The San Francisco 49ers were held to 65 yards on the ground in Carolina which restricted the offensive production. The final yardage for the offense was 302 yards, 75 of which came on one play, the touchdown to Vance McDonald. The team came within seven points before eventually finishing 19 points behind but offensive tackle Joe Staley says the mood of the team is proactive. They are ready to get back to work, putting this game behind them. It doesn’t get any easier as the team heads to Seattle to face their division rivals in week 3.
What happened to the run game that produced 150 yards in week 1? Joe Staley talked about why the offense may have faltered a bit against the Panthers:
Inaudible question.
We got in trouble because we were never able to establish the run so that’s something as an offensive line we try to pride ourselves on and really do a good job. They were doing a lot of stunts and different things with (Luke) Kuechly that we hadn’t really seen from them before on film. We came in at halftime, made the adjustments but were never really able to get it going again and a couple of those third downs early in the third quarter kind of hurt us. Our defense was able to get the turnovers for us and the special teams was, to keep us in the game. That’s all we can really ask for is a chance to win at the end but unfortunately we were unable to come up with a win.
Can you put your finger on why you were unable to run the ball successfully?
Yeah, they were doing some stuff up front with their defensive line. They were doing a lot of stunting, trying to free Kuechly up in space and trying to force the ball to him. It kind of caught us off guard early. I thought we did a good job of adjusting to it after we saw it a couple of times and got it fixed, and then they kind of went away from that and kind of did something else. They had a good plan for us. We’ll be ready. We gotta go back on Monday and fix everything.
Not the result you want but do you feel better about the team than last year?
You know, I mean I’m never excited about a loss. You guys know me, I never get too excited about wins but what I do really enjoy about this football team is everybody is really willing to put in the work and the time. I know that we’re really eager to get back on Monday. Coming into the locker room, everybody’s response is ‘I can’t wait to get back to work and put this game behind us, fix what we did wrong and move on.’ That’s the focus right now. We’ve got a good opportunity on the road again against a good Seattle team.
Do you feel like the energy was consistent throughout the game?
Yeah, I mean it felt good. Try not to feed too much off of energy because if you play off of energy, could be high and low all game. Just gotta go out there with the right mind set and just go out there and do your job. We weren’t executing in the second and third quarter so I guess that’s the main thing we gotta fix.