, Purdy has shown—albeit in a small sample size—the ability to keep us on schedule, avoid big losses and mistakes, and—like a running back who always gets more yards than are blocked—gain hidden yardage that not only accumulates over the course of a game but makes every ensuing down and distance more manageable. For a team like the Niners—with an elite defense and a style that emphasizes complementary football through a physical run game—those hidden yards matter more to us than most.

It’s also worth mentioning Purdy’s deep ball, which is actually not that great (his lack of arm strength was why Purdy fell so far in the draft), but differs from Jimmy G’s deep ball in that he actually throws it.

Jimmy Garoppolo is a notoriously bad deep ball thrower, particularly outside the hashes, but throwing the deep ball successfully (or not) is about more than just arm strength. If you want to throw the ball well vertically—especially if you don’t have a rocket launcher strapped to your shoulder—you need to throw early, throw with anticipation, and throw confidently. Jimmy’s accuracy wavered down the field but it was never as much about a lack of arm talent as it was about a lack of confidence to just pull the trigger and let it rip.

People have been critical of Shanahan not throwing the ball enough deep, but not all deep balls have to be completed on schemed-up shot plays and Bruce Arians-esque aggressive downfield passing. Nearly every passing concept has built-in deep balls—or pre-snap alerts—if for no other reasons than to easily hunt alignment and personnel matchups, to force DBs to drop deep, and to create spacing and passing windows between routes. Yet we rarely—if ever—saw Jimmy G recognize these alerts and let it rip down the sideline. Purdy, on the other hand, showed the ability to see and take these opportunities in just his first career start.

⚠️ ¡Y OTRO! ¡’TOUCHDOWN SAN FRANCISCO’!

👨‍🍳 Brock Purdy y Christian McCaffrey cocinan el 3º TD de los #49ers.
21-0 lidera #FTTB tras cuarto y medio de partido. pic.twitter.com/BtMLSnG1uA

— NFLSpain__ (@NFLSpain__) December 11, 2022

On this play, the Niners have flexed CMC out wide and are running Jennings on a Y-cross concept to the left of the formation with a slot pivot from Aiyuk underneath it. It’s a pretty standard concept in the Niners playbook, and—knowing how much we love leveling routes across the middle of the field—the cornerback on CMC false steps on the snap in hopes of jumping a short route inside. This is an outrageously aggressive move that can only be done if a corner (a) doesn’t fear the man out wide (which we’ll get to later) and (b) doesn’t fear that the offense will throw the deep ball. Purdy sees this aggressive approach from the corner—which is basically the equivalent to lining up in press and getting beat off the LOS—and lets it rip to CMC for a back-breaking TD near the end of the first half. 

To be clear, I wouldn’t consider Purdy’s deep ball a strength. He has to put more effort on balls over 20 yards than most QBs, he was a bit off-target on back-to-back fades against the Raiders, he’s had a few instances of missing deeper receivers to take safer passes underneath, and—also against the Raiders—he tossed a pick to Kittle that someone like Lance would have threaded upfield for a touchdown. But the willingness to see and throw the deep ball opens things up for our offense because it makes defenses FINALLY respect us just enough vertically that they can’t just crowd the box to play the run and short game.

Even when Jimmy is playing well, he always seemed to leave yards on the field because he would skew so heavily towards underneath routes and rarely take the deep shots that were baked into concepts. That led to a lot of short-yardage passes in lieu of early skinny posts or nine routes or the digs that often open up behind those contested passes. Then, in turn, those underneath windows would shrink tighter and tighter as teams began cheating away from anything down the field. As we move into the playoffs, teams are going to continue to do what they always do—load up the box against the run and crowd the middle against our intermediate passing game—but at least Purdy has shown he’s got the anticipation and the confidence to toss the occasional long ball. And you only need a few of those passes to be successful to open everything else in our playbook. 

More Like Christian Mc-Catch-rey HAHAHAHA, okay I’ll show myself out. Speaking of raising our offensive floor, Christian McCaffrey probably does that as well as any non-quarterback in football. We know that our emphasis on running the ball, completing intermediate passes, and play action means that we need to stay on track more so than most offenses. And CMC has been—in John Lynch’s terms—a force multiplier at turning negatives into positives and short gains into medium ones.

Shanahan has long been looking for a running back with high-end potential in the passing game, shelling out loads of money (McKinnon) and draft capital (Sermon) in the process. He’s finally found that man in McCaffrey, and the result is a dude who just prints first downs. 

Like the NBA’s push to entire squads of long, athletic wings, Shanahan knows that his various motions, formations, and schemes become exponentially more potent when he can mix and match personnel sets and hunt matchups across the board. The addition of Juice in 2017 let us use heavy doses of 21 personnel to create mismatches in the passing game on linebackers. The emergence of Kittle a year later furthered that trend. Deebo’s full ascent into the “wideback” destroyer of defenders in space gave us a weapon who could create issues for everyone from corners to linebackers in both the pass and the run game. And CMC’s mid-season addition gives us the same thing as Deebo, but in reverse. 

Last year, the Rams won a Super Bowl by (1) loading their roster for a short-term push, (2) peaking at the right time, (3) landing on the right side of an outrageously lucky string of high-leverage, high-variance plays (recovering Matt Stafford’s late-game fumble against the Bucs, Tartt’s dropped pick, the Bengals’ called-back TD in the Super Bowl), and (4) spamming the ever-living shit out of the choice route with Cooper Kupp.

While CMC isn’t on Kupp’s level as a receiver, he’s functionally the running back equivalent in the passing game. McCaffrey’s ability to regularly beat every linebacker in coverage on option and angle routes out of the backfield gives us a guy who is always open underneath—and often in the check-down role when shit gets hairy. His gravitational pull creates more horizontal space for Deebo and Aiyuk’s slants and more vertical space for Kittle and the receivers’ digs and crossers. And his ability to routinely make the first man miss en route to the first down marker can turn safe check downs into wins for the offense rather than consolation prizes. All that and he can still threaten as a receiver out wide against cornerbacks, whether that’s by gobbling up slants, hauling in back shoulder fades like mentioned above, or—like he did against Arizona—running hitch-and-go deep outs on the boundary. 

“B” is for “Better Than We Could Have Hoped For”. Banks, Burford, Brendel, and Brunskill haven’t been perfect this year, but props to the four of them for solidifying an interior OL that was a big question mark going into this year. Equal credit to the coaching staff and scouting department for knowing that they had the pieces in place to replace three departed starters on the interior. Interior pressure at the wrong times has been our Achilles heel during recent post-season runs, and while this unit isn’t impervious to the occasional rusher, they at least give us a fighting chance to flip the script on that trend.

While we’re on the subject of players whose play has allowed us to combat past weaknesses (and whose names include the letter “B” so that I can cram him into this category), Brandon Aiyuk’s emergence as the team’s top route runner gives us a true man-beater outside who could prove vital in the playoffs. Often times when our offense bogs down it’s because we simply can’t win enough outside against press man coverage, and that allows defenses to outnumber us in the box. Aiyuk has blossomed into an excellent route runner, and—in an offense that put a higher priority on downfield passes outside the hashes—it wouldn’t have taken him until Week 18 to eclipse the 1,000-yard mark.

Touchdowns Not Turtles. The confidence of Purdy and the “floor-and-ceiling riser” that is CMC have also led to a very important development on the coaching front: Shanahan is calling games more aggressively. Shanahan has long been lambasted for calling a single passing play in the Falcons’ Super Bowl loss when the run game was getting absolutely stuffed—leading to the narrative that he is “too aggressive” in these close games. This was hammered down in the Chiefs Super Bowl, when he called a few passes in the fourth quarter that fell incomplete (even if both were wide ass open). But in reality, I think our sporadic issues in closing games have been more of a product of (a) interior pass blocking, (b) the high variance nature that came with Jimmy G piloting a meticulously schemed offense, and (c) Shanahan becoming too conservative late in some games. 

It makes a lot of sense. He openly regrets that pass call in the Falcons’ Super Bowl—even if it’s lost in the narrative that he got the Falcons into would-be-game-winning field goal range multiple times in that game but each time those plays were called back on holding—and he also was the coach behind the absolute roller coaster that has been Jimmy G’s tenure as our starting quarterback. If that was your background, and you saw Jimmy collapse in the Chiefs Super Bowl and then perform as he did after getting dinged up in that wildcard win against the Cowboys, would you be apt to sling that shit all up and down the field? Probs not.

But the reasoning behind that approach—as understandable as it was—was a genuine threat to capping our ceiling as a team for years to come. Ultimately, it didn’t matter if Jimmy was more or less at fault (or more injured) than he seemed in these high-leverage situations. The fact of the matter was that as long as Shanahan couldn’t trust the passing game (and by proxy, the quarterback) to complete open passes to close out games, we wouldn’t be able to finish those games at a high clip. 

For the longest time, commentators and coaches have chirped that the only way to close out games is to run the ball effectively. And yes, if you’re lacking in the run game, it’s going to be harder for you to ice games. But if running the ball every down was the best way to close out games, how come the Ravens—who employ Lamar Jackson and an entire offense built on pounding the ball—and the Raiders—who have the league’s leading rusher in Josh Jacobs—have combined to blow eight(!) double-digit second-half leads this season? Running the ball into loaded fronts that have a numbers advantage and know that you’re running decreases the effectiveness of your running game. Closing out games is less about killing clock and more about accumulating first downs. And in today’s NFL, the best way to do that is to keep your late-game passing attack threatening enough that you can still be effective on the ground.

Despite starting a rookie quarterback, Shanahan is calling games with the confidence needed to close them out. Weird Juice-to-CMC option pitches notwithstanding, Shanahan may be in the best overall play-calling groove of his career, and his willingness to mix things up and lean on the pass when required late in the Miami and Las Vegas games has led—alongside good reads and good luck from Purdy—to some impressive closeouts from our offense. That cohesion and confidence between a coach and his offense is a potentially massive development for this post-season and moving forward. 

DEFENSE

Defensive DVOA: 1st
Weighted DVOA: 2nd
Pass: 5th
Run: 2nd

The Niners D leads the league in nearly every meaningful statistical category, both advanced and otherwise, as we also lead the league in points and yardage allowed. Unlike our offense, our defense fired out of the gates to start the season and—save for a few hiccups against AFC West opponents—has largely maintained its high rate of play. But we’ve been a bit leakier in the past month and teams are starting to gameplan more specifically against our weaknesses. Hopefully, that means that—entering the post-season—this unit will be energized and re-focused after a string of games against backup quarterbacks on non-contending teams.

Secondary Adjustments. DeMeco Ryans’ first year as a DC was basically a ten-to-twelve-week workshop on how to hide an absolutely atrocious cornerback situation. But that experience, and what I can only imagine included a string of night terrors involving Josh Norman playing jump balls, led to the Niners pursuing and signing Charvarius Ward in the off-season, and Ward has turned out to be one of the best (and best-priced) free agent pickups in the NFL. With the exception of the Chiefs game where he came back from injury rusty, Charvarius has played like a lockdown No.1 all season while being paid under market (his $14M payout next year barely eclipses Robbie Anderson’s $12M). But he’s only one part of what has become the Niners’ best secondary of the Shanahan era.

Ward’s ability to eliminate a side of the field and/or blanket No.1 receivers has helped us weather the storm that comes from losing both Emmanuel Moseley and Jason Verrett to season-ending injuries. In their place, Deommodore Lenoir has emerged from our crop of first- and second-year corners and played admirably. He hasn’t been perfect—and his ability to play the ball in the air has been challenged as of late—but he’s largely been a feisty presence in the secondary who stays in good position.

With the departure of Jaquiski Tartt in the off-season, Jimmie Ward was expected to be the veteran voice at safety holding together a young secondary. But when Jimmie went down late in the pre-season to injury, the Niners signed 32-year-old journeyman Tashaun Gipson—who some of the younger DBs nicknamed “dad.” Together, Gipson and Talanoa Hufanga have formed a safety pairing that combined for nine interceptions this year and which allowed Jimmie Ward to slide into the nickel position, where he can be incredibly disruptive against both the pass and the run.

While Gipson has been a solid stabilizing presence on the back-end, Hufanga took a massive step forward in his second-year, exploding out of the gates with a ton of splash plays early in the season that helped catapult him to a 1st-team All-Pro selection. While his first-team spot was a bit surprising considering he’s had some issues missing tackles and has gotten picked on a bit for his aggressive/instinctual play-style as of late, Huf is a big-play presence on the back-end and we can only hope his trajectory mirrors that of Fred Warner’s—a fellow first-team All-Pro who emerged as a second-year player before becoming all-world in his third NFL season.

Despite these improvements, the secondary is still the only unit with any real weaknesses, even if they’ve been largely hidden throughout the year. Huf is so instinctual that he can get caught guessing at times, and we’ve had a few busted coverages that often involve a miscommunication somewhere on the backend springing a receiver free. That makes me think that teams are scheming up ways to bait our safeties out of position and test them—and Lenoir—on jump balls down the field. 

bullying we can get behind

Adam Peters, plz keep turning down those GM interviews. But Hufanga and Lenoir aren’t the only former fifth-round picks to take a step forward this year. While considerably more established than his DB counterparts entering this season, Dre Greenlaw made the leap from “consistent high-level starter who loves goalline plays” to “high-end heat-seeking missile who still loves goalline plays.”

Props to the Niners’ brass for giving Greenlaw a two-year extension entering the season because his growth—particularly in coverage—has been just as much a factor as Warner’s stellar play in the Niners’ ability to eliminate underneath zones in the passing game and hunt running backs sideline-to-sideline. Greenlaw comes in too hot sometimes (and other times he gets booted out of games even when he doesn’t ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), but we’d much rather have that than the opposite, and having two linebackers who excel in coverage eliminates a great deal of what offenses can do to attack us.

As an aside, even if you exclude players like Juice, Samson Ebukam, and Charvarius Ward who we signed to big free-agent deals, the Niners currently start 10 players who were either drafted on the third day or went undrafted coming out of college. Gipson was an undrafted journeyman. Brendel, also undrafted, started three games across six years before this season. The rest were all selected and signed out of college by the Niners.

A bear’s gotta eat. The likely DPOTY gets his own category, as Nick Bosa’s performance this season has been truly spectacular. Despite missing a game-and-a-half due to injury, Bosa led the league in sacks with 18.5 and dwarfed his competition in knockdowns with 48, a figure that not only paced the league by 13 but—based on a general average of 45% of knockdowns becoming sacks—put him on pace for somewhere around the single-season sack record. Again, this is while missing a game-and-a-half due to injury.

Bosa has recorded a sack in all but three games this season, had a six-game mid-season stretch of at least one sack, and was PFF’s third-highest-rated edge rusher despite no other player on the team registering more than five sacks and Arik Armstead missing nearly half of this season’s games (thus tempering the inside stunt work that has terrorized teams for years).

That thing that every coach always talks about. The Niners’ 30 takeaways are tied for second-best in the league, and—in conjunction with their third-best giveaways mark—their +13 turnover differential is tops in the league. For a team that preaches complementary football as much as any in the NFL, this is a massive win, and the record follows. In games with an even turnover differential, the Niners are 3-0 this year. In games with a positive turnover differential (such as the last eight straight), the Niners are 10-0.

Special teams role reversal. Last year, our special teams were among the league’s worst, which led to a coaching change and us adding standouts Oren Burks, George Odum, and Ray-Ray McCloud. After a slow start to the season, Ray-Ray has really come along as of late in the return game and Odum was just named a second-team All-Pro specialist.

But now, the main thing holding back our unit from ascending past league-average status, is the one guy who has been rock solid for years. Our field goal and extra point unit is ranked 26th in the league, and Robbie Gould has missed key kicks in crucial moments of one-score games against the Chargers, Raiders, and Seahawks. Kicking is a fickle business in the NFL, and in last year’s post-season Robbie was a perfect 6-for-6—including a game-winner in sub-zero temperatures against the Packers. Hopefully, he can rekindle that consistency when the games get tighter in the playoffs.

graphics like this are why we don’t trust clutchpoints

THE MATCHUPS

Since all we know about the playoffs is our wildcard game against the Seahawks, here are a few quick write-ups on how we might match up against every team in the NFC (if we make the Super Bowl, I’m sure I’ll find the time to do a write-up). Due to time and NFL Gamepass restraints, these are based more on general knowledge than in-depth film study.

SEAHAWKS

Long the thorn in our side based on their propensity for staying in tight games and Russell Wilson running around long enough to pull them out of said tight games, the Seahawks are same same but different this year. Russ NBA’d his way out of town, the Broncos couldn’t get through a single season with him at the helm before axing their coach, and now the Walmart heirs are interviewing everyone they can think of who will establish a run-heavy offense in a desperate attempt to make Russ cook less. Meanwhile, the Seahawks have (unfortunately) re-emerged into a playoff team sooner than expected on the backs of a return to their intended team identity, a talented crop of rookies, and the resurgence of Geno Smith.

Neither of our first two matchups were particularly close—the second only being more of a game due to a terrible call on a would-have-been-game-ending pick six and a late Seahawks score—but there’s rain in the forecast (potentially very heavy rain) and that always hurts the team with the more explosive offense.

Offense: Seattle wants to operate a run-first offense that utilizes play-action to open up easy completions while limiting turnovers. While I’d expect lots of bootleg passes and attempts to set up misdirection to target our DBs deep down the field, it’s TBD how they plan to gain incremental yardage between their shot plays. Usually, that would be via the running game, but—despite the promise of their rookie tackles—the Seahawks should know that they don’t have the talent to run the ball consistently against our front seven. Nor can they be confident in their ability to drop back each play and let our pass rush tee off. Will the Seahawks open up their formations, shuffle DK Metcalf around (last matchup he was shadowed and shut down by Charvarius Ward), and rely on the quick game rather than run directly into a wall on first and second downs? And if so, how long can they keep that up given their preferred identity and Geno Smith’s uneven play to finish the season?

Defense: Seattle’s defense has been below average all year, particularly against the rush. But Pete Carroll is no idiot, and you have to think he’ll load the LOS and force Purdy into some passing situations early, otherwise, we’ll just bleed them dry on the ground. Getting into a rhythm in the passing game early is key so that we can stay balanced, and hitting the defense with some misdirection runs and counters will likely be in the game plan against a defense that will be trying to offset front seven talent with aggressiveness. They did a good job of shutting down our Deebo-less outside passing attack in the last matchup, but Deebo’s back now and Purdy no longer has an oblique strain. This Seapenises defense is one of the worst in the league at defending YAC yardage and we’ve led the league in that category for (I think?) every single one of Shanahan’s years at the helm. Gobbling up some chunk plays would be a nice way to keep them out of formations with too many down linemen, which should in turn open up numbers on the ground.

GIANTS

Brian Daboll’s first season has gone about as well as anyone could have hoped, as he’s piloted a team largely devoid of premier offensive talent to a winning record and a six-seed. They don’t have the horses to win pretty, so this is a team that has fully bought into winning ugly. While I’m bullish on Daboll and the direction of the franchise, I don’t think this team is particularly good. But they’re well-coached and they can definitely capitalize no your mistakes.

Offense: Daboll is very multiple in what he does on offense and his creativity has led to a top 10 offensive DVOA. If there’s anyone on this side of the bracket likely to put together a highly specialized gameplan against our defense and hard target the eyes of our safeties to spring big plays, it’s probably Daboll. Keys will be expecting the unexpected, settling in quicker than we did in games against the Raiders and Chiefs, accounting for Daniel Jones’ legs at all times, and forcing them to win at the catch point on any deep ball. While that got hairy against a Raiders team that has Davante Adams and Darren Waller, the Giants have speedy outside guys but not really anyone who can high-point like that Raiders duo, and this OL would be hard-pressed to hold up regularly against our pass rush on deep dropback passes. This is not an inherently explosive offense, so the key is not to gift them explosives through blown assignments.

Defense: Giants’ DC Wink Martindale plays more man and blitzes more than anyone in the league. When you have interchangeable players who can hang with whoever in coverage, that can be highly effective, and that blitz heaviness—alongside a talented defensive line—can create havoc when it gets through. But the Giants’ linebackers are major weak spots in coverage and—while safety Julian Love has had a solid year—they don’t have the secondary support necessary to hide those linebackers consistently. They want to throw them forward as pass rushers and let them do what they do best, but Shanahan is one of the best linebacker hunters in the game, and you gotta imagine that—after allowing lines of 7-88-2 and 13-109-2 against the Cowboys and Vikings—we’d be hard targeting those guys in the passing game.

COWBOYS

Unquestionably one of the most talented teams in the field and with high-end potential on both sides of the ball, the Cowboys—fair or not—are always looked at through the lens of their nearly endless string of butthole-tightening fuck-ups come post-season play. This is a team that stomped the Vikings 40-3 on the road then nearly lost to the Texans at home. They can hang with anyone and they can lose to anyone and regardless of which of those outcomes occur, Jerry Jones is gonna have something to say about it.

Offense: OC Kellen Moore isn’t as hot an HC candidate as he was last year, but he should be lauded for his work with Cooper Rush while the Cowboys stabilized through Dak’s early season injury. The problem is that this offense, which momentarily took off when Dak came back healthy, has been massively inconsistent to finish the year (including a six-point stinker against the Commanders to close out the season). When they’re on, they’re explosive and multiple. CeeDee Lamb is a genuine No.1 receiver and three-level threat and—given their second-best wideout is Michael Gallup—I wouldn’t be shocked if we shadow Lamb with Ward. Tony Pollard is the explosive head of their backfield and a homerun threat on the ground or as a receiver while Zeke remains as their sledgehammer on the inside. Tight end Dalton Schultz is often their metronome. If he’s getting his, the offense is likely operating well because he lives for intermediate routes. Taking away easy leveling concepts with Lamb and Schultz across the middle with our linebackers and generating pressure on an OL that has had to shuffle a bit due to injuries will be key. Prescott has been interception-happy to wind down the year. This would be a good time to be opportunistic.

Defense: The Dallas defense is equally as formidable as their offense (and has probably been the more consistent of the two this year). Their headliner is edge defender/linebacker Micah Parsons, who’s likely Bosa’s greatest competition for the DPOTY award. He’s a supreme athlete and a rocket shot off the line, and—when paired with fellow elite edge DeMarcus Lawrence—there’s a high likelihood we don’t run a ton of deep dropback passes (which we don’t run a ton of anyway). As everyone knows by now, Trevon Diggs is a big play guy who you can target if done smartly, but opposite him, Anthony Brown has gotten picked on throughout this season. The emergence of Aiyuk should help as one of him or Deebo will likely be matched up on Brown at any given point. Despite the strength of their edges, Dallas relies on a rotation of replacement-level players on the interior. Winning there will be important to establish our run game and keep their edge rushers at bay.

BUCCANEERS

Back by no one’s demand, Tom Brady is once again in the playoffs. While the Bucs’ place in these playoffs is mostly due to the large-scale ineptitude of the NFC South, this is a team that is finally finding its stride at the right time and you can never discount that.

Offense: The Bucs finally had an explosive passing performance in their last competitive game, torching the Panthers for 430 yards through the air and three tugs. Granted, this was a Panthers team that was so ravaged at cornerback that they signed Josh Norman off the street… but nonetheless, it was a good time for Brady and his two big wideouts to get on the same page. This Bucs offense isn’t fast anywhere and we have a sizeable athleticism advantage, but they are as good as any at winning jump balls if they have the chance. The last thing we want is Lenoir and our safeties having to box out Mike Evans and Chris Godwin forty yards down the field, so we’ll likely lean on our DL to force them out of those jump ball looks and into their quick game—where Brady has always excelled but where the Bucs lack speedy options who can get open early. If the Buccaneers’ historically inept rushing attack has improved it’s only slightly, but OC Byron Leftwich has found success as of late in leaning more into play action passes regardless. Stuffing the run game via minimal effort so that we can hedge play action passes would go a long way toward us repeating a similar performance. If we eliminate the deep shots, they’ll have to paper cut us down the field, and it will be hard for them to do that against our team speed.

Defense: We rushed for upwards of 200 yards on nearly 6ypc in our last matchup so it’s safe to say the Bucs will be keying the run in this one. This time they’ll also have a healthy Vita Vea, who is a huge presence (both physically and figuratively) on the interior and a big part of their run defense, but I’m not particularly scared of the rest of their d-line. Their secondary is talented, and they have two of the better cover guys in those hook-to-curl zones with linebacker Lavonte David and nickel corner Antoine Winfield Jr. If anything, I would expect our gameplan to look like a classic Jimmy G one. The Bucs play Cover 3 as much as anyone, which means putting their alley defenders in run/pass binds and pounding the edges makes some sense. As does threatening the alley defenders via seam routes, digs behind them, and the layering concepts across the middle that we love so much. Bowles is a savvy DC. Purdy will have to be smart in diagnosing coverages and noticing any safety rotations that attempt to jump routes over the middle.

VIKINGS

Much-maligned by the analytics community (and basically every other community outside of Minnesota), the Vikings are notorious for winning only close games and having a -3 point differential (a worse figure than the 8-9 Packers or 9-8 Dolphins) despite their 13-4 record. Football Outsiders has them as the 27th-ranked team in terms of DVOA, which has got to be the greatest disparity between on-field record and projected (they estimate the Vikings should have 6.3 wins). But, you know what, that’s why you actually play the games.

Offense: The Vikings offense rides the wave of variance. They’ve started multiple games with Kirk Cousins 0-for-something and digging them a hole, but—more often than not—they climb out of that hole (see: largest comeback in NFL history vs Colts). This is a Shanahan scheme that leans more McVay, and when they’re humming it’s often because they’re force-feeding the ball to Justin Jefferson (just as Kevin O’Connell learned to do to Cooper Kupp with the Rams). Hitting him off the line and disrupting his timing with Cousins is probably the biggest key, as Cousins is a big-time rhythm guy. When he’s on, he’s on, and when he’s off the nadir is very, very real. The Vikings have a strong OL—especially if center Garrett Bradbury comes back healthy—but Cousins is tied for the third-most sacked QB in the league. If you muck up his initial reads, he can hold the ball too long and good things (for the opponent) typically result.

Defense: Minnesota’s defense is much more consistent than its offense, but that’s not always a good thing. Since a week into November, this Vikings defense has allowed 29.6 points per game, with games against Mike White and the Jets and the first-pick-hunting Bears the only contests where they’ve allowed fewer than 24 points. They have a lot of pieces—even if some of them are getting long in the tooth—but to this point, the product simply hasn’t matched its parts. Despite having two high-tier edge rushers in Danielle Hunter and ZaDarius Smith, the Vikings have one of the worst pass defenses in the league. There will be guys open through the air. Get them the ball, let them run after catch, and keep their defense from keying the run game.

EAGLES

Seemingly unstoppable for much of the year, the Eagles are still very much a contender (and the front-runner) to represent the NFC in the Super Bowl, but how likely that occurs hinges largely on the health of second-team All-Pro quarterback Jalen Hurts and first-team All-Pro right tackle Lane Johnson. They have an extra week to get healthy courtesy of the first-round bye, so maybe when we see them next they’ll look more like the team that started the season 13-1 versus the banged-up squad that finished it 1-2.

Offense: The Eagles have done a tremendous job of building their offense around Jalen Hurts’ strengths in a way that is flexible enough to target multiple different defenses. They want to run the ball, both with Miles Sanders (except for when you start him in the fantasy playoffs) and Hurts, and they give a lot of option looks and designed runs to their QB. How Hurts’ shoulder feels will be paramount here because when you take away his legs he uses a lot of his effectiveness. They are a heavy RPO team when paired with their running game, believing that their strong OL and excellent running QB means QB runs are too mathematically difficult to defend while in heavy man coverage, but if you do go to man coverage, they love to toss contested fades to AJ Brown and DeVonta Smith. Obviously, we’d like to avoid having to rely on Lenoir beating either of those guys on jump balls. Our wide-9 system can make us slightly more susceptible to running quarterbacks at times, so we’ll need to rush smart and with proper lane integrity. Bosa on their backup right tackle could be huge. Bluff blitzes, rotating safeties, and disguising coverages pre-snap will be important to get them out of their RPO game. It’s not an easy task, but if you can force them out of their comfort zone and into a more traditional dropback passing attack, they're not nearly as effective.

Defense: The Eagles are—as always—loaded along the defensive line, with a rotation that goes eight deep and genuine players at each position. They lead the NFL in sacks with a whopping 70 (second place has 55). They also spent the past two off-seasons loading up at cornerback, with Darius Slay and James Bradberry making up one of the better cornerback pairs in the NFL and Chauncey Gardner-Johnson continuing to badger people from the safety/nickel slot. This combination gives them Football Outsiders’ #1-rated defense against the pass. But their greatest weaknesses on defense actually align rather well with what we’re trying to do offensively. The Eagles are one of the league’s worst defenses at missing tackles, and we love to get our players the ball quickly in space where they can catch and run. While linebacker TJ Edwards is having a career year, the Eagles follow the analytics trend of minimizing team investment in the linebacker position, and thus, those non-Edwards linebackers can and should be targeted in the passing game. Employing misdirection and play action to open up seams and make those linebackers hesitate on their assignments will also help us run the ball on their front seven. Despite the strength of their DL and the return of first-round NT Jordan Davis, the Eagles are 26th in generating tackles at or behind the line of scrimmage and dead-last in stopping short-yardage runs. This isn’t a team that gives up many long runs, but it is a team that—in the few times its faltered—can be susceptible to a run-heavy plan. So while the personnel that we’re up against would present quite the challenge, it’s not the worst stylistic matchup from our POV.

While these are far from in-depth or detailed looks at these matchups, hopefully, they’ll do for now. And hopefully, we’ll string off a few wins and there will be another one coming in the lead-up to a Super Bowl appearance.

Go Niners! 👍🏈