The San Francisco 49ers showed some good things this past weekend, but also had their share of struggles. We hear frequently about how teams do not game-plan, and keep things rather vanilla during preseason action. It makes sense that that would be the case, but we rarely hear much in the way of detail about what that actually entails.
49ers head coach Jim Tomsula conducted a conference call on Sunday to review the game, and two of his answers provided a lot more detail on what a vanilla game-plan actually means. He was asked about the defensive pass rush and the pass coverage. He discussed some of the issues, and went into detail on why we see issues.
Obviously there needs to be general improvement on the skills front, but I thought these two answers gave us more information than we might otherwise get. NFL coaches keep information close to the vest, and I really don't recall hearing this kind of detail in the past. It is not shocking information, but it is nice to hear it laid out in this manner by the head coach.
On defensive pass rush:
Tomsula: Not all the way in sync, but I will say, for me, in my history of coaching defensive line, if you go look at the preseason the pass rushes are a little sketchy too, because we don't put a lot of game plan into the protections. And we're not putting a lot of game plan and using our leverage principles in the rush as much. So when you start getting some wide-angle, 3-techniques opening up the pocket, and we're opening up windows underneath, and things like that, we're not sitting in there game-planning where we need to, where we want that quarterback to throw, and what we want him to throw over. So, it was porous in my opinion. But, Eli Harold, I think you see some things there with him. And Tank a few times. But we've gotta get all that gelled together, and get it coordinated.
On pass coverage issues being communication vs. missed assignments:
Tomsula: Well I'm gonna tell you, I think it was a little bit of both. Just quite honestly. Again, with the vanilla coverages, trying to see, we're really looking back there, that's an area we're really looking at, on finding out skill-sets, and finding out who we have there on game-day. And again, without the game-planning and without looking at your route combinations, and talking about what to jump, and the leverage on a particular combination of routes, and things like that. We come out of the gates last night, and they have 10 personnel out there, 4 wide receivers. Not something we've spent a lot of time on. Whereas if, when you're game-planning, you'd spend time on that, spacing and all that kind of stuff. I think it was a little bit of both. We did find some things out with our secondary. We've got some talented guys back there.