Linebacker play tonight

[mistaowen]

Not sure if our wide receivers or linebackers were worse tonight, but this should be discussing the LBs since there are tons of offensive threads already. They CONSTANTLY were missing their assignments, doing a terrible job supporting their lanes, completely absent in pass coverage on the check downs, and missed tackles. On their TD pass, two linebackers dropped into the endzone with Vernon Davis while two 49ers ran the underneth route wide open. I know it is easy to watch from the TV and complain, but they were frequently so far out of position that it was embarassing. Those runs up the middle against Gore should have been stopped after the first few ones, not getting longer in the second half. In every replay it would show one of them running into a pile of linemen while Gore sprints up a wide open hole. They did do a good job on outside runs though....

I knew check downs would be how Alex Smith would get any passing yards tonight, so how we didn't plan for that is also puzzling. His only successful passes last year were short check downs and tonight was the same thing. He isn't able to make those long throws against our secondary, so instead of pressing the running backs as they leave the backfield, we stayed in a soft zone and let Frank Gore catch it in the middle of the field without a defender within 10 yards of him. Loud echoing facepalm after facepalm watching it happen.

 

[MontanaHawk05]

In the first half, I remember the checkdowns being pretty closely covered as we've done all season. Vanished pretty quickly after halftime, though. Wright in particular got hammered on blocks during SF's touchdown drive.

 

[DHawk]

Agreed. They were terrible tonight. Those checkdowns pissed me off. And the worst part was that it continued throughout the entire second half without any adjustment.

 

[Tical21]

A couple months ago, this was the game that I circled to judge the Bobby Wagner pick with. I'm going to have to go back and watch again, but he wasn't filling the hole very often tonight. I thought his undersized rear end was going to struggle a bit against these types of teams. The good news is that there are only a handful of teams like this in the whole NFL, if that.

 

[mistaowen]

We were fantastic on runs to the outside which is directly related to our speed, but everything up the middle was wayyyy too easy. Just poor play overall.

 

[SuperBowlXLChamps]

Our defense gave up 13 points, chill out. It's the passing game on offense that is the problem.

 

[PlinytheCenter]

I really can't hold the defense at fault for tonight's performance. Like XL stated above, we held the whiners to 13 points. Our offense should do just a little better than that.

 

[mistaowen]

I'm not saying 'defense' I said linebackers.... and they did play terrible. The secondary had a great game, I think collectively they had 40 yards to anyone but a checkdown. The D-line held their own against arguably the best run blocking O-line in the game. Time and time again Frank Gore cruised through the middle where one of our LBs should have been waiting. If their QB wasn't Alex Smith, it might have been a different defensive game for us.

 

[-The Glove-]

They were horrible. It seemed like they had the same assignments. When one went deep so did the other. Same thing when they tried to cheat in. Horrible execution by our lbs.

 

[aku]

I think you probably have to lay some blame with the coaches. I mean, it's impossible to know for sure, but those guys have played pretty well this season so I think if the coaches had sat them down and gotten them focused, they could have at least controlled the yardage a bit more.

There are some games where keeping the score to 13 points is a victory. This is not one of them. Anyone want to guess what SF's time of possession was in the second half? I don't have the numbers, but our guys just could not get off the field. When the offense got the ball back with 5 minutes on the clock it was what, their second possession of the quarter? Our 3rd down defense was just ugly, and the LBs had a lot to do with it. Our offense was not good tonight, but if our defense had done its normal thing and gotten them two or three more possessions, it would have really helped.