Preview: Green Bay

Opponent: Green Bay Packers
Where: Levi’s Stadium (Santa Clara, CA)
When: Saturday, 1/20 @ 5:15 PT
Weather: 60’s with a chance of showers + wind

In the 90’s action thriller/gay rom-com Point Break, police chief Ben Harp (Dr. Cox from Scrubs) refers to the fresh-faced and cocky Keanu Reeves as “young, dumb, and full of cum.” Like many action heroes of this time, Reeves’ character was brash, bold, and too young and stupid to know the seriousness and repercussions of his actions. This impulsive youthfulness came with some growing pains (like Gary Busey’s death, whoops), but ultimately led to the (sort of) apprehension of the bad guys. You can probably guess the analogy here.

The fifth-youngest playoff team since the merger—and the youngest since 1974—these Packers are having fun, keeping loose, and staying dangerous. They just pasted the Cowboys in Dallas—giving the Boys their first home loss since September of 2022—and are peaking on both sides of the ball at the right time. They’re so young and so unheralded that—unlike Packers teams of old—there are no expectations that they must worry to live up to. They’re just here to surf, rob banks, and develop a half-baked romantic relationship with Lori Petty that no one remembers or cares about. 

Perhaps, the young underdogs will come through in the clutch. Or perhaps they’ll be left lying on the ground, screaming and firing their gun in the air because they’re just not quite ready to seal the deal.

Health Check

Packers: As of Tuesday afternoon, the Packers’ injury report has plenty of limited and DNP designations, but since they don’t actually practice until Wednesday it’s a pretty fuzzy picture. WR Christian Watson—who played limited snaps in the wild-card round while coming back from a hamstring injury—should be expected to play, but he may still be on a snap count. DE/OLB Preston Smith and G Elgton Jenkins were both listed as DNP, but should be considered likely to play given they played all of last weekend’s game. RB AJ Dillon missed the last two weeks and is a genuine question mark for this weekend. The biggest concern is CB Jaire Alexander, who toughed through an ankle injury against the Cowboys but left the game after re-aggravating it in the second half. He was listed as a limited participant, so at this point in the week that probably means he’s playing.

Niners: The bye week has been kind to us. Except for Trent Williams (who was given a rest day), the only DNPs we registered on Tuesday were Clelin Ferrell, Logan Ryan, and Dre Greenlaw, and the last two at least should practice on Wednesday and be considered heavily likely to play on Saturday. George Odum was limited, which could give our safeties a much-needed boost of depth, and Arik Armstead—who has been sidelined with a lisfranc injury since week 13—returned to practice last week. He’s still a limited participant, but he also seems highly likely to suit up this weekend.

PACKERS OFFENSE

Matt LaFleur has impressed me this year.

Despite starting his head coaching career with a 47-19 regular season record, it was always hard to tell how much of that early success was due to the culture and offense LaFleur installed versus the schemes that Aaron Rodgers and Davante Adams were already comfortable with. The 2-3 playoff record—with each of those losses disappointing and underwhelming in their own special way—didn’t help matters.

But now that they’re free from the spectre of Aaron Rodgers, LaFleur has been able to install and pilot the offense that he likely wanted to run from the jump. The result has been a unit that may not put up as many massive individual stat lines as the MVP Rodgers years but is much more cohesive and tailor-made to opposing defenses. 

Healthier than they’ve been all season, this is a top-10 unit with a deep roster of versatile weapons, an emerging young star at quarterback, and a playcaller who knows how to play to his roster’s strengths and attack defensive weaknesses. 

Same same but different. The Redskins’ and Falcons’ QB coach under Shanahan before hopping over to be the Rams’ OC for a year, Matt LaFleur’s offense has the same bones as the one we operate—with a heavy emphasis on motion, play action, and keeping defenses guessing by making the running and passing game concepts look as similar as possible. They’re all about minimizing tells so that teams can’t key on what they’re doing, which makes it easier to call games sequentially.

Before this year, the offense was a mish-mash of LaFleur’s concepts and the more static, matchup-hunting that Rodgers had become accustomed to with Davante Adams. While the bevy of back shoulder fades and quick hitters that arose from the Rodgers/Adams mind-meld often felt unstoppable, we kind of showed in our last playoff matchup against them how their rules could be reverse-engineered to force them into disadvantageous looks. This year, the offense relies significantly less on those kinds of audibles and hot routes and more on LaFleur’s thoughtful and well-designed week-to-week game plans.

LaFleur has been vocal this year about needing to stay committed to the run, and—with Aaron Jones back healthy—he’s done that better than ever as of late. As crazy as it seems, the Dallas game marked the first time in Aaron Jones’ career that he’s had 110+ rushing yards in four straight games. Staying ahead of the sticks and up on the scoreboard was clearly a massive part of the Packers’ game plan against Dallas, as 10 of the Packers’ first 12 plays were runs or utilized run action. I would expect more of the same against us.

The run game is their best way to rack up consistent short-yardage gains, and when that’s operating smoothly it opens up time and space for Jordan Love and their passing attack to target the second-level throws that this offense feasts on.

Love at second sight. Jordan Love blasted out of the gates in his first season as a starter before cooling off tremendously in the middle of the season, but over his last nine games—seven of them Packers victories—he’s played as well as any quarterback in the league. During that time, he’s completed 70.7% of his passes for 269 yards/game while throwing for 21 touchdowns and only one pick. Those numbers aren’t a mirage.

Despite dealing with numerous injuries to skill players during this closing stretch, Love has grown tremendously throughout the season, as best evidenced by his rematch performances against the Lions and Vikings—two division foes he struggled mightily against earlier in the season. Give credit to LaFleur for adjusting game plans to put Love in advantageous situations, but the Packers seem to have found (yet another) top-tier quarterback. Turns out drafting a dude for his physical tools and letting him set behind an established veteran can still—despite media outcry—be quite an effective method of developing a young quarterback.

You’ve probably seen Love’s “fadeaway” passes on highlights or social media. Given the fact that those passes are basically all to dudes who are wide-ass open and/or are massively underthrown, I wouldn’t get too caught up in all that. People throw from different angles. That’s nothing new. But if anything, those passes off his back foot are a reminder of Love’s athleticism, the size he has that allows him to toss those balls over rushing linemen, and—most importantly—his current comfort level in this offense. This team probably throws more late-opening crossers and deep outs than any in the league, and that’s a testament to Love’s ability to buy time in the pocket and make those throws under duress—whether that’s off his back foot or not.

Guys or Dudes. The Packers likely have the most diverse crop of young receivers in the country, even if none of them has cemented himself as a true alpha. Christian Watson is the dude who most looks the part—and someone who has had the most splash games over the past two years—but he’s been hurt a bunch this year. Jayden Reed is their Deebo light—a fly sweep and gadget guy who they scheme up different ways to get the ball in space. While Romeo Doubs—who just torched the Cowboys for six grabs for 151 yards—is perhaps their most consistent and well-rounded of the bunch (and their leader in receiving touchdowns). At tight end, they employ two promising rookies in Luke Musgrave and Tucker Kraft. This is a team that likes extra tight end sets, so both get plenty of run. Amazingly enough, all of these options are first- or second-year players.

Even if their only true alpha is running back Aaron Jones, the interchangeability of their wideouts and the creativity of LaFleur’s offense allows this offense to get the best of their young receivers while letting them continue to develop into the players they’ll eventually become. While it sounds counterintuitive in a time when we prioritize star talent more than anything in sports, it’s the depth of the receiving corps that is its best asset. Every good team has some weapons, and every good defense tries to take those weapons away. Few teams have a fourth- or fifth-option as good as the Packers, which is why—in any given game—any one of those options could be a featured player. 

Potential Defensive Keys

Stop the Run. Hopefully, Armstead is back for this one because stopping the run (and the pass looks off of the run) is the single most important factor in slowing down this Packers offense. It’s also where we’ve shown some weakness this season. While our raw rushing defense stats are strong, part of that is due to how quickly we’ve jumped on teams on the scoreboard. When it comes to YPC and EPA/rush, our numbers are much less pristine. Now, does that change immediately with one of the single-best run-stoppers in football back in the fold? Yes. To some extent. But we’ll need to be ready to stop the run early and often in this game.

As great as Jordan Love has looked as of late, this offense is built around balance and chunk plays off of play action. Against the Cowboys, they knew that if they could run the ball and run pass actions off of the threat of that run, they could stymy Dallas’ pass rushers. With only a single pressure on 21 passing attempts, their plan worked out better than they ever could have imagined. Given the talent and aggressive reputation of our defensive line, they’ll likely want to employ a similar game plan against us, with the run game, play action, and screens featuring heavily into their attack.

Love was 7-of-9 for 165 yards and a score off of play action against Dallas. The Packers want to get their young wideouts threatening deep then breaking into those second-level windows that open up when the run game is humming. If they can’t get those consistent short-to-medium gains on the ground then they’re not creating those passing windows behind the linebackers and they’ll have to get those short gains through drop-back passing. While Love is certainly capable in that regard, it is not the Packers’ strength, nor what they want to do. Love is at his best in deep drops where he has the time to see windows open down the field, where his athleticism can extend a play, and where his arm talent can put the ball wherever it needs to be. When we shorten down their routes and speed up that process, we have the best chance of preventing him from getting into a rhythm in the passing game. 

Bracket the Boot. Based on Love’s physical profile and how the Packers like to attack defenses, it should come as no surprise to learn that they love bootleg concepts. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen what was effectively one throwback bootleg concept work so consistently as it did against Dallas, but the Packers have been springing open receivers down the field off of their bootleg looks all year.

While I’d be shocked to see the Niners have coverage lapses on the scale of what we just saw in Dallas, I do expect the Packers to give us heavy doses of bootlegs in an attempt to get Jordan Love on the move with depth. That way they can slow up our pass rush, buy time for those second level throws, and give easy outlets in the flats to their tight ends, backs, and fly motion guys crossing Love’s face. 

We’ve seen teams spam bootlegs before—even when their run game wasn’t productive—as a means of preventing our defensive line from teeing off. So it’s important that we both have a plan to stop the run and the many looks that the Packers can deploy off of run action—regardless of their success on the ground.

Sound safeties. The Packers do a good job of targeting and attacking defensive tendencies and favorable matchups. Against the Cowboys, it seemed like they wanted to avoid their outside corners and target the slots. That led to route trees like this one, from Romeo Doubs.

Romeo Doubs caught all 6 of his targets for 151 yards & a TD, generating a career-high +60 receiving yards over expected.

Doubs had most of his production come between the numbers, catching all 5 of targets for 112 yards & a TD.#GBvsDAL | #GoPackGo pic.twitter.com/9iPzwDnHgJ

— Next Gen Stats (@NextGenStats) January 15, 2024

Here, you can see the multiple throwback bootlegs they completed to Doubs as well as the emphasis on the sort of deep in-breaking routes that avoid outside corners who are playing deep thirds/quarters while out-leveraging them when in man based on where their coverage help is likely to be. 

Since we have the best coverage linebackers in the NFL, I expect the Packers will avoid testing Warner and Greenlaw and instead lean more on trying to create one-on-one matchups with our safeties on double moves and deep crossers down the field. If they test us outside it will likely be towards Ambry Thomas, hoping to beat him off a double move or draw a flag if he initiates contact at the top of the route. Thomas has played very well for us since moving into the starting lineup, but he can get grabby on those late-breaking routes and scramble drill situations.

Having solutions and support for our backend players will be key here, but the easiest way to stop them from completing these long-developing routes is, well…

Speed up the process. It’s never a bad time for our defensive line to get in the opposing quarterback’s face, but given the time needed for the Packers’ preferred routes to get open, this would be a particularly good game for our vaunted d-line to pressure Love into getting rid of the ball earlier and less on target than he’d like.

3 < 7. Entering the Cowboys game, the Packers had only been stopped short of a touchdown once all season after getting to a first-and-goal situation—a stat that was the best mark in multiple decades. Despite that, their red zone touchdown percentage as a whole is only 17th-best in the league. So something’s going on between the 20- and 11-yard lines.

I haven’t watched enough of them to know what the problem is, but I assume it has something to do with the condensed field allowing safeties to sit on the goal line and drive on those second-level throws that they like so much. Whatever it is, it’ll be important for us to bow up once they start sniffing the red zone and force field goal attempts rather than touchdowns.

PACKERS DEFENSE

After firing then-embattled DC Mike Pettine in 2021, LaFleur went back to the Rams well with currently-embattled DC Joe Barry—who spent four years working under Wade Phillips, Brandon Staley, and Raheem Morris. 

Barry’s had his moments—including holding us to 13 points two years ago in Lambeau—but has been under heavy scrutiny for much of this season as the pilot of a defensive unit that has underperformed for most of the year. That said, the Packers finished the regular season holding the Vikings and Bears to averages of 9.5 points and 201 offensive yards before their starters kept the Cowboys to 16 points through three-and-a-half quarters. So is this a unit that has finally found its way, or have their past few opponents simply been unable to target their weaknesses? 

Not the mayor of Titletown. As recently as Christmas, Joe Barry was maybe the most hated man in Wisconsin. To the point where Packers blogs were doing shit like posting long form articles listing the many career games random players had put up against Joe Barry-led defenses. The past few games have quieted the chatter a tiny bit, but he’s still very much on the hot seat, and a bad performance against us could lead to another shuffling of DCs in the off-season. 

While I do think the Packers are playing their best defense at the exact right time, this is still a unit with major issues. Yes, they did all they needed to and more against the Cowboys but they also allowed 500+ offensive yards (even if some of that was with their backups in the game). And they’re less than a month removed from allowing 34 points and a season-high 454 yards of offense against the Bucs and 30 points and nearly 400 yards of offense to the Carolina Panthers. For anyone who has watched a second of Panthers football this year, those numbers are unfathomable. 

ROI woes. Other than Jordan Love in 2020, the Packers have used every single first-round pick since 2018 on the defensive side of the ball, so there’s no excuse for the cupboard to feel so dry. 

This is not a defense that is devoid of talent. Their front seven has players, with Kenny Clark still a disruptive force on the interior and Preston Smith and Rashan Gary making for an impressive-looking pair of book-end rushers. The front—and its ability to rush the passer—is unquestionably the strength of this defense. But there are major personnel question marks at every other level.

After Raheem Mostert gouged them to death in the 2019 playoffs, the Packers invested heavily in the linebacker position, drafting Quay Walker out of Georgia in the first round of 2022 and locking up De’Vondre Campbell on a five-year deal after his breakout 2021 season. But Quay hasn’t lived up to his draft stock and Campbell’s health and play have slowly deteriorated since signing his big deal.

In the secondary, 2021 first-rounder Darnell Savage has played well this season—his pick-six against the Cowboys basically iced that game before halftime—but that’s basically where the feel-good stories end. Jaire Alexander played in the wild card game—corralling Dak’s first interception—and when he can play it’s a huge boost for this secondary, but he’s been in and out of the lineup all season. 2019 first-round corner Eric Stokes has played two games this season—a recurring theme for a young player who hasn’t been able to kick the injury bug. Given the Packers traded veteran Rasul Douglas at the deadline—a trade that feels all the more mind-boggling now that he’s playing at a high level for the #2 seed Bills—they’ve been left with starting journeyman Corey Ballentine and 7th round rookie Carrington Valentine outside for much of the season. That’s a good blueprint to allow Baker Mayfield to drop 350 yards passing and a perfect passer rating on you. 

Ballentine and Valentine have had their moments in the past month or so, but it’s hard to tell how much of that is youthful improvement versus a pass rush that is starting to get home more often. Either way, the health of Jaire Alexander’s ankle is a major variable as we head into the weekend.

First thing’s first. So what’s gone right as of late?

The biggest change during the Packers’ late-season surge is that they’ve shown a pulse as a run defense, which has allowed them to lean into the strength of their pass rush, and—in turn—create more negative plays and takeaways. This is a team that allowed four 200+ rushing performances through week 14, including to bottom-dwelling units like the Tommy DeVito Giants and the Matt Canada-led Steelers. Even in the year of the lort 2024, if you can get road-graded on the ground it’s hard to do much of anything defensively, so the Packers adjusted heavily to stop the run in hopes that it would create a trickle-down effect of defensive success.

To key opposing running games, the Packers have leaned more into five-man fronts on early downs to clog lanes, create one-on-ones with their best players along the line of scrimmage, and generate more disruption and penetration in the run game. This has protected the Packers’ struggling linebackers from second-level blockers, given them fewer gaps to cover, and let them run and hit rather than read and stack-and-shed. To make things even simpler for those LBs (particularly Quay Walker), the Packers also started just sending them more on blitzes to muck up the works. Using blitzes to point a struggling or hesitant linebacker in the direction they have to go (rather than trusting them to read and react) is far from a long-term solution, but it can work in a pinch—especially when the linebacker is a plus athlete with minus instincts.

These five-man fronts, timely blitzes, and the friendlier downs and distances that arise from slowing down opposing rushing attacks have allowed the Packers to lean into their greatest personnel strength: their pass rush. Over their four-game winning streak, the Packers are averaging nearly four sacks a game, and—at times—the front looks more like the defense that was promised than the one that they’ve been fielding for much of the year. With their defensive line mucking up backfields and forcing quarterbacks into more hurried throws, the secondary doesn’t have to guard their men as long and the results have led to a few of the Packers’ best defensive performances to date.

Potential Offensive Keys

Take the Packers to P-Town. The Packers’ rushing defense may have bowed up as of late—holding four of their last five opponents under 100 yards rushing—but a run defense can’t be fixed overnight and it takes more than a commitment to heavier personnel to succeed against more sophisticated run games.

A five-man front can cover each gap, but it also allows for chunk yardage on the ground when runners can penetrate the first level or outflank the edges—both specialties in our scheme. While our offense is more balanced than it has ever been under Shanahan, we still hang our hat on a physical and diverse run game. That shouldn’t change in this matchup. I’m not saying we should run blindly into five-man fronts every first down, but we can and should have success on the ground in this matchup, and once that run threat is established there should be plenty of room to throw the ball via play action. The Packers’ linebackers have really struggled in coverage this season—especially off of play fakes, and that plays right into what we do best.

Sketchy math. The Packers often commit to their five-man fronts on early downs and distances and to combat 12 and 21 personnel (i.e. “rushing downs”), but—given what we specialize in offensively—I’m interested to see how much they can and will run a personnel group that intentionally takes away a linebacker or defensive back for a bigger bodied player.

As the only team who can break a huddle with 21 personnel and have our running back on an option route while our fullback runs a wheel, we can easily pop into empty sets against five-man fronts and force man coverage across the board or make one of their edge players drop into a short zone where they have to corral Deebo or Kittle in space. If you’re the Packers, how often are you comfortable with either of those situations?

The other inherent drawback of deploying these looks is that they take away a middle-of-the-field coverage option. The Packers have struggled to guard the middle of the field all year and they’ve routinely been gouged by play action, two major strengths of our offense. While committing to the run game is important, early down five-man fronts could open up opportunities for the kind of explosive first-down passing that quickly puts a defense on its heels. 

Clearing the picture. With increased pressure up front, the Packers have been able to muddy passing lanes and generate more turnovers in the past few weeks. But those complex looks are a lot easier against someone like the Cowboys than they should be against us.

While the move to a more traditional West Coast offense unlocked some of Dak’s best play this season, it also—somewhat ironically—tanked the Cowboys in a similar way that Rodgers’ commitment to static formations and matchup-hunting sunk the Packers in the 2021 playoffs. Knowing the massive personnel mismatch, Dak was clearly honed in on getting the ball to CeeDee early, but—instead of relying on pre-snap motion and scheming guys open—the Cowboys felt they could feed their elite wideout by just moving him around and hunting matchups. 

Obviously, that didn’t really work. While in theory, it made sense to have their best threat a potential target on every snap, the Cowboys struggled to get into a rhythm early without some schemed-up layups and the lack of window dressing and pre-snap movement let the Packers play aggressively downhill while deploying some trap coverages like on Dak’s pick-six near the end of the first half.

With our exotic formations and heavy use of motion, we’ll be able to create more hesitation for the defense while getting far more pre-snap keys for Purdy and force the Packers to play simpler coverages that they must declare earlier. 

Let the Boys Eat. On the simplest level, I think we just have a bunch of great matchups in the passing game. While we want to be more creative and intentional than the Cowboys were with CeeDee in creating those matchups, we also have a deeper core of weapons than Dallas and the Packers won’t be able to key any one player if they plan to slow us down.

Whether it’s motions to empty sets and overload quads, run action away to create singles on backside receivers, or any other number of tools in our toolkit, we have the means to set up mismatches up and down the field. I fully expect us to do just that.

The linebackers in particular should be in the crosshairs early and often. Their coverage issues have been harped on enough by now, but they’re also one of the league’s worst-graded units in guarding running backs in the passing game…

Which, uh… yeah. Good luck with that.

SPECIAL TEAMS + OTHER SHIT

Weather Watch. The weather report is bound to change multiple times before we get to this weekend, but at the moment there’s a chance for both rain and legitimate wind gusts on Saturday. Given we’re the team with the quarterback who had issues handling a wet ball in Cleveland and NOT the team from Wisconsin, we’d prefer those elements stay away.

Ray-Ray Returns. Ray-Ray McCloud got a bunch of run in week 18 as he returned from injury. That gives us a spark in the return game, and—most importantly—means we don’t have to rely on a rookie wideout wearing #10 to make crunch time returns during the playoffs. No offense to Ronnie Bell, who has played great as a rookie (all things considered), but that should be a relief for all of us.

Fresh fish. It is worth noting that rookie kickers are notoriously sketchy. Nick Folk and Ka’imi Fairbairn—the No.1 and No.2 top kickers in terms of field goal percentage this season—were 20th and 24th, respectively, in field goal percentage during their rookie years. Younghoe Koo, one of the league’s most handsomely paid kickers, was cut by the Chargers after making only 50% of his kicks over the first four games of his rookie season. Even Brandon Aubrey, who set the gold standard for rookie kickers this year (although he’s 28 and played professionally already so not sure if he counts as a rookie), missed two field goals in the season finale and an extra point in the wild-card round. Rookie kickers are sketchy. And this game has two of them.

Our rookie kicker is fresh off missing his first-ever field goal under 40 yards and his first-ever extra point. Not great. But the Packers’ kicking game (and their special teams in general) is even more suspect. Jake Moody has attempted fewer field goals than almost any other full-time kicker and is 20th in field goal % on the year, but Anders Carlson—who the Packers drafted in the sixth round—is 24th in field goal %, barely over .500 when kicking from 40 or more yards, and has missed an astounding six extra points this season (including one in the wild-card round).

Will this settle your nerves at all if this game comes down to a few crunch-time kicks? Probably not. But it’s worth noting.

Your everyday key to special teams: (1) kick the ball between the uprights instead of outside of them; (2) don’t allow back-breaking momentum-changing plays in coverage.

TLDR

The Packers are a young, hungry, and surging squad, which makes for a dangerous divisional-round opponent regardless of their seeding. This team is 8-3 in their last eleven games and their offense and young quarterback are near the top of the charts in nearly every offensive metric (advanced or otherwise) during that run. But the team and the young quarterback right above them in basically all of those offensive categories? The Niners and Brock Purdy.

While this Packers offense is absolutely legit, I’m not nearly as convinced that their defense has turned the corner. This seems like a unit that has improved, but whose improvements may be greatly exaggerated by the dominance they’ve displayed on the other side of the ball. I don’t think they’re as bad as the raw numbers and advanced analytics may say, but I don’t think this is a team strength. If we can simply play our game while preventing negative plays and turnovers, it’s hard for me to imagine a defense that has major issues stopping play action, defending the middle of the field, and covering running backs in the passing game slowing down our offensive attack.

Yes, the Packers can break explosive plays and score points in bunches, and if this game becomes a shootout then anything could happen. But if I had to bet on which defense will hold serve more times against elite offensive competition, I’m betting on the good guys.

Go Niners 🏈👍

NFC Playoff Preview

With a well-earned No.1 seed locked up, we now have the freedom to treat the next two weeks as byes. Shanahan has already said that they’ll be resting some guys against the Rams. Trent and CMC are the most obvious candidates, and—if there’s no Trent protecting his blindside—I would contemplate sitting Purdy as well. Regardless of how we approach it, NFL rosters are small so there will be plenty of starters suiting up. There’s a chance we practice the week with the ones to keep them sharp then roll out mostly twos. There’s a chance we treat this like a preseason game and play the majority of our starters for a few series before they give way to the backups.

Regardless of who plays, who doesn’t, and for how long, our goal in week 18 is to have a good week of practice leading up to the bye and exit the week healthy. As an added bonus, there’s not a single other team in the NFC that has the same luxury, as all will be vying for playoff entrance or seeding.

NFC

Dallas Cowboys (11-5)

With a win, the Cowboys will lock up the 2-seed and perhaps no team needs it more, as Dallas is 8-0 at home and 3-5 on the road. While that stat is skewed by the fact that they’ve played four of their top five opponents on the road, there’s no denying that this Dallas team—which relies so heavily on their explosive passing offense—prefers turf, domes, and nice weather. 

This is an offense that averages 37.4 points and 426 offensive yards per game at home—two figures that would easily be tops in the league if spread out across an entire season—and they’ve done so by unlocking Dak with the west coast offense. One fewer loss and Dak—who leads the league in passing TDs and is top five in every meaningful statistical category, from interception % to completion %—would likely be the front-runner for the MVP, and his emergence after an early season adjustment period means the Cowboys can put up points with anyone.

However, one of the main reasons Dallas struggles on the road is that their passing attack has to take on too much of their offensive burden. A year after running for nearly 2300 yards and 24 scores under Kellen Moore, the Cowboys have only scored 13 times on the ground and have yet to surpass 1800 yards rushing. Simply put, their rushing attack is a shell of what it once was, and that’s most evident on the road. In the six road games since the start of October, the Cowboys have only had a single 100-yard rushing performance, and that was when they narrowly eked out 107 yards against the NFL-worst Carolina Panthers. 

They say that defense and rushing attacks are the two things that travel in the NFL playoffs. Luckily for the Cowboys, they hold the tiebreak over both the Eagles and the Lions, so if they can win in Washington this weekend, they won’t have to do any traveling until—at earliest—the NFC Championship game.

Detroit Lions (11-5)

After the absolute shitshow that was the end to the Dallas game, the Lions need a win, a Dallas loss and an Eagles loss to secure the 2-seed. Any other outcome and they’re locked in as the 3-seed. But either way they’ve won their division and will host a playoff game in (at least) the first round, a feat that the franchise hasn’t achieved since 1993. That is absolutely insane. That fanbase promises to be rabid, and I fully expect Detroit to be an absolute nightmare for opposing teams to play in during the playoffs. 

The Lions have one of the best young play callers in the business in Ben Johnson and—when they can run the ball and protect Goff—they can score on anyone. They have a physical mindset in the trenches and—with their two-headed running back tandem—they’re fully capable of road grading teams. They’ve only failed to surpass 100 yards rushing twice this season—once in a game where they were torching the Bucs through the air and their starting RB went down in the first quarter, and again the week after when they got so far beyond the Ravens so quickly that they had to abandon the run game altogether. They’re not only committed and capable in the run game, but it’s where they hang their identity.  

When they choose to pass, Jared Goff is playing his best ball and Johnson does a great job of catering the offense to his strengths. But he’s still Goff. If you can get into his body, get him feeling pressure, and force him off his spot, he can turn over the ball in bunches. This Lions offense has five games of three or more turnovers. They’ve actually won two of those games, which is a testament to their offensive firepower and their ability to throw the ball down the field, but things can get loose in a hurry.

While Dan Campbell’s coaching style has led to an emphasis on running the ball and stopping the run, preventing rushing yardage is basically the only thing the Lions do all that well on defense. This is a bottom-ten unit in terms of points per game allowed and yards per play allowed and their takeaway numbers aren’t strong enough to offset those figures. Given the competition last week, they’re coming off one of their best defensive performances of the season, but this is a team whose defense has registered in the negatives in expected points added for eight consecutive weeks exiting their bye week. To be fair, this is far from a bottom-dwelling unit, it’s just not a strength. Its highs are solid and its lows are not great. I imagine they have another level of play that they can hit, but they might not have the talent to get there this year.

Philadelphia Eagles (11-5)

Despite losing four of their last five games—including at home to a then three-win Cardinals team who is fighting for a high draft pick—the Eagles still have a legitimate shot at the 2-seed. They just have to beat the Giants this week and have the Cowboys lose to the Commanders. I wouldn’t say it’s a likely scenario, but that’s the silver lining for an Eagles team who’d been skirting by their competition for most of the season before the wheels fell off over the past month. 

This is a team that is 8-3 in games decided by one score or less, which is a classic indicator of a team that isn’t as good as its record. While the Eagles could finish the season with the same record as us and may have the most talented roster in the league, the answers have not been there schematically after they basically tried to run it back with in-the-building promotions after losing both of their coordinators in the off-season.

Last year’s defense always felt like a mirage—buoyed by a dominant pass rush and a schedule that faced a never-ending slate of backups and below-average quarterbacks. But under Sean Desai and now Matt Patricia (lol), teams have exposed its back end and the Eagles have been getting carved up. If you include the 394 yards the Cowboys put up on them at home, this Philly defense has allowed 400+ yards on six separate occasions—including four times in its past six games—and now they no longer have their best cover man in Darius Slay. While Slay is expected to be back in time for the playoffs, there are clearly problems with this unit beyond the absence of just one man.

Offensively, the Eagles have had one of the more predictable and least creative attacks in the league. Granted, it’s still a top-ten unit. That’s what you get when the scheme was built specifically to your quarterback’s talents and you have one of the best offensive lines and set of skill players in the country. But Shane Steichen, the actual architect behind the scheme, is gone, and so too it seems is the core understanding of why the scheme was built the way it was and how to attack defenses as they adjust to it. So instead of seeing the Eagles’ offense grow and evolve in what would effectively be year two under this particular offense, the coaching staff has turtled further into its tendencies (shotgun, no motion, few personnel sets, etc) and is basically playing the tribute band version of the offense Steichen ran so well last year. This is an offense that always had things that it simply could not (or would not) do, but at least last year, the man pulling the strings knew that and called games accordingly. In 2023, those shortcomings are now just blindspots. 

This is still a team loaded with talent, and that shows in its individual highlights—be they on the defensive line, the offensive line, or in one-on-one matchups with their talented receiver corps. But they’ll need to right the ship in a hurry to be a genuine threat in the playoffs—especially if they can’t secure the 2-seed this weekend. They have the players to do so. Do they have the X’s and O’s? That remains to be seen. But their ability to hit big plays off impressive individual efforts is still around, and—as long as that remains—they’re a threat in a post-season shootout. 

Tampa Bay Buccaneers (8-8)

Ah yes, the NFC South. For a while, the Bucs looked like they were going to run away with the division (which isn’t saying much) and assert themselves as a tier 2 conference contender in the process, but their four-game winning streak came to a screeching halt in an embarrassing home loss to the Saints. Now they must win their final game in order to secure the NFC South title and host a first-round playoff game. Luckily for them, their last game is against… Carolina. 

The Bucs—like the Saints team they just lost to—are very much as their .500 record would indicate. Middle-of-the-pack. Their defense has shown flashes, with points allowed and takeaway figures hovering around the top ten, but they’ve also surrendered more passing yards than any team in the country. Their offense has been buoyed by some strong play (at times) from Baker Mayfield and Rachaad White, but they rank—at best—average in most offensive metrics and they have—by far—the worst yards per carry mark in the entire league.

Perhaps the Bucs know as well as everyone else how bad their division is and have simply been sleepwalking through it? There are glimpses of a team that is better than its current 8-8 record, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they pulled off a home upset over whichever NFC East team lands the five seed—especially if its a stumbling Eagles squad—but it’s hard to imagine them making a deep run in the playoffs.

Los Angeles Rams (9-7)

I always felt like Sean McVay had the youth and the energy to be a good candidate for a rebuild, and that seems to be the case in a season in which the Rams started as a top-five pick contender but have now clinched a playoff spot a week out. Yes, it took some luck for the Giants to miss that last-second field goal, but this is a Rams team that is at worst a seven-seed and—with a win against our backups this weekend—would move into the sixth spot in the conference.

Embarrassing showing against the Giants notwithstanding, I actually think this Rams team is pretty good. They’re 6-1 in their last seven games, dropping 36 on the Browns’ vaunted defense before putting up 31 on the road in Baltimore the week after. Yes, shit got ugly when they were banged up in the middle of the season, and this team definitely lacks the depth to have much success if any of their stars go down again, but at full health I think the Rams have an argument for being a top four team in the conference. That makes them especially dangerous if they can pitch an upset in the first round and force a divisional round matchup against us. 

Tired of constantly being bullied in the trenches, McVay spent the off-season shifting Los Angeles’ offense away from the wide zone tendencies of the Shanahan scheme and more towards a power-gap scheme. It was a bit clunky to start, but the change proved fruitful when the Rams fully invested in bowling ball dual-threat Kyren Williams, who—despite missing four games due to injury—is second in the NFL in rushing yardage and first in yards/game.

In the passing game, the emergence of another young skill player in Puka Nacua has greatly opened up what the Rams can accomplish through the air. The presence of a genuine second option opposite Cooper Kupp has let the Rams mix and match with their slot receivers in a way that they hadn’t been able to do in the past, and Stafford—while still turnover-happy at times—has taken to the scheme change well in a rebound from his injury-plagued 2022.

Defensively, they still have Aaron Donald, but all-in-all I’d say they just get by on that side of the ball. However, their offense is a top ten-ish unit, and that—paired with a signal caller who can play elite at times, a physical downhill running game, and a smart play-caller who attacks defense’s weaknesses—will make them a difficult out. 

Green Bay Packers (8-8)

Similar to the Rams, the Packers have had a resurgent season now that they’re out from under the shadow of Aaron Rodgers. Make no mistake, if you’re an NFL head coach you’d rather have Rodgers than not, but it seemed like things in Green Bay had gotten to a point last season where—especially once they started losing—Rodgers’ happiness or lack thereof became a specter looming over the team. While the Packers didn’t get a crazy return in exchange for their future HOF quarterback, they now get to run the offense they want with young talent that can develop alongside Jordan Love.

Offensively, this is a squad with a lot of young skill players and tremendous potential. Love has been inconsistent and at times streaky in his first year as a starter, but he’s progressed tremendously as the season has gone on and shown more than enough upside to excite the fanbase. Entering the final week of the season, his 30 passing touchdowns are third-best in the league and his physical tools stick out often when you watch their games. Surrounding him are a bunch of B-level young targets with the potential to develop into much more, making them reminiscent of watching a young basketball team go through a rebuild. You know they have solid players on rookie contracts but you wonder how many of them will develop into legitimate stars. In the NBA, a roster full of B-level talent likely gets you a top three pick in the draft. But in the NFL—which is much less star-centric and which admits players at an older age—a bunch of B-level guys working together can get you to about where the Packers are now—a win away from one of the last spots in the playoffs.

This is at least a top 15 offense, and—when Aaron Jones and more of their receiving corps are healthy—they can look more like a top 10 unit, but the defense holds them back. Their raw numbers against the pass are decent, but they have one of the worst run defenses in the league, don’t take the ball away enough, and have had some truly ugly moments on tape. While the offense seems to be cresting at exactly the right time, the defense is less than a month away from getting diced up in the fourth quarter by Tommy “Cutlets” DeVito and two weeks removed from allowing 394 yards and 30 points to the Carolina Panthers—both season highs for a Panthers team that averages 269 yards and 14.75 points scored per game.

I like their talent and love the direction that the team is going, but they’ll likely need to win some shootouts and have some positive turnover luck in order to advance further than a first round upset this year. 

NFC South Randos - Atlanta Falcons/New Orleans Saints (8-8)

These guys get clumped together because I don’t really think either of them is any good. Both have their moments defensively—but not so much to put a scare into you—and are—for 75% of the time—completely unwatchable on the other side of the ball.

If there’s something the Falcons offense does well, it’s run the ball, as they’re top ten in attempts and yardage and have one of the more exciting young running backs in the league. If there’s something the Falcons offense doesn’t do well, it’s everything else. They’re best known for not scoring points (19 ppg), murdering fantasy teams with their player usage, and having a quarterback rotation so pathetic that their team has as many interceptions thrown as passing touchdowns on the year. Three weeks ago, they lost to the Carolina Panthers 7-9 in a vintage TNF debacle. 

Meanwhile, the Saints under long-time OC Pete Carmichael are one of the few teams still running Sean Payton’s Drew Brees scheme. The only problem? Drew Brees retired three years ago. Their offense involves a lot of stick routes and slants, and—when Derek Carr is playing well—it can be decently effective. But it lacks creativity, is a tough watch, and they haven’t really sniffed any offensive success except when they’ve played a team from either the NFC South or AFC South. 

These two teams play each other this week, and—if the Packers or Bucs lose—the winner will slide into the last playoff spot in the NFC. If that happens, I would expect them to go one and done. 

Go Niners 🏈👍

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds

Of course it couldn’t be that easy. 

After buzzing through the first four games of our bird-stead with an average margin of victory of 24 points, winning each game by at least two scores, and never really being threatened except for one quarter in Philadelphia, we were two wins away from locking up the No.1 seed in the NFC and being able to rest starters Week 18 against a healthy—and dangerous—Rams team.

But the Ravens game quickly devolved into a swift kick in the nuts and the must disappointing Christmas since your grandma packed a chunky sweater into a gift box that looked suspiciously like a PS2. Now we must win both of our next two games (or get some help from the Cowboys and Cardinals) to secure a first-round bye that—given our banged up state—may be more important for us than most other contenders.

So what happened? How worried should we be? Why has Santa Claus forsaken us despite our best behavior? And what could a potential Super Bowl rematch look like?

OVERALL

The one thing your Pop Warner coach was right about. How do you lose a game by two scores when you outgain your opponent by 80 yards and nearly a full yard per play? Turnovers and penalties. While it may seem overly simplistic, that’s the big story of this game.

The Niners—who to this point led the league in takeaways and were last in giveaways—were an astounding minus-5 in turnover differential against the Ravens. Historically, teams that lose the turnover differential by ONE have a winning percentage of just over 30%. Lose by two and it drops to 15%. By three? 10%. By four? Less than 5%. By five? I have no idea. Because at that point the statistical trend is so obvious and the margin so great that no one has even bothered crunching the numbers into a Google-able stat. The old heads were right. Turnovers will do you dirty.

Penalties are a bit murkier regarding their statistical impact, partly because not all penalties are created equal. But the 49ers were flagged 10 times for 104 yards, and six of those flags either took away one of our first downs or gave the Ravens one. If you cluster those kinds of penalties alongside third/fourth down success (after all, they both give or take away a new set of downs), then the Niners got annihilated in the two statistical categories that matter most in winning: creating and extending scoring opportunities.

Sweet, sweet, specials. The special teams were far from horrid in this game. Mitch had a few nice punts. Deebo had one solid kick return. Moody made his one field goal attempt. But my god did it feel like the mistakes on special teams were absolute momentum killers.

After the safety, we had a chance to easily get the ball back on our own 35-yard line or better and pile on early in a way that has thus far proven insurmountable to overcome, but Ronnie Bell muffed the ball by the sideline and it dribbled out of bounds at our own 20-yard line. You should never gain fewer yards on a safety punt return than a regular kick return. And you should NEVER ever gain fewer yards than you would by simply fair catching.

But the biggest special teams momentum swing happened at the beginning of the third quarter. After Purdy threw at Willie Snead’s inattentive head to snuff out our first series of downs, we outkicked our coverage on the ensuing punt, allowed a fatty return, then fouled the runner out of bounds to tack on an additional 15 yards. Three plays later, the Ravens would score a touchdown. The next offensive play Purdy threw an interception returned to our nine-yard line. The game felt out of reach almost immediately thereafter.

OFFENSE

The Niners’ roster construction—and Shanahan’s deployment of our talent—is not coincidental. Shanahan always likes to zig while other teams zag, so as more and more teams started assembling rosters around an analytics-encouraged theory that builds defenses from the front (defensive line) or the back (secondary) while pinching pennies on linebackers and safeties, we were assembling a roster of Swiss-army knife position-less offensive weapons to attack the very same positions that other teams were neglecting.

In Philadelphia, Nicholas Morrow—despite being a converted safety who has had a good season in coverage—allowed a whopping 6 catches for 175 yards and two scores against us. When hosting Seattle a few weeks ago, Jamal Adams—despite being an actual safety—allowed two grabs for 79 yards and a score. At its core, Shanahan’s offense aims to force linebackers to cover and defensive backs to tackle, and—as odd as it may sound—there are far fewer defenses than you’d think that can do those two things consistently. 

Bizarro Baltimore. The Ravens’ defense was always going to be a fascinating litmus test for our offense because—in theory—their roster was made specifically to stop the kind of linebacker and safety abuse that we specialize in. 

While built from the back forward with tons of quality corners and safeties, they also have invested heavily in the linebacker position—spending a first-round pick on Patrick Queen and trading a second and a fifth to obtain Roquan Smith and pay him handsomely. With four quality cornerbacks, two excellent safeties, an emerging star at nickel (who can also play all the safety positions), and two rangy linebackers, they’re one of the few teams who can mix and match different cover guys on our many offensive weapons. 

I wouldn’t say they can fully cover all of our guys. As we’ll touch on later, there were certainly people open in this game, but the Ravens have enough flexibility and optionality on their roster and in their scheme that they rarely give themselves a genuinely bad matchup. That allows them to present a wide array of coverage and blitz looks that aren’t easily recognized.

The other unique aspect of this Baltimore defense—and the reason why it’s both hard to play against and hard to predict—is the fact that they really coach up and prioritize blitzing technique in their linebackers and defensive backs. That helps them generate considerably more pressure than their pure DL talent would indicate and also slows up the timing and processing speed of opposing quarterbacks.

I don’t want to completely neglect the Ravens’ defensive line, as it too is an interchangeable collection of players who they do a good job of finding the right matchups for, but it’s the depth and quality of their linebackers and secondary that truly differentiates this defense, especially when in the hands of a talented DC such as Mike Macdonald.

Spot Treatment. Everyone knows that the Niners want to chunk play you to death with slants and digs built off of their run game looks, but the extra potential cover man that 3-4 fronts like the Ravens employ innately means there’s one more guy between the tackles or in the alley who is a genuine threat to drop into coverage.

The Ravens have loved mug looks up until this point—where inside gaps are covered by walked-up linebackers, simulating a six- or seven-man front. But knowing how much we like to attack the box in the passing game, they went away from those looks and kept their linebackers back, telling them to drop into the zones that we like to target the most and hoping to throw off the rhythm of an anticipatory thrower such as Purdy.

That led to a couple of plays that ended up looking like this.

Granted, one Tampa 2 defender covering two digs is the single worst example (and there were people open in this game), but by spot-dropping to our most popular areas of attack and moving from mug looks and inside pressure to creative outside edge rushes, the Ravens successfully mucked up the works and forced Purdy to rush out passes before he could get through his progressions.

Dark and Edgy Reboot. Purdy’s second pick was the most glaringly effective use of the Ravens’ edge pressure, as a blitzing corner batted down an attempted screen pass which another edge blitzing corner from the opposite side was able to pick it off, but, in a macro-sense, these outside blitzes were most effective in speeding up Purdy’s process so that he couldn’t get to the open receivers further down his progression.

You can see it as early as our first offensive play. Here, we’re motioning CMC out wide to see how the Ravens adjust to empty, with the idea of throwing a simple spot-dig concept to the three-receiver side.

In response, the Ravens check to an edge blitz to the three-receiver side, gambling that their nose tackle shading the center’s weakside A gap—plus the late showing blitz—will make the Niners open their pass set to the left so that the edge rusher will come free.

The gamble pays off, as it heats up Purdy so quickly that he’s forced to throw a check down to CMC, and the Ravens—in a split coverage with a corner sitting in the flat, are easily able to rally to the ball and make a short tackle for loss.

If Purdy had been able to get through his progression he’d have been able to find a wide-open Kittle, who had enough room to run—and advantageous angles on the secondary—that it the completion would have netted a hefty gain, if not a house call.

Another clear instance of this edge pressure forcing Purdy to make decisions before he can get through his progressions is the pass to Willie Snead noted above. Here, we have an empty set with a simple triple slant inside-out progression to the left and a high-low concept to the right. 

Brock will open to the side he thinks he has numbers, which is very clearly the left side given it looks like man coverage across the board. But on the snap, linebacker Patrick Queen—who is lined up way outside on CMC—will basically cat blitz from wide outside…

Triple slants rarely go to the inside slant unless something has gone terribly wrong on defense, so this is really a play designed to hit Deebo in the middle and Aiyuk after him if Deebo doesn’t free up. Willie Snead may be the “first read,” but nine times out of ten he’s just there to run off / wall his defender.

Right off the snap, you can already tell that Snead (in red) won’t be open, while Deebo (in yellow) will be.

Unfortunately, the pressure from the outside makes Purdy chuck the ball at Snead—who is tangled up and not even looking—despite Deebo springing wide open for the play that all defenses dread the most: Deebo on a slant with room to run and one man to beat who is twelve yards off of him.

Does a Purdy who hasn’t thrown three first half interceptions to this point have the confidence and timing to huck that ball into Deebo simply off of how Snead is being covered? Impossible to say, but… probably. It’s something he’s done plenty of times before. But by now he’s hesitating and not trusting his anticipation as much.

The most obvious example of how the outside pressure—and Purdy’s play on the night—started to mess up his timing and willingness to throw anticipatory throws was when we turned the ball over on downs at the beginning of the fourth quarter.

Here, we’re trying to run off the short-side defenders and hit a dig-shallow concept behind them, while the Ravens are showing a mug-like look before dropping into man coverage with a rat defender coming off the LOS and a deep zone safety. They’re overloading the short side of the field by sending both overhang defenders, but we have CMC back to block.

Now, if there is one thing that CMC hasn’t absolutely excelled at this year, it’s his pass pro, and he doesn’t kill it on this play. But that doesn’t change the fact that Aiyuk has sprung wide open.

This ball should be thrown now. Honestly, it could have been thrown a step or two earlier because Aiyuk had basically already beaten his man on alignment and initial stem. And normally, this ball would have been thrown. But by now Purdy’s holding onto the ball a bit too long, playing a bit too cautious, and feeling the pressure a bit too early. So instead of a massive completion, first down, and more, Purdy holds the ball, is contacted and flushed, and by the time he’s free there’s no one open anymore.

The result is a weird flip of the ball over Purdy’s head and a turnover on downs.

Still Don’t Miss Jimmy. The stats make it look worse than it was and there’s a lot of team-wide mistakes that went into this kind of performance, but this was unquestionably the worst game of Purdy’s career.

The first pick is Purdy’s fault in full. The second pick is actually a pretty good check-at-the-line from Purdy (Deebo would have had one safety to beat fifteen yards away at a bad angle if he’d gotten the pass) and just bad luck getting the ball batted in a way that it was intercepted in the backfield. I’d basically not blame him for that one at all. The third pick was also a carom but I would put blame on Purdy, simply because he was throwing across his body, not totally on target, on a play where he expected there was an offensive flag. The ROI on that risk is simply not strong enough to make that throw at that time. And the fourth pick he was hit mid-throwing motion. You could say he should have felt the pressure and slid away. But, at this point, given all that had happened before, we’re picking nits. 

We’ve seen Purdy be off-timed or off-target before, but typically that was early in games and he’d adjust as the game went on. This was the first time we’d seen that trend go in reverse. This was very much a game where everything went wrong all at once, so I’m not sure how much there is to really take away from it in regards to Purdy individually. He played poorly. That’s the micro view. The important thing is the macro long lens view. How does he respond from this game in the upcoming games, the rest of this season, and beyond? Based on how he got to the point he currently is, I’m optimistic that his process and professionalism will lead to a strong rebound.

DEFENSE

Despite the score and total yardage, this was not a terrible performance from our defense. But it did raise some questions as to what our overall strategy was in combatting the unique talents of Lamar Jackson.

Hemming and Hawing. Against the Eagles we had our defensive line emphasize containing Jalen Hurts in the pocket because we rightfully believed that he was a person who saw pressure instead of feeling it. When the pocket started to get tight his eyes would leave his downfield options and drop down to the pocket itself, so if you could keep him from exiting that pocket and throwing sideline scramble shit, you could effectively take away a lot of the Eagles’ downfield passing.

Now, Lamar Jackson is better than Jalen Hurts in basically everything other than short-yardage running (and maaaaybe sideline throwing), but—up until this year—you may be surprised to learn he actually struggled with off-script, on-the-run passing. He was still the best off-script, on-the-run runners of all time, but he didn’t do a good job of running to pass. That’s been the biggest change under Todd Monken. Lamar is now much better at running to extend plays in the passing game, while his receivers are much more in sync and prepared for the scramble drill to break out at any moment.

The only reason I bring up this comparison is because the Niners had a clear plan of attack against Jalen Hurts, but against the Ravens, it seemed as if the defensive line was stuck halfway between trying to keep Lamar in the pocket and rushing him like any other quarterback. Unsurprisingly, this led to some notable breakdowns.

Below are the splits of all run and pass plays, separated between plays where Lamar moved outside the pocket versus all other plays. I’d put it in a chart, but for some reason, I can’t do that on Squarespace, so please forgive the formatting.

Designed Runs: 24 carries for 63 yards and 1 TD at 2.6 yards per play (ypp)
Scrambles outside pocket: 2 carries for 39 yards at 19.5 ypp
Passes from inside pocket: 17-of-28 for 116 yards, 2 sacks for -11 yards, and 1 TD at 3.5 ypp
Passes from outside pocket: 6-of-7 for 136 yards and 1 TD at 19.4 ypp

Those inside pocket splits don’t even include the negative 20-yard safety that happened due to a disciplined pass rush that kept Lamar backing up within the pocket. And they do include the two completions for 33 yards off of two outside blitzes that Ji’Ayir Brown whiffed on which allowed Lamar to break contain.

The Ravens offense was an entirely different beast when it was forced to operate from within the pocket.

Assuming the position. One of the many drawbacks of eight billion turnovers is that the opposition’s field position is a lot better than ours. Our average starting field position was our own 23-yard line. The Ravens started a typical drive on their own 40. We never started with the ball past our 36-yard line. The Ravens started five drives with better field position than that, including two drives that began inside our 20. If not for two excellent punts that twice backed the Ravens up within their own ten, the field position battle would have been much worse. 

Not my president. Despite the handful of exciting plays he made, the Lamar Jackson MVP chatter was and continues to be beyond annoying. This is a Baltimore team that wins mostly off its defense and Lamar—despite being better in real life than he is on the stat sheet—didn’t surpass Kirk Cousins in touchdown passes until the second half of this game. Kirk Cousins hasn’t played since week 8.

Lamar is currently in a four-way tie for 14th in the NFL in passing touchdowns, and—even when you include his five rushing scores—he only cracks the top ten because the players clustered around him (Stroud, Stafford, Herbert) have all missed games due to injury. He has the #1 scoring defense behind him and has thrown for under 200 yards six times this season, yet the Ravens are 6-0 in those games. Yet somehow the narrative is about how Lamar is a one man offense and everyone else (Dak, Purdy) are the ones who get all the help?

I understand that stats aren’t everything, but they’re certainly worth more than the Instagrammable highlights, media politicking, and the “vibes” that seem to be buoying the campaign to give the MVP to a quarterback—any quarterback—as long as it’s not Brock Purdy.

For the record, I think CMC should get the award.

THE GOOD NEWS

It’s far too early and there are far too many things that could go wrong to start thinking of what a potential rematch against the Ravens might look like in the Super Bowl, but—despite this Christmas nightmare—I think we’d be fine. The Ravens are absolutely one of the best teams in the NFL and one of the few with a defense built to slow down our offense, but everything that could have gone wrong went wrong on Monday and that kind of a shitstorm isn’t likely to make a reappearance if—for no other reason—based on variance. 

But if you want something more reassuring than entrusting our success to lady luck, here are a few cliff notes to how we might flip the script come February.

Run the ball. It’s far too easy to look at the stat sheet and say we didn’t run the ball enough, but that would be neglecting how the game actually unfolded. We were moving up and down the field with ease on our first three drives, it’s just that two ended in interceptions—the second pick coming on a called run play.

After running all over them for our last score of the first half, we entered the second half balanced with two passes and two runs. Unfortunately, we had a three-and-out in the first drive and threw a pick on the first play of the second. By that point we were down 18 points. While I think we could have been slightly more balanced in attempting to make our comeback given how much time was left, throwing when down three scores is pretty common.

When a defense employs so many three safety looks, wants to keep their linebackers off the LOS to take away slants and digs, and hopes to scheme up exotic rush looks, they’re naturally going to be a bit susceptible to the run, and we ran the ball very well in this game. Despite our OL’s issues against the pass, we seemed to overpower them on the ground, and I’m sure Shanahan wanted to lean on that running game in the second half. The game flow just didn’t allow us to.

If there’s a rematch, there should be more room (and more opportunities) to churn out yardage on the ground.

Win outside. Clouding the middle of the field to try and take away slants and digs isn’t something new or particularly innovative. Teams have been trying to do that to us for years. The big difference is we now have more answers and—on most days—a QB who can exploit defenses who play our tendencies too heavily.

The Eagles tried their best to take away inside-breaking routes when we played them earlier this year, and our response was to utilize trips and quads formations to isolate a receiver backside—usually Aiyuk—and force the defense to either give that backside player help or have a numbers advantage to the multiple receiver side.

With the inside players keying inside-breaking routes, they inevitably weren’t getting much width, but to make sure that linebacker at the top of the screen would clear out, CMC ran a spot route to the middle of the field and directly into his line of sight. That let Purdy and Aiyuk just chip away relentlessly on one-on-one coverage with no underneath help by throwing quick and intermediate passes outside the hashes.

Even though it seemed like nothing was going right on Sunday, we actually had success doing something somewhat similar against the Ravens—albeit with concepts that created a high-low look to the backside rather than a pure isolation.

Since the Ravens are more likely to drop into something like Cover 2, we used a player coming across formation (or later, a running back) to keep the flat defender shallow, out of the way, and distracted, then basically let Aiyuk cook someone deeper down the field for an easy completion.

After the snap, you can see that the linebackers are looking to take away inside routes and haven’t widened at all. While the true flat defenders must play up to take away the motion man who has immediately threatened their zone (especially when that player is Deebo). The end result is a single corner with deep responsibility covering Aiyuk, and… as we should all know by now…

Aiyuk is always open.

While the Ravens are super deep and versatile in their coverage players, I’m not actually sure if any of their outside guys are true lockdown types, so when we can isolate them on man and protect it, there are wins to be had both to Aiyuk and Kittle—who both roasted people all night.

Layer the middle. The Ravens may have been hedging against our inside breaking routes, but the digs were actually opening up quite well in the second half once we started giving them eye candy—and a YAC threat—with check downs between the hashes. The length of this write-up has gotten out of goddamn control, so instead of diagramming the plays in question I’m just going to show two stills that display how the inside checkdown opened up the second-level passes as the game went on. We just weren’t always able to hit them.

While the Niners love to pair digs with slants and other in-breakers that allow them multiple options to generate big YAC yards and would prefer to put CMC on an option route for the possibility of a bigger gain that is “right every time,” these check downs were more successful in this game because (A) Kittle/CMC/whoever directly in front of a linebackers eyes is hard to ignore, (B) they made for a simpler vertical (high-low) read that required less perfect timing for Brock, and (C) they allowed for a check release if pass pro was going to shit.

Keep Lamar in the pocket. Easier said than done and we still need to pressure him, but I’d rather him run the scramble drill from inside the pocket than outside and rather their offense have to beat us with scheme. That means much better rush lane integrity.

Don’t be afraid to heat him up. The old Ravens offense was so great at option running and so bad at dealing with a defensive scheme that was seemingly too stupid and simple to work: engage eight. There were entire games where teams would just fuckin’ send it and somehow it worked. While this new scheme (and Lamar) are much better at combatting that defense than before, I think there’s still success to be had by sending extra men (as long as they maintain their rush lanes). 

The Ravens spammed screens at times in this game in part because I don’t think their offense has a ton of quick-hitting answers other than screens and RPOs. They rely pretty heavily on crossing routes and mesh concepts for their quick game—plays that are flexible against man and zone and hope to create YAC yards but that are slow developing for short yardage completions—and when you take out the scramble drill element of their offense, their receivers are not as effective getting open. 

The Ravens receivers had 15 grabs for 109 yards and two scores in this game. Far from paltry numbers, but some of that was off the scramble drill, much of that was from screens, and the 7.3 yards per completion leaves much to be desired. If you can speed up Lamar enough to where they have to rely more on their actual offense, then their receivers will need to win downfield in true dropback passing. I don’t know how consistently they can do that.

Go Niners 🏈👍

2023 First Quarter Assessment

As one of only two undefeated teams remaining and with the third-best point differential in the league (+67), the 2023 campaign has started off considerably more stress-free than recent seasons. This is both a welcome relief and not particularly surprising, as each of the past three years saw us lose our starting quarterback to injury in week two, and apparently that’s pretty important. Regardless, the Niners have come out the gates more connected and more in-tune from top-to-bottom than in years past, which has let us largely cruise through the first month of the season as we enter the thick of our schedule.

OFFENSE

Still not a pumpkin. Through four games, Purdy has posted two excellent outings and two starts that were more than good enough but far from perfect. Against the Rams, his accuracy was a bit off, missing on a few big plays down the field (and a few typical lay-ups underneath). Against the Giants, the combination of Wink Martingale’s 80%+ blitz rate on dropbacks and confusing back-end coverages led to a dicey start. Still, Purdy and our offense settled in enough for him to record his first regular season 300-yard passing game. Only the greatest of Purdy haters could call any of his starts this year (or realistically last year) truly “bad.”

Purdy’s deep ball is still a work in progress and you can sometimes see the ball fall off a bit when he has to throw across body in a hurry (also, they really need to get those center exchanges figured out), but his anticipation and understanding of the offense have clearly improved since his rookie season. He’s getting the ball out faster on our slants and quick game while impressing with his timing and placement on the second-layer and second-window throws that open up behind them.

Purdy’s average time to throw (TTT) is nearly three-tenths of a second faster than last year, while his average intended air yards (IAY) are up by .8 of a yard over that same time period. While those improvements may sound minuscule, that TTT improvement moves him from 25th- to 6th-fastest in the league at speed of release, and the IAY puts him above players such as Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, Trevor Lawrence, etc. Neither of these stats is inherently an indicator of success—after all players like Mahomes and Allen often hold onto the ball the longest and the current leaders in IAY are Jordan Love, Jalen Hurts, and Ryan Tannehill—but there are few scenarios where you want your QB with subpar arm strength holding onto the ball longer. And if you’re getting rid of the ball quickly while still pushing it further down the field at the 72% completion percentage Purdy currently carries, you’re doing something right. Other statistics that point to Purdy doing something right include that he currently leads the league in adjusted yards per attempt (10), QB rating (115.1), and QBR (84.6). And he still hasn’t lost a game.

Purdy—like all NFL quarterbacks—will eventually have an actually bad game, and he will eventually lose. But I think we can comfortably say that Purdy’s floor is much higher than Garoppolo’s. Bad Jimmy games would almost always include a mind-boggling interception (or two), and a play-calling shift to protect him in a way that made us much more one-dimensional and conservative on offense. Purdy has for sure thrown some interception-worthy balls both this season and last, but his valleys are not nearly as deep or as long as his predecessor’s, and—nearly as importantly—Shanahan seems to have trust that he’ll climb out of those holes in a hurry.

Increasingly aggro. Going hand-in-hand with Purdy’s raised floor is Shanahan’s belief in his quarterback and—by proxy—our passing attack. This has led to a noticeable increase in aggressiveness dating back to last season, which has continued into 2023. With two fourth-down attempts (both called passes) and a QB sneak that ended the first half against the Rams (and would prove pivotal in that game), Shanahan clearly trusts Purdy’s decision-making in high-pressure situations, and the Niners have benefited from that.

Shanahan isn’t the most aggressive coach (nor do we want him to be given the most aggressive coach is probably Brandon Staley), but the subtle increases in the likelihood that we’ll go for it on fourth down or call a pass in high-leverage situations late in games greatly improve our ability to both secure and retain leads.

So that trade worked. Ten days after we traded for CMC, he threw, ran, and rushed for a touchdown in a crucial win against a division rival. He is considerably better now. 

While Christian McCaffrey was a spark plug and a force multiplier for our offense from the second he landed in the Bay, his increased comfort level in our scheme (in particular our run game) is apparent this season. Last year there were times when Elijah Mitchell’s burst, speed, and experience in the offense made him the better option as a pure runner. With an off-season to get used to the many nuances of our blocking schemes, CMC is making sure that is no longer the case. 

Through four games, CMC is on pace for a record-breaking 2,550 yards from scrimmage and 30 touchdowns. And while stating pace marks four games in is basically pointless, CMC leads the league in yards from scrimmage, missed tackles, and touchdowns from scrimmage, while his 323 rushing yards after contact are more than every other running back other than De’Andre Swift has in total rushing yards.

The only potentially worrisome stat attached with CMC is that he leads the league in touches, but hopefully, the healthy return of Elijah Mitchell will allow us to split up the touches more in a way that keeps everyone healthy and fresh into the post-season.

The wobbly right. Things today look much better than they did three weeks ago, when TJ Watt abused Colton Mckivitz into three sacks and the entire right side of our line seemed like a potential weakness. Now, on an offense that’s performing this well, that right side is… still a potential weakness, but one that’s been trending upward and is coming off its best performance of the year.

Trent is and will continue to be our best lineman (and the world’s best lineman), and Banks—while not spectacular—has become a reliable running mate beside him. It should come as no surprise that CMC—over the past two years—has his highest YPC running between those two guys. At center, Brendel doesn’t fly outside and make second-level blocks like some of our past point men and he’ll occasionally get beat in pass pro, but he seems to get the boys to the right assignments the large majority of the time, and—given the issues we’ve had at the center position over the years—we’ll take that.

At right guard, the hope was that Spencer Burford would go from part-time starter last season to—at least—somewhere around where Banks was in his second year. Perhaps he still will, but Burford was a turnstile in pass pro the first two weeks (and had three penalties in week one) before settling in a bit as of late. Burford has great tools and upside for the position so the hope is that he can continue to ascend throughout the season to a level where—seemingly for the first time—we won’t have to worry about the right guard position late into the year.

Out wide, Colton McKivitz took over for Mike McGlinchey at right tackle. While letting Big Mike walk for a huge payday in Denver (and a third-round comp pick) was unquestionably the right move, McKivitz didn’t win over any doubters after the debacle against TJ Watt. But, like Burford, he’s coming off his two best games of the season and held up well in pass pro against the Giants’ “blitz everyone, all the time” approach. 

After an inauspicious start, the arrow’s pointing up on both Burford and McKivitz, and we can safely consider this potential red flag something more of an orange-ish one. That said, we’ll know for sure this weekend what kind of weakness our right side may be as we go up against potentially the best and most athletic pass rush we’ll face all year. 

DEFENSE

The inside has arrived. Unsurprisingly, adding one of the best interior pass rushers on the planet will make the inside of your D-line considerably better at rushing the passer. Who knew?! Through four games, Javon Hargrave—whose “Gravedigger” nickname is both excellent and fitting—has already matched last season’s positional total in sacks with three. The dude looks and plays like a cannonball.

But Hargrave isn’t the only reason our interior is generating so much more pressure this season. Arik Armstead is healthy again beside him, and the second-line rotation of Kevin Givens and (gasp) Javon Kinlaw has been a terror for teams to deal with. While Kinlaw is in the fourth year of his rookie deal and his fifth-year option was declined this off-season, it’s nice to see him finally healthy and making an impact in a way that we’ve all been hoping for. 

On the outside, Drake Jackson and his go-go-gadget arms racked up three sacks in the opener but none since. While he wasn’t going to keep that pace and double the NFL’s single-season sack record, he’s been hustling and making his presence felt. We’ll want more production opposite Bosa as the season continues, but Jackson and Clelin Ferrell—who have split snaps almost evenly thus far—have had their moments this season, and—in Omenihu last year and Key the year before—Kocurek has often found a way to get complementary pieces to step up as the season goes on.

As for Bosa, he only has one sack in our first four games, but all signs point to that being an aberration. Per PFF, he’s graded out as the highest edge defender in the league through the first month of the season—this despite him missing all of training camp and needing some time to re-acclimate his body to football. Against the Cardinals he looked as disruptive as he has all season, and his 10 QB hits on the year are good for third in the NFL and—on average—would result in 4.5 sacks. For reference, the two dudes with more QB hits (TJ Watt and Myles Garrett at 13 each) have totaled 6 and 5.5 sacks, respectively. All this to say, Bosa has been the victim of variance and bad luck, and the floodgates should open soon when it comes to his sack numbers.

The corner carousel. Through four games, we’ve had four cornerbacks playing major snaps across three starting positions. How much of that is due to match-ups, inconsistency, or pure numbers is up for debate, but it’s probably some combination of all of the above.

In terms of numbers, fifth-round pick Darrel Luter got hurt in July and hasn’t been able to play since. While he’s expected to be back soon(ish), he’s a fifth-round rookie from a small school who missed all of training camp, so anything he can give us this season would be gravy. Samuel Womack on the other hand very well could have been a part of our rotation (maybe even a major one) if he hadn’t injured his MCL in week 1. He’s currently on short-term IR and we should expect to see him later this season. Finally, promising undrafted free agent D’Shawn Jamison got poached by the Panthers after cutdown day and is on their active roster, while Qwuantrezz Knight—who is really more of a safety—was one of the three practice squatters whom the Cardinals swooped from us earlier this year.

That means we only have four healthy cornerbacks to choose from for three positions, and with Ward and Lenoir set in stone, Isaiah Oliver and Ambry Thomas are competing for that third spot. So far, Steve Wilks has flipped back and forth between packages with Lenoir outside and Oliver inside and Thomas outside and Lenoir inside. 

Some of the shuffling has been matchup-based. For instance, Oliver started inside last week but Lenoir moved into the nickel when the speedy and smaller Rondale Moore started getting more snaps in the slot. While Lenoir saw a season-low three snaps inside against the Giants, who use bigger receivers and often tight end Darren Waller in the slot. But some of it’s performance-based as well. Namely, neither guy has played outstanding for a long stretch of time and distanced himself from the other. Oliver has put up plenty of good tape in the nickel over the past five years, but he hasn’t looked amazing against the quicker guys since arriving in the Bay. Whereas Thomas has good tools and has flashed well (end of 2021, anyone?), but also has been more susceptible to brain farts and double moves than our other options outside. 

The wildcard in the race is Anthony Brown, who we signed just a few days ago off the street as he recovers from an Achilles tear suffered last December. Brown has played a lot of good football, starting 28 straight games in Dallas opposite Trevon Diggs before his injury, and—if healthy—should give us at least insurance outside, if not another starting option that lets us slide Lenoir into the nickel.

I have to think part of the constant shuffling to this point is just Steve Wilks trying to figure out exactly what he has and who he can lean on when we start lining up against elite offenses—as well as him trying to prepare as many players as possible for extended roles in case there’s injury attrition down the road. If either Thomas or Oliver really steps up their game and their consistency (or Womack or Brown force their way into the equation), then maybe we’ll see a starting three that is set in stone at some point this season. But if not, there’s a strong chance that—for better or worse—this rotation will continue indefinitely.

A delayed blitz? Much of the talk surrounding Steve Wilks entering his first season as our DC was that he’d like to blitz more than his predecessors did. So far, that hasn’t been the case. Through four games, our 20.1% blitz rate is bottom ten in the league and a few notches below the rate DeMeco sent extra rushers last year. But there are a few signs that our blitz rate might increase over the course of the season.

Anecdotally, it seems like we’re sending more men in the second halves of our games, which is typically when we’ve played our best defense. In the four second halves this season, we’ve allowed a grand total of 18 points, and never more than six in a single contest. If heavier blitzing is simply where Wilks is most comfortable, then it’s safe to say we might see more of it as the season continues.

The other reason why our blitz rate may increase this year is that most of our opponents have deployed an offensive game plan around quick passes and screens to nullify our pass rush. This was never more evident than in our matchup against the Rams, where rookie sensation Puka Nacau racked up 15 catches and 147 yards on 20(!) targets—almost entirely on hitches, curls, and short crossers. Since we’re predominantly a zone team, there’s no easy way to take away that quick game when teams can execute it efficiently enough, so the direction Wilks has often leaned on is showing blitz, sending an extra man, dropping someone else into a passing lane, and hoping that our added rush gets home, our hidden underneath coverage baits a bad pass, or—ideally—all of the above. 

I think we’ve all been pleased with how few transition costs we’ve incurred in the move from Ryans to Wilks, but I’m definitely interested to see what our defense looks like once Wilks is fully settled into how he wants to deploy our personnel.

SPECIALS

Money Moody. Hats off to the rookie. Despite announcers trying to jinx him at every turn, a shaky pre-season, and weird Steelers shit on his first-ever field goal attempt (which was technically blocked by five dudes who were all off-sides), our rookie kicker’s only blemishes through four games are two kickoffs kicked out of bounds.

On kicks that directly result in points, he’s been a perfect 14-of-14 on extra points and 9-of-9 on field goals, including a 57-yarder on the road in the second half of our closest game to date (it was in LA, so only technically on the road, but still). 

We still need to see him in game-winning and high-pressure situations, but so far it looks like that shaky preseason had more to do with an NFL adjustment period and the injured quad he didn’t know he had than his long-term ability.

The next four games will surely tell us more than the first four did, as we’re through the softest part of our schedule and the rest can be considered legitimately difficult. Every quartet of games features at least one current or pre-season Super Bowl contender as well as matchups against one or more teams with—according to aggregate playoff predictor models—a 50%+ chance of making this year’s playoffs. That starts Sunday night against a Dallas team that is one of the top 3 teams in the conference and has realistic Super Bowl aspirations.

Nevertheless, it feels good to—for the first time in years—start the season strong so that we’re not playing catch-up from the jump.

Go Niners 🏈👍

Floors and Ceilings

yonder

If the Brock Purdy era wasn’t already made official when he came back from elbow surgery, it was cemented with the Niners’ trade of Trey Lance. This 49ers team (and its Super Bowl window) is now firmly in the hands of the second-year quarterback who—just a year ago—fell to the last pick in the draft mostly due to questions about his physical tools and lack of upside. So what can we (and should we) expect from Purdy as he enters year two and beyond? And—on a macro level—what is the value of a pocket passer without a strong arm in 2023?

There is likely no time in history when the running ability and arm strength of a quarterback is prioritized more at the quarterback position than it is right now. Part of that is due to rule changes that have increased defensive PI calls and decreased offensive holding calls during scrambles, as well as the never-ending emphasis on overprotecting quarterbacks inside and outside the pocket. Schematic shifts towards more spread-out formations have also led to larger passing windows down the field and RPOs and screens have created a plethora of underneath free-bees that even raw players can take advantage of as they develop.

That said, the key traits of successful quarterback play are—and will continue to be—knowing where to go with the ball at the right time and putting it there—two skills that are largely reliant on intelligence, accuracy, work ethic, and a preternatural ability to see the field and anticipate openings in defenses. 

That makes the development of Brock Purdy—and effectively, any undersized signal-caller without plus athleticism or arm talent—so interesting in an era that is more obsessed with a quarterback’s physical traits than ever before.

Durability

Let’s look at the most triggering topic first, as likely no team in the league knows better than us the importance of having a quarterback (or eight) who is healthy and available. As stated in the Trey Lance write-up, backup quarterbacks have started a whopping 38.7% of regular season games during the ShanaLynch era, and we’ve had to turn to third-stringers (or worse) in four of the past six seasons. Given Purdy is the smallest quarterback we’ve deployed during this era—and is coming off a major arm injury—it’s worth wondering if we’re about to embark on yet another Jimmy G rollercoaster of endless injury woes. So let’s look at some measurable comps.

When people talk about Brock Purdy they pretend like he’s 5-6, 155 pounds and his mom just packed a PB&J in his red and gold backpack before dropping him off at practice. Purdy’s size is certainly a drawback, but he’s far from an outlier in terms of height, weight, and build among starting NFL quarterbacks. Using official combine measurements (because we all know the roster ones are B.S.), I found a couple of body types among current (and recent) starters that most closely match Purdy’s:

Bryce Young: 70.13” — 204 lbs. — n/a
Kyler Murray: 70.13” — 207 lbs. — 9 games missed/4 years
Russell Wilson: 70.63” — 204 lbs. — 5 games missed/11 years
Tua Tagovailoa: 72” — 217 lbs. — 14 games missed/3 years
Drew Brees: 72.3” — 213 lbs. — 18 games missed/20 years
Brock Purdy: 72.63” — 212 lbs — 1 game missed/1 year
Baker Mayfield: 72.63” — 215 lbs. — 2 games missed/4 years
Sam Howell: 72.63” — 218 lbs. — n/a

If size directly equates to durability, this is not the most optimistic list. Howell and Young get a pass because they haven’t played enough, but Tua and Kyler’s injury concerns are well-documented, and Baker and Purdy have already gotten banged up during their young careers. But there are two very durable players on this list—both future Hall of Famers—and they’ve stayed healthy in drastically different ways.

Russell Wilson is the epitome of the scrambling quarterback who can extend plays long enough to take shots downfield or eat up small gains on the ground—all while avoiding much (if any) real contact. Superior athleticism helps in this regard and so does having a build that is stout and more running-back-like than most of the guys on this list. On the flip side, Drew Brees started nearly 300 games over 20 years in the league by getting the ball out of his hands as quickly as anyone in NFL history. As always, you’re a lot less likely to get injured when you’re not getting hit, and that’s something that Brees (and Tom Brady) have mastered throughout their careers.

We love how Purdy can extend plays and make something out of nothing. It’s one of the defining characteristics that makes us hope he can ascend from the muddled masses of “system quarterbacks” into something greater. But there’s a time and place for all that, and within our YAC-obsessed underneath passing game, you’d hope Purdy can typically get the ball out quick enough that he doesn’t have to expose himself to unnecessary hits. As quarterbacks get more reps, they naturally get better at anticipating openings and releasing the ball quicker. Purdy’s already good at this. The faster he gets great/elite at it, the more likely he is to stay healthy.

Keeping Purdy upright and healthy will also be a task for Shanahan and the Niners. While I think Shanahan gets too much flak for the QB injuries, we haven’t always had clean hot routes to counteract extra pressure in our dropback game. With opposing D-coordinators likely to send extra rushers this season—and Purdy’s most natural counter to that pressure being his ability to read defenses and find underneath receivers quickly out of spread and empty sets—it will be critical that we always have an escape hatch outlet for our quarterback so that he can avoid unnecessary hits.

There’s also the elephant in the room of Colton McKivitz. I get that TJ Watt is one of the five best players in the world at defensive end, but the Niners surrendered three sacks in the opener and McKivitz allowed all of them—some so quickly that Brock Purdy never had a shot. Given his up-and-down career to this point and the fact that he played few meaningful snaps last year, our new starting right tackle was always going to be a worry spot heading into the season. After one week, those worries have only grown.

If McKivitz doesn’t improve, we may have to give him more and more help as the season goes on, but that’s easier said than done. Yes, George Kittle is an excellent blocking tight end, but he’s also an excellent receiver, and anything that prevents us from utilizing all our offensive weapons or forces us into more reps from specific formations limits what we can do offensively.

Sophomore Slump

Purdy doubters typically adhere to some combination of two separate arguments: (1) Purdy’s lack of physical tools and draft positioning means he can’t actually be that good; (2) he looked good for such a small sample size that he’s bound to regress to the mean after teams get an off-season to study and prepare for him. Basically, they don’t see Purdy as a rising young player but a guy who stumbled into a Vegas heater that is about to run its course.

The list of quarterbacks who’ve shown glimpses of stardom—or peaked during a small stretch of games early in their career only to fall into mediocrity—is a long one: Baker Mayfield went from Cleveland’s savior to the narrow winner of the NFL’s saddest quarterback battle. Vince Young followed up an exciting—albeit uneven—rookie of the year season and Pro Bowl alternate selection with a 9-to-17 touchdown-to-interception ratio in year two. The Matt’s (Cassel and Flynn) leveraged explosive fill-in starts into massive free agent deals in Kansas City and Seattle, respectively. Cassel proceeded to throw as many interceptions as picks while leading the Chiefs to a four-win season while Flynn got beat out by a rookie Russell Wilson and threw nine total passes in mop-up duty before being shipped off to the Raiders. Sample size can be a helluva thing. 

But each of these players had extenuating circumstances. Mayfield played for the Browns—which honestly could just be the end of this sentence—under Freddie Kitchens (never not funny), and immaturity questions hounded both him and the organization throughout his tenure. Young had a fun highlight reel as a rookie but was horribly inefficient as a passer, threw for more picks than touchdowns in year one, and—in retrospect—we now know he was dealing with a number of undiagnosed mental issues such as bipolar disorder. Cassel went 10-5 in fifteen starts for the injured Tom Brady, putting up a respectable line of 3,693-21-11 in the process, but that becomes a bit less impressive when you realize that—just one year prior—Tom Brady piloted that same offense and led the league in passing yards (4,806), QB rating (117.2), and set a then-NFL record for passing touchdowns (50) en route to an NFL MVP and the league’s only 16-0 regular season. Finally, Matt Flynn torched the Lions for 480 yards(!) And six touchdowns(!!) in a Week 16 matchup that was pointless to the Packers (who had already locked up the #1 seed) but massively important to Flynn’s checkbook. The man he subbed in for that game? Aaron Rodgers, that year’s MVP.

In Purdy’s case, the inherent issues and expected drop-off that come from a player jumping into a new system and new supporting cast are nonexistent. It’s undeniable that teams will approach Purdy with a more specific game plan now that they’ve seen film of his tendencies and weaknesses. He doesn’t have a rocket arm. He’s a little too quick to escape the pocket at times. Defenders will start to key his habit of using a back shoulder turn to flush to his left out of pressure. But Purdy isn’t riding a fatty contract to a new team and a foreign offensive system. He’s not being brought in as the savior of a downtrodden franchise looking to steal some magic-by-osmosis from someone who's brushed by a future Hall of Fame quarterback. He’s plugged into year two of one of the best offensive schemes in football and surrounded by some of the best offensive weapons in the game.

Just as importantly, the rookie quarterback who hits the sophomore slump often does so because the league figures him out faster than he figures out the league. It so often comes down to issues of maturity, work ethic, and process, and—when it comes to those three traits—Brock Purdy looks like a bonafide blue-chipper. This is the guy who—as the scout team QB—would stay a half hour after each practice to run through the entire day’s script on air. Who—despite taking Iowa State to unforeseen heights—never had a “chip on his shoulder” mentality about the draft process, but was instead humble and self-aware enough to submerge himself in a biomechanics think tank to remake his body and throwing motion before his rookie season.

It is the process and the approach that have allowed the most impressive of player transformations throughout the years because when those qualities are elite, exponential learning and improvement become possible. That borderline psychopathic commitment to improvement has powered Jalen Hurts’ ascension from erratic-armed run-first QB to MVP candidate in Philadelphia. It let Tom Brady improve both his arm strength and his accuracy when many claimed that neither was possible. While it’s impossible to predict where that mental makeup will lead Purdy, I feel confident in saying that—at the very least—the league won’t catch up to him due to him not taking the craft seriously enough.

Arm Talent

Purdy has a quick, compact release, is comfortable throwing off-balance and from multiple arm slots, and his overall arm talent is better than most give him credit for. However, he’s never going to have a howitzer strapped to his shoulder like Allen, Mahomes, or this season’s toolsy draft-darling Anthony Richardson, and he’s unlikely to ever climb out of the bottom half of NFL starters when it comes to pure arm strength and velocity. Thus, the biggest question in Purdy’s game is how proficient he can become as a deep-ball passer, as any ability to stretch defenses down the field and outside the hashes opens up more for our offense than probably any other offense in the NFL.

According to PFF, these were the top ten highest-graded quarterbacks in deep ball passing (20+ yards in the air or more) during the 2022 regular season:

1. Geno Smith

2. Tom Brady

3. Joe Burrow

4. Tua Tagovailoa

5. Patrick Mahomes

6. Kenny Pickett

7. Mitch Trubisky

8. Daniel Jones

9. Josh Allen

10. Kirk Cousins 

Of those players, Mahomes and Allen have elite arm strength. Geno and Trubisky have plus arm strength. Daniel Jones—just like with everything—is (at best) middle of the pack. But Burrow, Tua, Pickett, Cousins, and age-45 Brady are clearly in the bottom half of the NFL in terms of arm strength, meaning 5 of the top 10 and 3 of the top 5 deep ball passers have average or worse arm strength. That’s because deep ball passing in the NFL is less about elite arm strength and more about elite touch, accuracy, and anticipation—all traits that Purdy already possesses and can be improved with time.

In 2022, Purdy’s deep-passing numbers ranked 38th in PFF—behind all but three other starters—so there’s plenty of work to be done in the area, but rapid improvement in the vertical passing game is more common than you might think. As crazy as it seems now, Burrow was only 9-of-46 on passes of 20+ air yards and a single touchdown in 2000 for an EPA/dropback of -0.14. A year later, he jumped to 27-of-62 on those passes for an EPA/dropback of 0.77 while leading the league with 11 deep touchdowns. Tua—another regular atop vertical passing metrics—had a similarly explosive ascent up the ranks following a rookie season when his deep passing was anemic. Same with Derek Carr. Now, some of this vast improvement can be chalked up to the variability of the vertical passing metric. There’s also a legitimate argument that rookies usually aren’t great vertical passers because the awareness and anticipation needed to excel in that regard just isn’t likely to be there yet. But improvement as a deep passer without elite arm strength is very much a thing—especially for young signal callers—so that element of his game shouldn’t be written off quite yet.

That said, I do think Purdy’s arm strength needs to improve if he’s going to maximize his deep ball opportunities. While he has nice zip on underneath passes and between the hashes, you can see the ball drop or hit receivers on the wrong shoulder when he has to zip balls across his body or outside the hashes—particularly when he doesn’t have the time or space to step into his throws. One of the biggest bummers about Purdy’s elbow injury is that he couldn’t spend the off-season strengthening his mechanics and working to improve his arm strength. While huge gains in arm strength aren’t common, the fact that he reworked his body before the draft to create a looser whip of a throwing motion means a second and third off-season of biomechanic work likely can unearth a bit more. Sadly, we’ll have to wait until next season to see whatever gains that work could bring. But by just improving his arm strength a tick or two (while continuing to improve accuracy and anticipation via standard reps) could pay massive dividends. I mean, look at these cut-ups of vertical passes by Tua…

Tua Tagovailoa on passes that travel 20+ air yards:

On-Target: 69.6% (Per SIS Data Hub)
Adjusted Comp Percentage: 55.2% (per PFF)

Both figures led all NFL passers. #FinsUp

(Part 1 of video) pic.twitter.com/qxAbcuYpPh

— George Forder (@GeorgeForder3) January 24, 2022

… or this video that the NFL won’t let me embed of some of Joe Burrow’s deep balls last year.

While the anticipation and accuracy are impressive, is there anything physically in these videos that you can’t imagine Purdy doing? Especially with a few MPHs more on his arm? Brock’s never going to be the dude threatening deep outs to the field side and off-script bombs down the field off a scramble drill. When the timing of a play goes to shit is when elite arm strength can’t be replicated, so Purdy will need to get his deep balls within the scope of the offense. But we don’t need a guy who lives on the deep ball. We need a guy who can do just enough of it to where defenses can’t crowd the box and key our inside passing and run game.

Potential Comps

LOW-END - Shake N Bake Garoppolo

No one wants a low-end projection, but I wanted to give a wide range of potential outcomes here, and this one seems as safe, boring, and pessimistic as they come. Purdy has already shown that he can operate the underneath game that we love to employ and hit guys in stride to set up YAC yards between the hashes. If he never improves on his deep ball and is more or less the same player we’ve seen but with some bad games and injury issues sprinkled consistently throughout his tenure with the 49ers, then we kind of already know what that looks like. After all, we’ve been living in it for quite a few years now.

This isn’t meant to disparage Jimmy G, as we won a lot of games with him, but I don’t think there’s a world where the bottom just falls out on Purdy and he becomes much worse than what Jimmy gave us. Brock’s ceiling may have questions but his floor seems solid. And while durability will certainly be a question until it’s not, Jimmy was about as routinely injured as you could possibly be in the NFL while still being considered a starting quarterback. So if Brock somehow becomes more injury-prone than Jimmy, well… he just wouldn’t be our starter anymore.

Thus far, the biggest difference between the two is that—even with a small sample size—Brock is clearly superior at evading pressure, improvising on the run, and working outside of structure (hence the “shake n bake” designation). While this projection implies that Brock doesn’t improve at all from what we’ve already seen and is inherently pessimistic, Purdy has only played well and only won games since taking over the starting job. There are far worse outcomes than a Jimmy G-type who is available and work outside of structure.

MID-TIER - Cold-Blooded Creative Cousins

Kirk Cousins gets a lot of shit for being a system quarterback, but what really hurts his reputation is the fact that he’s seen as kind of a lame dude who wilts in his team’s biggest moments. From a statistical and analytical view, this is still a guy who has thrown for 4,000+ yards in seven of his past eight seasons (the Niners as a franchise have only three 4,000+ yard passing seasons) and has finished as a top 15 PFF QB in eight of his last nine (including three top ten finishes in the past four years). Despite that, his reputation is dragged down by his penchant for playing for .500-ish teams that no one is scared of or gives a shit about, the 0-9 Monday Night Football record that he started his career with, and his 1-4 post-season mark.

To be clear, I’m not a Kirk Cousins apologist. I’m just saying there’s always been a little something missing that stops people from putting him in the tier of quarterbacks that you really get excited about. While it’s early, Purdy kind of already has the stuff that Cousins has been missing. The cool confidence that immediately wins over a locker room and takes him to an 8-0 record as a starter (with twice as many playoff wins than Cousins has in his career). The off-script creativity and elusiveness that Kirk has never shown and that has helped lead to his poor reputation under pressure.

To be fair, Cousins has better arm strength than Purdy and has made himself into a dangerous deep ball passer over the years, but his physical tools are very much in striking distance of our young signal caller. Someone who can make the variety of throws that Cousins can, and—when needed—lead the offense through the air to open up the ground game is incredibly dangerous in our offense. Add in the creativity and steely resolve that Purdy has already shown in his young career, and that’s someone who wins a lot of games.

HIGH-END - Baby Burrow

After it became clear that Purdy was the dude who was going to be leading us into last year’s playoffs (and likely beyond), the first comp that came to mind was Baby Burrow. Not because Purdy is close to the level of quarterback that Burrow currently is but because both of them have a similar demeanor, composure, and swaggy creativity about them despite neither having particularly strong arms.

Burrow is widely considered either the second- or third-best quarterback in all of football because of the gamer mentality he plays with and the incredible anticipation and accuracy he shows when throwing to every level of the field. Despite an arm that ranks in the bottom half of the league, his placement and his ability to release the ball before his receivers break open is unparalleled. He is, without question, the current gold standard when it comes to quarterbacks excelling without elite arm strength. Needless to say, even a lesser version than him is a lofty goal.

Once again, Purdy would need to up his arm strength and continue to improve his accuracy through his biomechanics work to even approach this kind of comparison. And we need considerably more information on how he plays in tight games before we know how consistently he can lead us to victory rather than just pilot the ship when things are going well. But I don’t think it’s at all out of the question that Purdy—with enough time and reps—can become a top 10 quarterback if everything falls right. Yes, the physical ceiling is real, but it’s impossible not to be impressed with everything else about his game, and—even in 2023—it’s the “everything else” that still separates the bad from the good and the good from the great when it comes to quarterbacks.

Go Niners 🏈👍