On a fairly weekly basis, 49ers Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young chats with Ralph Barbieri and Tom Tolbert. He discusses the NFL in general but always has plenty to say about the San Francisco 49ers. Yesterday, Young took some time to talk about the 49ers development into a 7-1 team and what it can mean for the team moving into the second half of the season. I've embedded some audio after the jump and you can also read a transcript of the segment. I think it goes to auto-audio, so if people are getting annoyed by that, let me know.
Without listening to the tone and voice inflection, it's entertaining to read through the transcript and the level of excitement Steve Young displays. Seeing him struggled to balance calling the team "we" and "they" might actually be the highlight of it.
The most interesting part of his segment came when he discussed the development of the offense and the coming games on the team's schedule. Young advocates for using some of the team's remaining games to mess around a bit with the offense by opening things up on occasion to see what the team can get from the offense:
Now, offensively, is where if we're actually going to threaten - and we might as well, we're 7-1, let's go deep! Let's do it! - I talked about this a couple week ago, at some point as we have some games to, not waste, but some games to toy a little bit, not toy, what's the word, we have games that we have to really push the envelope, let's do it offensively, let's throw the ball 40 times just once, just to see how it goes. Let's go no huddle. Let's go win it with the passing game. Let's say, "That's what we're going to do." Because if we can develop another kind of set - because we can run it, obviously, we've got a great running game, we can pack it - I don't want to be greedy, but I want it to be useful, because if everybody agrees that they're more predictable, we know what we're going to get week to week, then why not? Why say: "Good year. We went to the playoffs. We went one-and-out. But, boy, next year! Look what we can do!" No, we're here!
I have seen some folks advocating for this here in the comments. Is this something you save for some of the divisional games? Or does the type of game matter? I'd argue this weekend you have to stick with whatever your basic game plan is given the importance of beating the Giants for playoff implications. Do folks disagree?