Video of Adrian Colbert, other 49ers defenders vs. Texans

The San Francisco 49ers beat the Houston Texans in what was a pretty decent game. I won’t call it an “ugly” game, because the 49ers set the bar exceedingly low for “ugly” earlier in the season. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a good time overall.

As I’ve done a few times this year, I’m putting together a couple posts with some video that I captured during the game. As usual, I will do more thorough breakdowns with the coaches film later in the week, but for now, we’re going to dive right in. I’ve decided, this week, to separate things up by offense and defense.

And we’re going to start with the defense. There were some good plays, particularly from Adrian Colbert, who is earning his spot in the lineup going into the offseason. Are the 49ers going to go into the 2018 season without both Jimmie Ward and Eric Reid? Seems possible.

So we’re going to get to the videos below. These aren’t gifs, but videos embedded from Tweets I posted throughout the game (follow me, you know you want to), and thus occasionally have stuff at the beginning or end that is not the focus. I’m sure ya’ll will manage, though.

Witherspoon makes the stop

This is a very typical outside run that was probably good enough for a first down and a smart play overall by the Texans ... until Ahkello Witherspoon decided to close with superhuman speed to make this tackle, forcing the fourth down. Speaking of fourth down ...

Mitchell has been here before

I love that the 49ers have guys like Earl Mitchell and Elvis Dumervil. Ideally, no injuries would happen and the 49ers would be starting four young, promising defensive linemen, but that’s not how it works. And someone like Mitchell obviously has plenty of value, as illustrated with this excellent stop.

Colbert closes fast!

Maybe if T.J. Yates gets his ball out faster, the 49ers are in a very bad spot. But he doesn’t, and safety Adrian Colbert makes a huge play to get over there about as fast as Witherspoon ran on that third-down stop. He makes a great play on the ball to force an incompletion.

Fumble!

Poor ball security for the Texans is their loss, but Colbert’s (and Aaron Lynch’s) gain. Colbert positions himself perfectly to knock this ball loose, and Lynch gets the ball at the bottom of the pile. Good stuff.

Runner giving himself up?

This sees like a pretty terrible interpretation of NFL rules, to me. This is a player making a very stupid mistake, not a player giving himself up and thus being ruled down by contact. It’s like those receivers who spike the ball before actually crossing into the end zone. The rule shouldn’t exist to bail out dumb mistakes.

Buckner sack, and everything is good

Buckner has been double-teamed and held pretty consistently over the past few weeks, and thus hasn’t been getting to the quarterback. Teams are going out of their way to neutralize him. They failed on this attempt.