Forty Niners Forever

Since this has been such a weird season already, I’m nervous about this game. I’d call it a trap game, but I think that would apply to NEXT week’s game against the Falcons. Thing is though, we have an annoying habit of playing to the level of our opponents. The Bears loss was one broken play in a monsoon, and the Denver game was just a Jimmy clusterfuck.

Now? The Panthers are terrible and we shouldn’t be. The defense will be the defense. Whither the offense? Jimmy has 1.66 good games, under his belt, and 1 bad one. What will tomorrow bring? Hopefully he’s good Jimmy. The spread has gone up so the money is going to the Niners. So there’s that.

We are the late game on the east coast so that’s a little odd. But let’s do it. Get above .500. Row, Jimmy.

I still don’t know. The good news though is our two wins are against NFC West opponents, so we got that going for us. Our two losses WERE lowly teams on the road, so that brings us to the Carolina Bakers. They are currently 1-3 and are in the bottom of the bottom of the NFL. Well, they did beat the Saints, so they are ahead of them. The big deal that brought them Baker Mayfield is paying off in turds.

Baker Adtime is throwing a lowly 54.7% completion percentage, averages 6.4 yards a throw (Jimmy territory) and has 4 TDs to go along with 3 INTs and a not-so-stellar 75% rating. Carolina is 30th in passing yards per game, and 24th in rushing for the bottom of the league in total yards per game.

They are 18th defensively. 12th passing, and 25th in rushing allowed. So you and I know what is coming. Run early, run all the time.

Still and all, I’m still worried about this offense. the 2nd half turtling is still a major thorn in my side, and whatever script Kyle is using for the first sets of downs should be extended to the 2nd half. Run them in reverse order. Run them all over again. Do SOMETHING to get this offense out of the ditch in the 2nd half. Last game we had 4th and goal from the 1. The defense was in absolute control of the game despite the offense squandering their first drive advantage in the 3rd quarter. At that point the score was 14-9 and the game was wide open. Going up 21-9 at that point would have been the move to stick the knife in the Rams’ throat. But no, Mr. Vanilla shoes goes for the FG. Still a once-score game.

The defense stood tall again forcing a quick 3-and-out. The Niners drove to the Ram 24 and promptly missed the 42 yard FG. Oh, Robbie. Oooops. So, despite moving up and down the field twice with 3 drives that took up 14:00 minutes, the 49ers are still only up one score, 17-9.

This is the usual time for some sort of complete fluke play or horrifically bad penalty that bites us in the ass to squash Kyle’s hopes of running the clock out with 20:00 minutes left. Fortunately for us, we were going against matthew Stafford, to me the luckiest guy with a Super Bowl win, as he’s all over the place at QB. And he threw target #200 to Cooper Kupp on a sideline route that my newest favorite 49er DB undercut beautifully and took to the house for a 52 yard pick 6.

The rest was grave as the defense was crushing the Rams O line all day. Our own Sampson popped the ball loose for the last turnover to keep the lambs out of the end zone.

Love the defense, I’m still disappointed by this anemic offense. Especially in the 2nd half.

In a game that followed the recent script of building an early lead, and the head coach sitting on it with ultra-conservative play calling, the defense stepped up big time, and slammed the door in the LA Rams’ face with a glorious pick 6 by Talanoa Hufanga, the latest USC Trojan stud DB to enter the league. He has been absolutely unstoppable this season. 2 picks and numerous breakups and tackles.

This one is truly on the defense as DeMeco Ryans dialed up stunts and blitzes that had Stafford and the Rams on their heels all game. The score should have been even more lopsided as Gipson dropped a pick in the end zone, and Warner dropped a pick 6 in the 4th quarter.

The offense? Well, this team goes as far as Jimmy goes. What was goo to see is the team focussing on Aiyuk and Samuel as wide receivers rather than running backs. Deebo had the play of this young season, snagging a high throw by Jimmy (intentional or not we will never know), turning a potential pick 6 into a dazzling display of broken field running. Half the team threw blocks downfield, including Aiyuk’s last block at the 2 to finish off the TD run.

Jimmy didn’t throw a pick. He didn’t fumble. So there’s that. The team was 5-12 on 3rd downs. Worlds better than the 1-10 against Denver. Sure, he missed a wide open Juice on a route out of the slot that would have been a TD, he threw to the wrong shoulder of Woerner on a sideline route which would have been a 40 yard gain, and missed a wide open Jennings on another slot route that would have netted 30+ yards. He didn’t make any mistakes. The maligned O line did not give up any sacks, and the run game did enough to keep the LA defense honest. Key stat? 193 of the 239 passing yards were gotten after the catch. Yackety Yac.

We actually started running misdirection plays again. Highlighted by the 32 yard run up the middle by Wilson for the first TD. Shocking as the power run game has been pretty weak. They finally scaled back on running Deebo as he had 2 carries for 2 yards. But, Shanahan continues to be an absolute disaster at coaching with a lead. After a near TD by Kittle on 3rd down on the 1, Kyle does not trust his defense to hold the Rams offense on the goal line and instead kicks the FG in the 4th quarter to keep the game a one-score lead.

No going for the win, but instead playing not to lose. This is usually a disaster, but Shanahan was bailed out by the defense because Hufanga jumped the out route to Kupp and upped the lead.

Still and all, a solid game that suddenly puts the 49ers in the NFC west lead with their wins over LA and Seattle.

I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees . . .

Here we are, week 4, and it already feels like the season is at the crossroads. Of course this isn’t really true this early in the season, but what should have been a transcendent season of looking to the future and watching our young exciting quarterback develop into a star has instead been seemingly sabotaged by the guy who directed the signing in the first place.

Kyle’s bright idea was to develop Lance’s passing game by running him repeatedly into the line and work the passing in at some later date. Well, that is now next season. Curious as this strategy has killed our last 4 leading rushers under Kyle the Merciless. Why he thought his costly quarterback would fare better is baffling as fuck, but here we are. Back to square one. Back to Jimmy. Mr. Fragile. Mr. costly fumble/game-killing interception. You know, the 9 year vet who is so rusty he forgot how big the end zone is.

But I digress. Tonight we get to find out if Kyle’s mastery over Sean McVay will continue, or if McVay found the key to beating us is to oversell against the run and force the game into Jimmy butterfingers hands. Thing is, but for the Tartt fail, the Niners could have won that NFCCG game WITH Jimmy. But that is a bridge long passed. Shanahan shit the bed in that fateful 4th quarter. And so did Jimmy and the rest of the team.

Now, the 49ers come into this game beat up. And it’s week 4. Mitchell is gone, Lance is gone, Williams is gone for a month, Kinlaw is (shock) hurting, AA is hurting. Brunskill is cleared to play, so the hope is the line does OK. They did well enough last week, but it didn’t seem to help Mr. ‘it’s like riding a bike’ as he fell off the bike and smashed his face into the pavement.

The Rams? After their humiliating loss vs the Bills to open the season, they rebounded with a win against the Falcons, and followed that up with a win over AZ. Nothing spectacular, but they finished their games. We didn’t. This was supposed to be the easy part of our schedule, but we’ve blown two 4th quarter leads in three games, and tonight a loss would mean last place and 2 games behind the Rams. Another blazing start here in year 5 of the Shanahavenoplan. I mean, shit, he’s the offensive guru who has two explosive 10 point games under his belt.

We got healthy vs the Rams last year after the worst loss I have even seen against Colt McCoy and the Cards, so the hope is we do the same this year and get better. Cuz last week’s game was just as pathetic.

Right? This is rock bottom? Jimmy was just rusty? Even though the week before it was ‘just like riding a bike’ and he was Mr. Swaggger? This team does nothing but infuriate me. Trey Lance plays his 3rd NFL game in a driving monsoon, scores 10 points on the road, makes one rookie mistake, and all the pundits come out of the ooze to crucify him for being a bust, a failure, and wasted pick.

Jimmy Garoppolo, a 9 year vet playing in his 65th game in perfect weather scores 10 points, makes 3 rookie mistakes (walking out of the end zone being the biggest, to go along with the INT and the obligatory Jimmy fumble), and all the pundits come out of the muck to defend him. Oh, he didn’t practice with the team. He was rusty. He just had surgery. He had a bad day. His Chi was in the 7th house of Mars. My take? Jimmy is an idiot.

Fuck, I don’t know. More annoying to me is the guy who architected all this madness is not catching any heat from the national media or the locals for the debacle that this offense is right now. Kyle Shamahan took a shitty team and made it respectable. Yet the onus on him even before he got here was his choking away a 25 point lead in the Atlanta Super Bowl. He took Matt Ryan and made him an MVP. Turned Matt Shaub into a Pro Bowl QB. RG III had a rookie-of-the-year season under Shanny.

So, what happened to Jimmy? He’s apparently immune to the Kyle effect. This far into Kyle’s tutelage, and Jimmy is still a one-read and panic QB. He takes unnecessary sacks, has no pocket awareness, and has the escapability of a snail. So, what is Kyle to do? Build the most boring, predictable offense he possibly can. I get that Kyle doesn’t want to take unnecessary risks throwing the ball too much, but he’s his own worst enemy when it comes to putting Jimmy in bad situations.

We saw the results. Quick passes on 1st down to start the game. It opened the run game on that 1st drive. Quick score. And Shanny’s response to that success was to stop doing it and go back to the prevent offense. Teams invariably catch up and pass us, so Kyle is forced to have Jimmy throw. When the other team KNOWS he has to throw. Trouble ensues.

I’ve pretty much given up on expecting anything decent from this team at this point, so I won’t be so angry if we end up getting waxed by the Rams. They looked pathetic early and rebounded.

Can we?

Yes, the curse is tradeable. Not much to say about this one other than I saw this coming from a mile away. So done with this vanilla bullshit offense. The defense is being wasted by the likes of our crappy QB play, our predictable play calling, and the unreal sight of seeing our linebackers dropping 20 yards to prevent dump-offs and thius giving Wilson open space to scramble for whatever he needs to get the 1st down.

Too much bad shit to write about, but let’s start with this. I’ve been saying for oh, 4 years now that Shanahan need to throw more on 1st down. Mainly because we run on 1st down 99.95% of the time. So when we came out throwing on 1st down, I thought, great! Open things up! What happened? Guys were open, we drove down the field, and scored a TD.

Cool! What happened on the next 4 series? WE STOPPED THROWING ON 1ST DOWN. The result? FOUR punts. This is what I mean when I say Shanahan stops this offense more than ANY DC does. Kyle went into turtle mode halfway through the 1st quarter and didn’t let up until he had given up the lead.

Yeah, fumbles, pressure, blah blah blah. Jimmy looked pathetic. He STILL makes rookie mistakes. Taking a safety was a great play in that he threw a pick 6 after walking out of the end zone. He had Deebo wide open on a deep route but instead threw to Aiuyk double covered RIGHT underneath Deebo. Tipped away for an incompletion. He missed a 4 yard fucking slant on 3rd and 3. He threw into triple coverage for a pick. His ability to avoid pressure is worse than George Blanda. And he’s dead.

Another wasted game for the defense. They played well for the most part, but Ryan did somehting that bothers me no end. What kills me is seeing ALL the linebackers dropping 15 yards into coverage on a 3rd down and long late in the game and thus opening up the middle of the field for easy scrambles. It kept that FG drive going, and naturally we declined a holding call that would have pushed the Broncos out of FG range (we’re in fucking DENVER!) and they kicked the game winner.

Yet another stellar scoring barrage for the Shanahan offense. 3. But we only scored 2 for the other team rather than the 7 last week.

I had such high hopes for this team this season, but I’m flat disgusted now. Shanahan is killing this team. I hope Jed comes out of his hole and says SOMETHING about the state of the franchise. We look like a sub-.500 team right now and that is absolutely atrocious.

Russell Wilson is something like 17-4 against us. Will his magic domination, a domination that saw the near-NFC champs still lose twice to him last season, come to pass now that he’s in Denver? A place where dreams go to die? Where ol’ horseface has been searching for a legit QB since the crippled and barely able Peyton (call me Ichabod) Manning won a Super Bowl by merely standing there and handing the ball off?

Things have not gone well so far for the Broncos. They managed to play an opening game worse that ours. They had the ball inside the 3 THREE times and came away with a field goal. Fumbling twice in the process. They had 12 penalties.

Ouch. Their win was over the wet and soggy Houston Teabags. A stellar 16-9 win. The offense 7th in yards, but 24th scoring. Fumbling on the goal line does that. The run game is decent at 10th and the passing is decent at 11th. Their fucking defense is 3rd in yards per game, and tied for 3rd with us for points per game.

So, what the fuck?

We of course are coming off an epic fuckup. But somehow, there are pundits out there are calling this a good thing. As if having Jimmy the Geek running the team is suddenly just what the doctor ordered. Because you know, developing Lance is just too hard for Shanahan. His thought process seemed to be, well, I’ll run the shit out of him now and let him throw later, after he’s been through the tackle box 3-400 times. Ooops. Only 3 times? Well, I got Jimmy!!!

I’m completely at a loss as to what happens tomorrow. The Shanaplan seems to be run the skill players into the line until they break. I thought this was the main issue with Deebo this offseason, and why we drafted TDP. Oh, yeah. Hurt. We even had Jimmy pining for the glory days of 2017 when Jimmy took over the team and flung the ball all over the place. Will his coach let him? Or will we see the return of the Vanilla Mike Nolan/Aluminium Mike Singletary/Snappy Khaki Jim Harbaugh/Jimmy Bagadonuts boring-ass run run offense?

The ONLY offensive coach we ever had was one year wonder Chip Davis, but he was given a team that had lost all their playmakers, and Colin Kaepernick couldn’t score enough to overcome the league’s worst defense.

Oh well, Game on. I’d like to think this one will be another of the easy variety, but as we saw last week, Shanahan has the amazing ability to keep our opponents close when we should be going for the jugular a little bit more.

I think we all know this, but Jimmy pretty much confirmed what we all know. I’ve given Grant Cohn a ton of shit (rightly, IMO) regarding his interactions with the team and some of the players he makes a living on ragging, but he was asking Jimmy G about the game last week and said:

COHN: After the game, you said it felt like 2017 again. You really were pushing the ball downfield in that game more than you had the past couple seasons. Is that something you want to do this season — push the ball downfield more?

GAROPPOLO: I love that, yeah. There’s a lot of things that go with that obviously, but yeah, I love doing that stuff. In ’17, there was a freedom, where me and the receivers and the tight ends, we had a good chemistry going. When you get that with offensive skill players and quarterback, it makes for a tough offense.

COHN: Do you feel you had that freedom last week just because you were coming off the bench or do you anticipate having it the rest of the season?

GAROPPOLO: I don’t know. That’s a fair question. I think we’ll see that as we go forward. The more freedom you have as a quarterback, you’ll play better, you’re more confident and good things will happen.

Pretty open about having to play in the system that Shanahan is pushing, which is run the ball and low-risk passes, little downfield action, and pretty much a snoozefest that results in little scoring in the 2nd half. As we all know all too well.

Granted, Garoppolo is rarely perfectly healthy like he is now, and he’s susceptible to bumps and bruises that throw him off pretty badly, so this will be a fluid situation. But, hey, if Jimmy can get Shanny to wrestle his foot off the motherfucking brakes and hit the gas, I’m all for it.

As shitty as the news is around Trey Lance, just imagine if (when?) Jimmy the Greek goes down. Brock (you shore got a) Purdy (mouth) is our #2 right now, but don’t fret! We have brought in Kurt Benkert, AJ McCarron, Garrett Gilbert, Kevin Hogan, and Mike Glennon in for tryouts!! Yes, THAT Mike McGlennon.

What? No Tim Tebow? Mark Sanchez? Nate Sudfuck? Colin Kaepernick? Fuck, I’d think CK would be better than these stiffs, but I don’t even know who Kurt Benkert, or Garrett Gilbert are so it’s hard to even say.

The thing about Jimmy G is every little setback seems to really break his confidence. Whether it’s simply a big hit, or a hurt finger, or a sore shoulder, he never seems to be right when it comes to the end of the season. So, hopefully we won’t be seeing Kurt (?) Benkert any time soon.

This could be a fucking wash of a season very soon. And I’ll be supremely bummed if this season swirls down the drain due to the misguided play calling of Kyle (what, me give a shit?) Shanahan.

Except for the obvious (did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?) the 49ers came out of their home opener with a fairly solid win. Yeah, it’s Jimmy time again. Yeah, we won pretty handily. Yeah, it should have been much more gleeful as it was Seattle, our nemesis for oh, the entire Pete Carroll/Russell Wilson tenure.

But (there’s always a big but) scheduling vagaries being what they are, we get to face RW in Denver on Sunday Night Football. Interesting only in that fact. Denver looks for all intents and purposes to be the doormat of the AFC West. They BARELY squeezed out a turd of a victory against the hapless Russ’s old team when Seattle fumbled TWICE inside the 3, and gagged up another opportunity with false starts and other dumb mistakes to take the lead, but never did.

Frankly I was a little more worried than I am now. Wilson isn’t nearly the force he was. He isn’t hitting the long passes like he was, and he’s struggling over the middle, and isn’t very consistent. New team/new system I suppose, but this is another game that we should be able to win. Wilson did hit a lot of passes, but missed a lot as well. 14/31 for 201 with a pick and a TD. And 150 on the ground. But, Houston.

The 49ers? Well, we al know the bad news. The good news is the 49ers committed ONE penalty (a 26 yard PI) after the fuck-a-row shit-show 10 penalty effort in Chicago. The O line played well, we only gave up 1 sack, and we ran for 186 yards and threw for 184. Solid across the board.

Defensively, Tualoa Hufanga is playing off the charts spectacular. He should have gotten the game ball vs Chicago had we not gagged that one up. Bosa is getting held with regularity and is still getting pressure. The interior line is a bit weaker without DJ Jones in there, and Kinlaw is fairly inconsistent.

But RW isn’t the RW of old, so we just have to contain him in the pocket. Von Miller is von Miller, but amazingly, he didn’t record a tackle in the Houston game. They did get 3 sacks and only gave up 234 yards. But, again. Houston. Davis Mills is OK, but if we can’t outplay him we are bad.

Then agains, there’s the Shanahan factor of never wanting to get too big a lead. He never met a lead he couldn’t squander.