Girod Street End Zone

The Goat
GSEZ Founder

Yeah, I’ll admit it.  There was one night in my life I didn’t hate the 49ers.  On January 29, 1995, the 49ers won Super Bowl XXIX 49-26 over the San Diego Chargers, and Rickey Jackson got his well-deserved Super Bowl ring.

Other than that, fuck ‘em.   The Falcons hate runs strong because we have to deal with them twice a year.  For better or worse, the 49ers, who have been pretty much irrelevant since 1998, essentially ran and hid with realignment in 2002, but we have now hunted them down.  I am looking forward to Saturday night’s game like a Russian plutocrat heading to Vegas for a four-day weekend with a suitcase full to bursting with quality blow and stacks of non-consecutive Benjamins.

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 I’m sure you’re at least a little like me.  You’re so tired of hearing about the Frisco defense, you want to poke out your own eardrums, or at least stop clicking on ESPN.com more than once every 11 minutes to see if anything has happened (which it has not) or there’s any new information (which there is not).

It’s just astonishing to me that everyone is ignoring the great subplot of this game:  the Saints defense against the 49ers offense.

It’s certainly true that this Saints defense isn’t one of the league’s few “dominating” defenses, if you can even have one any more. But we really haven’t given up many long, grinding Touchdown Drives in the back half of the season. Also, we gave up only 18.8 PPG in the last 8 games, which would be good for 5th in the NFL over a full season, and I think it’s a meaningful metric because we played much better offenses in the last eight games (average NFL rank of those opponents in yards per game is 12) than the first half (average rank of those was 20).

It’s not a great Saints defense, but at this point it’s above average, and that’s where we needed to get from where we were in August.

And the 49ers are exactly the kind of team we can stop:  prefer to run the ball with a grinding back, control the clock, the QB is a game manager whose favorite target is his tight end…..all of which sounds like a hell of a lot like Atlanta and Tennessee, teams whose offenses we handled beautifully in the back end of the season.

To make sure, we went to one of our favorite stats, Touchdown Drives (six plays or more, 60 yards or more, resulting in a TD) versus Short Drives (three or fewer plays, or 10 or fewer yards, resulting in no score, other than a FG when you already got the ball in FG range).  The 49ers in 2011?

Pretty stark:  11 Touchdown Drives, as opposed to 71 Short Drives, in 16 games.  Jesus.  And only three of those Touchdown Drives have come in the last nine games.  These guys can’t move the ball.  To be sure, they did have some yards, and the occasional/rare big play for a TD (QB Alex Smith had only 41 plays of 20+ yards, and six of 40+ yards, all season), but mostly they just either punted the ball back to you or kicked a field goal.

Since the back half of the season started, when The Family Practitioner finally had enough time for this new front seven to get it together, we’ve been choking off just those kinds of attacks pretty regularly.  The teams that move on us?  Big-arm teams with stud WRs like Green Bay, Detroit and Carolina.  Don’t think any of those guys are showing up on Saturday in the Bay Area.

They’ve essentially got three weapons:  hand it to RB Frank Gore, or throw it to TE Vernon Davis or WR Michael Crabtree, who combined for 139 of their 277 pass completions.  Only one other receiver (including backs) had as many as 20 catches.

But this is big-boy time.  They can’t hide their offense any longer, even against a slightly above average squad like the Saints defense.  We will focus on making sure the run game never gets started, bracket Davis, take our chances letting CB Jabari Greer run with Crabtree, and make Smith beat us throwing to a bunch of guys who are not ready for prime time.

Moreover, this is the playoffs.  They will either make doubly sure to play it close to the vest and protect the ball, or they’ll get clever and get way out of their comfort zone and try to do a whole lot of new shit with a lot of bit players playing the first playoff game of their lives.  Honestly, I am more than happy taking my  chances here either way.  It’s not that they can’t keep up with us if we’re scoring 30.  It’s more like how do they not go into a blind panic once we score a second touchdown.  This will be the biggest and best game of the year for this Saints defense.

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Turns out this is yet another “bat game” for the team, whereby bats are handed out to the players.  Honestly, given the cast of characters we have, I’d like to think that all you’d have needed was a pair of pliers and a blowtorch, but I am willing to defer to Payton on the issue.

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Something else we like to look at:  results against quality opposition.

The 49ers played five games against playoff teams and went 4-1 in those games with a plus-25 in total points.

The Saints played seven games so far against playoff teams and are 6-1 with a plus-97.

You can expand it to teams that finished .500 or better if you want.

The 49ers are 6-3 in nine games against teams .500 or better, with a total of plus-37 points in those nine games. The other 114 of your plus-minus in points came against the weak sisters.

The Saints were 8-1 in nine game against teams .500 or better, with a plus-119 in points scored in those games. Considering the season-opening loss to the Packers at GB, we were as good against the league’s better teams as the 49ers were against the bottom dwellers.

As far as they “when did you play them” argument, we note that we played and beat both the Bears and Texans early before each was slammed by injuries.  As far as “who’s hot”, we played winning teams in six of our last eight games, where we went 8-0 with a plus-149 in points against teams with a combined record of 67-61.  The 49ers were 6-2 down the stretch against teams with a combined record of 62-68, with a plus-63.

There’s no denying we had a mid-season brainlock. There’s also no denying who’s played a lot better when the bell rang at 3 o’clock and the big boys got out of school, and who is playing better ball now. If you really think the 49ers played better against the better teams, all I can say is you’ll have a lot more time to consider the point starting around late Saturday afternoon.

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Here’s the essence of it:  we can win the 20-17 type game the 49ers need to play to win.  They can’t win the 30-point type game that we will play if they make any mistakes at all.

My belief is that the reason you’ve heard so much blather about the 49ers defense, the field, the Saints road record, the Saints outdoors record, blah, blah, blah, is that nobody in the media wants to come out and say that Frisco is this year’s model of the 10-6 ballclub masquerading as a 13-3 team behind a flurry of turnovers.  Everybody and their mother’s son has talked themselves into the only issue being the 49ers ability, combined with mother nature and sunshine, to stop the Saints.   From my point of view, you study that  49ers offense all year, and this is another version of the 2001 Bears, or maybe the 2006 Bears.  If they don’t get turnovers, they starve and die.  And the willful ignorance of the Saints fabulous road record since 2006 (best in the NFC) is maddening.

The only way we lose this game is

– we go into one of those Twilight Zone games where we’re a little flat or off, Brees starts to press, we can’t get out of the funk and we have at least two turnovers;

– the 49ers don’t make any mistakes under pressure themselves,;

– the 49ers consistently turn their opportunities into touchdowns; and

– some other bizzarro shit goes wrong in the fourth quarter.

Not gonna happen.

I have looked and looked and looked and I just can’t come to any conclusion other than that we’re the superior team, and there’s nothing about this matchup that’s getting me scared.  On top of that, WE HAVE DREW MOTHERFUCKING BREES, who is as badass a playoff quarterback as there is in the league.  The days of him pressing against pressure like he did in 2008, and in parts of 2010 when he had to carry an injured team on his own injured knee, are over.  Anybody picking us to lose is counting on him coming up short in the playoffs, in the face of his  107.0 passer rating, 16 TDs and one INT in seven playoff games with the Saints.  I am at a loss to explain these people.

All I can say is that people see what they want to see, and we see what is.   We’ll force our share of three-and-outs and get at least one turnover.  They may stop us here, or there, or for a little while, and they may get a turnover, but eventually we’ll break through.   If you ran a simulated game 100 times, we might win a close game, they might win a close game, we might win a blowout….but they’re not going to win a blowout.  They’re gonna need a bigger boat.  They won’t have one.   I know how this is going down.

Saints 30, 49ers 16.

WHO DAT.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 12th, 2012 at 11:40 pm and is filed under The New Orleans Saints. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.