The only thing better than seeing the 49ers defense absolutely throttle the vaunted Arizona Cardinals offense on Monday Night Football? I found myself down 21 points in my first round playoff matchup heading into Monday night and I had the 49ers defense. 4 sacks, 5 fumbles and 4 2 interceptions later and I get 24 points from the 49ers defense. When you get that many points without a defensive touchdown, you know you got a dominating performance. I'm willing to argue that's one of the greatest comebacks in fantasy history!
It's an hour or so after the game and I am still without a computer. I'm sitting at a Fedex/Kinkos a little buzzed putting this post together and giddy as could be. Using a PC keyboard right now is actually making this a little more difficult than my Mac keyboard. But the important thing is that the 49ers won in fairly dominating fashion and left me highly entertained. For the next week, my posts will come from a variety of public Internet options, so they might be a little shorter than normal. I have access to the USF library so I'll do what I can, but bear with me for the next week or so.
We'll have plenty of opportunities to focus on the 49ers offensive performance. For this post though, let's focus on the defense. Some may argue that the Cardinals offense basically did whatever they could to hand this game to the 49ers offense. To those people I snicker. The 49ers defense put together a performance you will not see very often. First and foremost, we may have seen a breakout performance from Dashon Goldson. He hauled down a beautiful interception, while also providing a pair of huge forced fumbles. Maybe he didn't recover them, but he was a play-making machine. The much criticized Mark Roman had a pair of fumble recoveries. Given his performances prior to this season, that's simply amazing.
All in all, we saw a defensive performance that does not come along fairly often, even when you're playing a crappy team. The 49ers took on a hot Cardinals offense and absolutely shut them down. The dynamic duo of Larry Fitzgerald and Anquan Boldin were held to 62 yards on 7 carries. Kurt Warner, who had been fairly dominant in his previous 4 games was fairly easily contained, throwing for 178 yards and 2 picks.
The 49ers need a lot of help if they want to make the playoffs, but we saw a defense perform on a level we haven't seen probably since the Rams game. Given the quality of competition, this was arguably the defense's best performance of the season. As the team heads into what is a monstrous battle in Philadelphia, will they be able to contain an explosive Philly squad, or will we see more inconsistency going forward?