You look at the 49ers 25-19 triumph of the previously undefeated Detroit Lions at Ford Field and the cliché sportswriter thing to do would be to wax poetic on redemption.
Alex Smith played his worst game of the season and threw what could’ve been the game-changing interception, but came back to throw the kind of clutch touchdown pass at the end that he never could these past six seasons.
Delanie Walker dropped a touchdown when he was wide open in the third quarter, but then ran the kind of slant route that Jerry Rice would’ve admired on that fateful 4th-and-goal from the 6-yard-line and was powerful enough to drag a tackler into the end zone.
Rookie Aldon Smith had an easy interception clank off his shoulder pad, but then came back to sack Detroit’s Matthew Stafford into an 18-yard loss that ruin a Lions drive and set up Walker’s go-ahead score.
Even the much-criticized Chilo Rachal, who’d been benched the past 2 ½ games, checked into the game in the fourth quarter for injured starter Adam Snyder and more than held his own against the Lions Ndamukong Suh, who’d been hyped up as football’s answer to Clubber Lang and Ivan Drago.
All of that is well and true. Those guys had their low points earlier in the game and reached exhilarating heights at the end. But all that nonsense overshadows the real nuts-and-bolts story of the game – Jim Harbaugh’s over-caffeinated postgame handshake and slap on the back with Lions head-whistle Jim Schwartz.
Kidding. Just kidding. Such an overblown total-nothing of a story. It’s all ESPN cares about – because apparently fellows like Frank Gore, NaVorro Bowman and Aldon Smith aren’t compelling enough to write stories on – so they’re driving the cattle call for the editors of the local writers to care about the story too. Frankly, the whole thing is embarrassing and makes me question why I’m in the business.
(And then I remember that I don’t like working for a living.)
No, here’s the story: The 49ers are, unquestionably, better than the Detroit Lions, and thus, by the transitive property, this makes them one of the five or six best teams in the league and a legitimate contender. There’s no need to qualify it or say “maybe if this happens” or “if the ball bounces that way,” or anything like that. Right now, what they have on their roster and on their coaching staff is good enough to play deep into January. I’ve seen enough and I’ve become a believer.
Consider all that the 49ers had going against them on Sunday. First off, they were on the road, which had not been kind to them in the past decade. Secondly, they were playing a team that hadn’t lost at home in nearly a calendar year. They were without Joshua Morgan, who was lost for the season last week and also missing Braylon Edwards, who’s still on the mend, leaving the mercurial (another sportswriter cliché alert) Michael Crabtree as their only decent receiver. Of the 11 primary defenders they would be using the game, eight were different than the primary 11 they fielded last season.
Still, on a day when Alex was only their third-best Smith, when the team was a -2 in the turnover department – a road team winning in such a case is about as rare as a Halley’s comet sighting – and the fellas misbehaved to the tune of 15 penalties for 120 yards, the 49ers still found a way to prevail because they had better players, better coaching and more composure at the end.
Past 49ers teams would’ve fallen apart down 10-0 early on the road and the game would’ve turned into a disaster. This one never led the Lions get out of shouting distance, even in the ear-splitting din of their dome. The coaching staff wisely game-planned to use the over-aggressiveness of the Lions front four against them, the way karate senseis teach their pupils to do. Detroit uses the same “wide-nine” front that the Philadelphia Eagles do, lining their ends up exaggeratedly wide and putting them in sprinter stances to explode off the ball and go hell-bent after the quarterback. These guys do not care one whit about stopping the run. As a consequence, that leaves the two defensive tackles with four gaps to cover, the two between the guards and the tackles and the two between the center and guards. And those guys aren’t reading and reacting either. They want to get sacks too, so they’re also picking a gap and exploding through it. When they guess right, they stuff the run on their way to the quarterback. When they guess wrong… well then guys like Frank Gore (15 carries, 141 yards) start getting smaller and smaller as they run off into the distance.
Even in the passing game, the coaches schemed well enough to get Crabtree open quite a bit (whether Smith actually threw it within Crab’s zip code or not was a different story) and to get Walker wide open in the end zone in the third quarter and on the game’s biggest play, where Walker’s slant was helped along by a sneaky Crabtree pick. That the 49ers didn’t do more damage in the passing game was due to some misfires by the quarterback, some drops by the receivers and generally mistakes of San Francisco’s own making than anything the Lions did.
Defensively, the staff saw that Stafford gets rid of the ball too quickly, too often to make blitzing him worthwhile, and that most of Detroit’s big plays happened when their opponents brought pressure. So the Niners gambled… by not gambling. As Harbaugh noted during his Monday presser, the 49ers didn’t bring more than a four man rush on any of the Lions’ 78 plays from scrimmage. They just played their nickel defense pretty much the whole game, with two-man over help from the safeties (Donte Whitner and Dashon Goldson was each responsible for half the field) and let Bowman cover the back and Patrick Willis cover tight end Brandon Pettigrew.
Come to think of it, I think defensive coordinator Vic Fangio, who said he’d never been associated in a better defensive effort than this one, according to Harbaugh, was giving us a bit of a snow-job during training camp when it came to Willis. Fangio said that Willis was better than he expected in virtually every facet but blitzing and that he would have to work on that skill. I filed that comment away at the time because I thought, "Huh, it’s odd he thinks a guy who had six sacks last year needs to work on his blitzing," when I always thought Willis’ biggest weakness was in pass coverage.
My theory is that Fangio intentionally threw us off track and actually got Willis to work on his coverage skills. Wills has hardly blitzed all year, but has been tremendous in coverage. Yesterday might be the best game I’ve ever seen from him in that regard. He made three or four plays on the ball in the red zone when he was clearly targeted, and even the one time Pettigrew scored a touchdown on him, it took a perfect throw, as Willis was practically in the tight end’s shirt. I think the Niners thinking all along was to give the Lions what looked like a mismatch with Pettigrew, all but daring them to throw to him, so they’d have less incentive to go to Calvin Johnson in the red zone. The Lions fell for it, hook, line and sinker.
Harbaugh and the coaches will get all the credit for this 5-1 start, but general manager Trent Baalke, who’s been mocked, derided and dismissed through much of his 49ers tenure, deserves a lot of praise himself. It’s been fashionable to look at the 2010 49ers as by-and-large the same team as the 2011 version, but there have been changes at virtually every position.
Carlos Rogers has been a godsend at cornerback, and center Jonathan Goodwin, safety Donte Whitner and kicker David Akers have also been clear upgrades as free agent additions. Perhaps Edwards will be too, when he gets on the field again. Meanwhile, in the draft he’s gotten immediate contributions from Kendell Hunter, Bruce Miller, Chris Culliver and Aldon Smith. Of the ten picks in the 49ers draft class, Hunter was probably the only one who got universal praise from the experts out there, but Baalke was ripped for just about all the others.
Aldon Smith certainly looks the part, but the fear about him was that he’d be another one of these guys that (cliché alert) looks like Tarzan and plays like Jane. How about “looks like Tarzan, plays like Tarzan after Jane cheated on him with the opposing quarterback?”
Culliver had prototypical size and speed, but only had three games worth of experience at corner in the SEC. He switched positions from safety as a senior at South Carolina and suffered a season-ending injury early in the season. Baalke didn’t care, and so far he looks like a genius. Culliver’s talent was easy to see during individual drills in training camp, and even back then it was apparent that if this kid could put the time in to be a pro, that he’d be a starter in this league for a long time. He didn’t “shut down” Megatron yesterday by any means, but he limited the damage, tackled well and didn’t allow the big play.
To draft Miller, who was a two-time Conference USA Defensive Player of the Year at UCF, and turn him into a fullback was thought of as ludicrous. Now, not so much. He’s been the starter the past three games, where the 49ers have totaled 580 rushing yards and Moran Norris may not be in the plans anymore.
Then you look at the way Bowman’s blossomed – he might very well be the 49ers MVP through six games – he was a 3rd round pick in 2010. You look at the progress Mike Iupati and Anthony Davis have made. Baalke saw the potential in Ray McDonald and gave him a five-year, $20 million contract and decided to let Aubrayo Franklin go. McDonald has been terrific so far as a full-time starter (I was way wrong on that one) and the run defense hasn’t missed a beat with Isaac Sopoaga at the nose.
However you want to view the win, the thing we have to put a stop to right now is this silly notion that Harbaugh is rallying the troops because of his emotion, his competitiveness, his sideline antics, etc. The players readily agree to lazy Hollywood premises like this because A) they think we’re idiots who’ll believe anything they tell us B) it amuses them that we so readily gobble up this tripe and C) it beats telling us the truth for why games are won and lost, which would get them into all kinds of trouble with all kinds of people.
In case you folks had electroshock therapy to expunge the Mike Singletary era from your memories, Harbaugh’s sideline behavior was EXACTLY the same kind of stuff the media at large ripped him for. We said Singletary didn’t deserve to be a coach because he was TOO EMOTIONAL, that he still thought of himself as a player, and that he wasn’t mature enough to lead a football team.
Now we’re giving Harbaugh praise for the exact same characteristics and behavior? Get out of here with that garbage.
Harbaugh is a much better football coach than Singletary because of the things he does to help prepare the team Monday-Saturday, because of the ways he can provide information of substance to his quarterbacks, and because instead of telling his team to run the ball better, he actually schemes a way for them to do so. Or maybe he was just prescient enough to hire a better staff around him. Either way, “Who’s got it better than us?” doesn’t mean a lick more than “Physical with an F.”
He’s a better football coach because he’s a better coach. How’s that for your cliché?
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