Monday, October 10, 2011

49ers Throttle Bucs But Needlessly Lose WR Morgan

SAN FRANCISCO -- 49ers Coach Jim Harbaugh was wrong three times on Sunday afternoon.

1) He went for it on 4th-and-2 from Tampa Bay's 20-yard-line with four minutes to go and a 41-3 lead, instead of kicking the field goal. In fact, he didn't just go for it; he called a pass.

2) After the game he speculated that receiver Joshua Morgan's injury wasn't too serious, even though Morgan's left foot was badly twisted underneath him in similar fashion to the injury that befell San Francisco Giants star catcher Buster Posey on May 25th and ended his year. Morgan needed assistance from teammates to get off the field and was helped onto a cart. A couple hours later CSN Bay Area reported that Morgan fractured his ankle, which likely means he'll be out for the season.

3) In the otherwise cheery postgame presser, Harbaugh gave a reporter (okay, me) some guff for mispronouncing Ricky Jean Francois' name during a question. "It's Ricky Gene, get the pronunciation right," he chided. One would think the "Francois" part would be a dead giveaway of the French roots of his nose tackle's surname, but nonetheless, I went to the Jean Francois himself in the locker room who assured me it is in fact pronounced Zhahn-Frahnswah, not Jeen-Frahnswah.

Whatever. Harbaugh's a football coach, not a linguistics professor. I don't care if he calls Jean Francois "Ndamukong Suh," really. It's his room. And it's hardly the first time he's been condescending to the media when the facts were clearly not on his side. As fans and colleagues have told me ad nauseam, as long as the team is winning, nobody will ever care how Harbaugh acts or speaks.

However, while mistake No. 3 was trivial for Harbaugh the first two certainly weren't, and it casts a pall on an otherwise perfect 56 minutes for the coach, where he made, I'm sure, literally hundreds of correct decisions in guiding his team to a remarkable, stunning, merciless 48-3 win over previously 3-1 Tampa Bay.

Let's focus on the good stuff first.

The Buccaneers came into the game no doubt filled with confidence. Their coach, Raheem Morris, referred to his team as "The West Coast Killers" based on their wins at Arizona and against these very same (well mostly same) Niners last season. He boasted about his squad's confidence on the road playing in hostile environments. The Bucs had won 9 of their previous 12 away games. In last year's meeting with the 49ers, San Francisco came into the game with a two-game winning streak, just like this season. Tampa Bay whupped them up and down the field, winning easily 21-0 and handed the Niners their first shutout at home since 1977. The Bucs defense had six sacks of starting QB Troy Smith that day and hounded him into a 51.5 passer rating, while their guy Josh Freeman had two touchdown passes, no interceptions and a 117.9 QB rating.

However, not everything was hunky dory with the 2011 Bucs, even though they'd won their past three games. For one thing, the schedule was stacked against them. They had to play on Monday night this week and then fly cross-country to face the 49ers, so they didn't have too much time to recover or prepare. Also, Freeman hasn't been the same guy so far this year. Last year he was sensational, with 25 touchdowns, just six interceptions, and a 95.9 rating as a second-year starter. He came into this game with three touchdowns, four interceptions and a 81.1 rating.

As the game unfolded, it because quickly apparent that 49ers QB Alex Smith (11-of-19, three touchdowns, no picks, 127.2 rating) is not very similar at all to Troy Smith except for their shared last name. Smith sliced and diced through the Bucs on the opening possession and hit tight end Delanie Walker on a perfect pass in between three defenders to make it 7-0.

Freeman, meanwhile was very similar to the guy he's been throughout the first four weeks of this season (minus the fourth quarter heroics this time), rather than the one who starred last year. He threw two early picks; one that was returned 31 yards by Carlos Rogers for a touchdown to make it 14-3 and another to rookie Chris Culliver that led to another score to make it 21-3 and the rout was on.

Smith, who didn't have to do much on this day, only showed off one other time. He was red hot to open the third quarter too, hitting Michael Crabtree on a slant on 3rd-and-14 for 15 yards, then Morgan on a bubble screen for a 24-yard catch-and-run and then Vernon Davis over the middle for 23 and a touchdown to make it 31-3.

Mostly though, the 49ers ran and ran and ran it some more. They ran shotgun draws that surprised the Bucs and from jumbo formations with six linemen (right guard Adam Snyder was lining up at fullback) and three tight ends that didn't. It really didn't matter if Tampa Bay knew it was coming or not, particularly after they lost defensive tackle Gerald McCoy to an ankle injury late in the first quarter. The more lopsided the score got, the less resistance the Buccaneers offered.

Frank Gore (20 carries for 125 yards) found wide running lanes between the tackles the first three quarters, and then rookie Kendall Hunter ran a series of student body sweeps and tosses left and right for 65 more yards of his own on nine carries. All in all, the 49ers had a season-high 213 rushing yards, with their backs often not getting touched until they were 10 or 15 yards down field.

The domination of their offensive line didn't just extend to the run game however. Smith wasn't sacked once all game and I can't even remember him being hit. Everyone up front did a great job, but tackles Joe Staley and Anthony Davis in particular deserve kudos for their work.

Defensively there wasn't much to quibble with either. Harbaugh noted how quickly his secondary reacted to the ball, how they read routes and how they got their hands on so many passes. Culliver, the third-round pick with prototypical size and speed but only three games of cornerback experience in the SEC, looked like the real deal and Rogers put the kibosh on his butterfingers reputation with an interception in his third successive game. He never had more than two in any of his previous six seasons in Washington. Also, free safety Dashon Goldson laid out Bucs receiver Mike Williams with a ferocious hit in the third quarter, causing a fumble. It was the first time all season that both starting safeties -- Goldson and Donte Whitner -- played at the same time, and the results speak for themselves.

The front seven stuffed LeGarrette Blount (10 carries for 34 yards) even without starting nose tackle Isaac Sopoaga, who missed the game with a staph infection. Jean Francois was superb in relief and the 49ers extended their streak of not allowing a 100-yard rusher to 27. They also had three sacks, pretty much all of the "coverage" variety, with first-round pick Aldon Smith collecting two of them. He now has 3.5 on the season, which leads the team and trails only Denver's Von Miller among rookies.

In short, the 49ers were the much better team in every facet a football game could be measured. They won all three phases, controlled the line of scrimmage and thoroughly out-coached and out-executed the road weary Bucs. Harbaugh and his assistants deserve all the credit in the world, not just for having the team absolutely prepared for this game, but also in a big-picture sense, as their fingerprints on the team are easy to see everywhere.

The 49ers, even without the benefit of mini-camps to install the new offensive and defensive schemes, look for all the world like runaway division champs and one of the seven or eight best teams in football. It's taken virtually no time at all for Harbaugh to change the culture of the locker room and to turn Smith into not just a serviceable quarterback, but a good one. Again, they deserve full credit for that.

However, two things can be equally true, and the facts remain Harbaugh totally screwed up the end game.

He tried to run up the score, because it's what he does. It was the same way at Stanford, when he went for two with a billion point lead against USC late in the game, prompting then-Trojan coach Pete Carroll to ask him "What's your deal?"

As Harbaugh said in last Monday's presser, he's "moody and complicated." Part of this complication extends to being a bully when he knows the other team has given up and quit. He doesn't know how to win gracefully and he feigns surprise when people ask him why he enjoys stepping on the opponent's throat and twisting his heel.

"You've got to play," he said. "You can’t take a knee with four minutes left in the game. It could have been a run. Josh was competing; I think he's going to be okay. [QB Colin] Kaepernick is competing; he's got to get to work. We're not taking a knee with four minutes left in the game."

Nobody was asking you to take a knee, coach, and I understand that Kaepernick needs "work" though I'd question the value of that work in a 41-3 game against a defeated team. But that's what downs 1-3 are for. On 4th-and-3 it's just good form to kick the damn ball.

The thing about Harbaugh is that unlike previous 49ers coaches, he's repeatedly demonstrated that he's capable of learning, even though he'd never admit, ever, that he made a mistake in the first place.

The media suggested that mayhaps right guard Chilo Rachal wasn't playing too well? Harbaugh insisted that he was, then benched him in favor of Adam Snyder, who's been tremendous.

Some of us wondered why Kendall Hunter wasn't playing when Gore was struggling early, and voila, Hunter has gotten a lot of work the past three weeks and prospered.

Harbaugh was questioned why he kept a field goal on the scoreboard in a loss to Dallas instead of taking the penalty and accepting what would've been a 1st-and-10 at the 22-yard line in the fourth quarter.

Against the Bucs he gleefully pulled an Akers field goal off the board and accepted a Tampa Bay penalty early in the fourth quarter and then had Smith throw in the end zone to Davis to make it 41-3.

So rest assured that when the grave results do come in on poor Morgan, that Harbaugh won't admit he erred, when his efforts to impress the AP Poll or whatever he was attempting to do cost him one of his best receivers and most popular players inside the locker room. I'm guessing the next time the 49ers are administrating or receiving a whipping, he'll be more conservative and that the explanation he'll offer for his change of heart will bend the truth severely, similar to the way Morgan bent his ankle.

Morgan got needlessly hurt last year too at Kansas City, when Mike Singletary called a pass on the final play with the 49ers trailing 31-3. Morgan scored a cosmetic touchdown to make it 31-10 at the gun and Singletary sent his message -- that he's a terrible coach who could care less about his players' safety.

Maybe next time a 49ers coach calls a pass play in a blowout, Morgan will just fall down.

2 comments:

  1. Michael - ask most ankle specialist and they would say its better to fracture your ankle, than to get a grade 2 or grade 3 sprain which can linger for months. The Niners have NOT scheduled an MRI on Morgan for today, which means its a clean fracture with no suspected ligament damage (if there was any ligament damage suspected, they would certainly do an MRI. That's why Harbaugh was optimistic. Look for Morgan to be down for 4 weeks max.

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  2. MM:
    Sadly it is going to be much longer than 4 weeks...MUCH longer !

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