Ok so everybody knows the bread and butter of our defense is stopping the run. Apparently according to Sando, we are 32nd (!) in the league in yards allowed per carry since the first niners game, as opposed to second in the league before. Some of this may be attributed to facing better rushers (Peterson, Gore, Spiller) but overall I think our defensive line has really regressed at stopping the run. In the beginning of the season we just crushed every run right at the line with Mebane and Big Red just dominating whatever came their way. People will talk about Wilson vs Kap as the story of the game, but the battle in the trenches will decide this one. Our D-line must regain the dominance it showed before the first game and then we can start talking about contention.

Wow not a good stat man.

if we can stop gore , i LOVE our chances.

if we cant stop gore we will be in yet another thriller of a game

Yeah just saw that stat on Sando's blog. That is a very concerning stat for us. If we cannot contain Gore than our chances of winning go down significantly.

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What the hell has gone on with our run D???

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"WE ALL WE GOT! WE ALL WE NEED!"

No excuses...Red Bryant is not the player he has been the last couple of games for us.
This is partly due to the implementation of Bruce Irvin and his foot injury. Nonetheless, he IS NOT making plays like we're used to and it is a problem.

I see us replacing Branch with a free agent or early round draft pick next year. He hasn't appeared to be a liability but stats don't lie and he hasn't made any memorable plays himself.

This is a problem. I'm sure that we will get better here these last two games and into the playoffs, but our run d is not the dominating force it once was.

That's been eating the hell at me ever since the first goring by Gore.
Seems Pete is either ignoring it or he just doesn't seem to have an answer for why we can't,,the problem will be compounded if Kaepernick takes up the slack.
Both these guys need to have D players assigned to stopping these guys from eating up time and yards eh?
Kaeprnick opens up a whole new can of worms for our Defense, as Smith isn't even in the same category as QB.

a lot is on the style of runners faced.. speed backs tend to have good days against em, while the power runners stall.

How can we be tops at run D to start the season and absolutely shit the bed the rest of the season?

Something more is happening here than meets the eye test.

We know Red's foot has been a problem. That explains a certain fall off in productivity for HIM. However, what about Branch and Mebane? Why have they declined so much in recent weeks?

We need those three to be SOLDIERS this Sunday or we have little chance to win. Forget Wilson, Lynch, Rice, Tate...If our DLine can't step up and stop the run, we're done.

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"WE ALL WE GOT! WE ALL WE NEED!"

Teams aren't gonna rush you too much when your up on them by like 40 at halftime.

don't sleep on lmj though.

stupid stat. there have only been a handful of running plays in the nfl longer than the one AP put on us this year. How many of those were before week seven? When you have a longest of run of 74 yards on the books, its gonna hurt your average. You also have (if my memory is working at 5 am) some teams in the beginning of the season that pretty much went at us through the air like the boys, pack, and pats.

we have only given up 10 more yards, and one more point than SF has all season.

can i get a link to that? that sounds like a sick stat.. is that just rushing D or total D?

thats total D and i got it off NFL.com

Scoring defense is all that matters.

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Superbowl.

Yes, but when are these runs coming and how many rushes are we facing?
I'm quite happy to let teams run for 6 yards a carry if it's on 3rd and 8 every time (which a lot of the long runs we're giving up are coming on).

We may be dead last in YPC, but when the team still ranks 10th overall in rushing defense it doesn't really matter unless your team can't defend the pass... and we do that pretty well

We're in OUR house, he's not gonna' tear it up on Sunday.

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60 percent of the time..........it works........every time

Ah, .NET.

Two back-to-back 50+ point games and everyone's talking about an 11-5 finish and a run to the SB. One stat comes out and now "we're done."

Outstanding.

You all want to know what else has happened since that SF game where our run defense began to have issues?

We've gone 5-2. The two losses came by 3 and 4 points, on last second plays, on the road. We've outscored our opponents in those 7 games by 234 to 113.

We've held 3 of our 7 opponents under 85 yards rushing as a TEAM, and held 2 others under 136. What's the big deal about 136, you ask? It's the number of rushing yards we put up on SF in their own house.

We've forced 18 turnovers after forcing only 9 through that SF game. Meanwhile, on offense, we've only turned the ball over 6 times versus 11 times in the 7 games through the SF game.

But wait, there's more...

Our last 2 games are at home. So far this season, the only team that put up more than 20 points on us at home was a Patriots team that happens to lead the league in scoring by nearly 100 points. Here are the opponent point totals for every other game we've played at home this year: 7, 12, 20, 7, 0.

What's more, in our last 3 games (Chicago, Arizona, Buffalo), our offense has put up more than 450 yards and scored 13 TDs. Our defense has allowed 4 TDs, and only ONE of those was on the ground.

Complain all you like about our run D, but they've only allowed 8 TDs all year on the ground. That's 6th best in the entire league. The pass D has only allowed 13 TDs all year through the air, and that's the best in the league.

And if you need context, well here it is...

Opponents MATTER. They do. We're not out on a field against "Random Team A" or "Random Team B" every week. These opponents have their strengths and weaknesses, and those will almost always be reflected in the results we see on the field.

In the first 6 games, we faced the Cards, Cowboys, Packers, Rams, Panthers, and Patriots. The first three of those teams haven't been good rushing teams in years. The Rams have an aging Steven Jackson who has never done well against us. The Panthers' run game has been awful until the latter half of the season. The Pats are the only team that really dedicated themselves to the run that we stepped up and dominated. Since then, look at who we have faced. Adrian Peterson. Frank Gore. C. J. Spiller. Matt Forte. Reggie Bush.

Peterson, Gore, and Spiller happen to be the featured backs for the 2nd, 4th, and 6th ranked rushing teams this year. It's ridiculous to expect a defense to put up similar results against Peterson and Gore as they do against Beanie Wells and Shonn Greene. But still, why is no one talking about how we held Matt Forte to almost EXACTLY the same stats that San Francisco did? Same 21 attempts, and we gave up 3 more yards (63 vs. 66). Should SF be in panic mode over their run D, too? They gave up twice as many run yards to the Rams on their own turf as we did playing in St. Louis.

We've only really had one game where our run defense really performed poorly against an opponent that it should have handled, and that's the Miami game. And that Miami game served as a wake-up call for the team, because we haven't lost since. Plus, we've held teams to an average of under 100 yards per game since. Our YPA since the Miami game has been 4.2, which is lower than our season average.

In the end, we've got 3 games out of 14 that really skewed our run defense stats. Two of those games were against top rushing offenses in SF and Minnesota. The third was the anomaly against Miami. In those three games, our opponents rushed 87 times for 607 yards. That's 7.0 YPA. That's 41% of the total yardage we've given up on the ground ALL SEASON in 3 games. And all three of those games are being included in Sando's stat.

Do you know what the result is when you look at the other 5 games? Our opponents in the other 5 games ran the ball 114 times for 461 yards. That's 4.0 YPA. That average would be good for 7th in the league, and is well below the league average of 4.3.

Now, I'm not saying that we can just ignore the SF, Minnesota, and Miami games. They happened. But what I am saying is that those three games do not DEFINE our run defense. The ugly YPA we've got as a result of those games has not spread throughout each of the games we've had since the SF game. We're not giving up massive YPA against EVERY team we face. We had 3 bad run D games out of 14. That skewed our averages. The sky is NOT falling.

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Okay, so maybe that pass rush is still an issue. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Unfortunately, Wagner has been part of the problem on runs. Yes, he has a lot of tackles by he has been over-pursuing the holes and allowing RBs to get into the 2nd level for big gains.

Guys two posts up is knowledge. It really makes me think about our passing zone d that used to drive me insane, until i realized something. It may appear we give up alot of passes using the zone coverage, at times. But look at the production we have made this season. We are ranked #2 in pnts allowed per game, nobody has score more than 24 on us, we have had defensive shut outs more than once, we havent lost a game by more than 7, and every game has been down to the wire and decided by a play or two. If we dont get the lombardi this year ... Its right around the corner.