Green Bay Packers vs San Francisco 49ers -  Previewing the 2020 NFC Championship Game

49ers offense vs. Packers defense

Jimmy Goroppolo

To me, Kyle Shanahan is the premier offensive play-caller in the game today. Not only is his scheme and all the stuff he does off it very complete, but what I really appreciate him is the way he puts together game-plans specifically suited towards his opponents and how he continues to build around the things that have made them successful. That’s how he made Matt Ryan an MVP in Atlanta and why he is now 21-4 with the 49ers in games that he has an adequate quarterback in Jimmy Garoppolo from start to finish. When you re-watch that first game against the Packers, Shanahan ran circles around the Packers defense.

While having George Kittle and Kyle Juszczyk on pretty much all base downs, he still made things easy for his quarterback by identifying coverages through different motions and it created a lot of easy completions on in-breaking routes to the voids that were created. That was especially the case on RPOs, where they could isolate the back-side linebacker. While the Green Bay defense should see that a lot in practice, the Niners were also highly effective faking zone to the overloaded side and then hitting Kittle on a deep over off the bootleg or use a receiver in that role and have the tight-end come into the flats of the split zone action. Overall the San Francisco offense was just extremely efficient, scoring 37 points on just 45 total plays, even if a strip-sack on the first Packer possession set them up with first-and-goal right away.

With that being said, Mike Pettine’s tendencies and transparency for his defense made things a lot easier on them. While the Packers do play a multitude of coverages, what they run is very dependent on personnel sets, field positions, and situations. Despite using true man-coverage (mainly cover-one) on just 30 percent of their snaps, most of those calls came on early downs and on the opposite side of the field. More telling however is that 80 percent of their snaps in man-coverage came against 11 personnel, while they use different types of zone looks on almost two-thirds of plays against 12 or 21 personnel.

Coaches who have figured that out now only needed some motions to confirm the looks they were given and when you look at teams like the Niners or Chargers, they just shredded the Green Bay DBs with shallow crosses and double-moves. That’s how a top ten defense on paper like they have up there has allowed 15 passes of 40+ yards through the regular season – second-worst in the league. Something San Francisco did in the first matchup, for example, was motioning to two-by-two sets with one tight end. After seeing the defender trailing the receiver coming across the formation and having Adrian Amos line up over Kittle with outside leverage, the Packers were already done. They ran a drag route with the tight-end and had the back go into the flats, with forced both Amos and the linebacker inside of him to work over the top of those defenders needed to work over the top of the action and it made for some easy completions.

If Green Bay wants to have any chance of keeping Shanahan from exploiting their secondary, they need to break tendencies and force Jimmy G to hold the ball, which allows their pass rush to get home. If you give those guys clean looks all game long, you don’t really have a chance to slow them down and they don’t mind running the ball into the ground once they show you some pass plays early on. They just proved that against the Vikings, when the put together 47 rushing attempts and once had a drive where they handed it off eight straight times until reaching the end-zone.

That also means finding a way to stop that run scheme the Niners used in the first matchup, where they fake the jet sweep one way and take advantage of the edge defender having to stay wide by sending a puller to kick him even further out. Whether it’s having those outside backers crash inside more aggressively and trusting the safeties to come up or implementing switch calls when you’d need to cross defenders, you have to take away the easy path to success. If you are not always in perfect position and Jimmy G finds a way to carve you up on the fly, I can live much better with, especially after what I just saw from him in terms of staring down some receivers and trying to fit balls into windows that just aren’t really there.

Throw some different looks at him and make him pat the ball. The Smith brothers have come through for the Pack all year long, but what they do on the back-end will dictate how many opportunities they get to impact the game. With all that being said, if Shanahan all of a sudden pulls out a change-up call himself like he did in the last game, there is not much you can do about it. The Niners ran a bootleg out of a condensed formation and they had Kelce fake going on the deep out like he has many times, but on that play, he broke it back to the post and was wide open for a 61-yard score.