Assessing the 49ers’ post-trade deadline chances of making a run at the Cardinals and Rams (2024)

The 49ers enjoyed an offensive renaissance in Chicago, just in time to set the table for what could be a defining two-game homestand against the Cardinals (7-1) and then the Rams (7-1).

Then Tuesday’s trade deadline came along, and what happened just before it made the next two games at Levi’s Stadium even more compelling.

L.A. made its aggressive trade for star edge rusher Von Miller. Draft capital be damned — the Rams are pushing hard to reverse the regression that’s afflicted their defense this season. Meanwhile, though Arizona didn’t make a pre-deadline splash, the Cardinals had already blossomed into a top-five powerhouse on both sides of the ball. They present a formidable challenge, regardless of whether Kyler Murray’s ankle is healthy enough for the QB to play Sunday.

The 49ers are lurking at 3-4, still clearly flawed — but potentially dangerous after impressing offensively against the Bears. Coach Kyle Shanahan and general manager John Lynch improved their team with a pre-deadline trade for Texans defensive end Charles Omenihu, who should immediately bolster a hampered pass rush.

But the 49ers still face a steep uphill battle to climb out of their early-season hole, especially with such formidable NFC West opponents looming. Don’t forget that Russell Wilson looks to be reemerging from his injury in Seattle.

How daunting is the 49ers’ climb? That’s what we’ll try to gauge.

The Cardinals and Rams are fighting for the division’s driver’s seat. The 49ers are still trying to claw their way out of the trunk. But they’ve managed to pry an opening now, and even if it’s only an inch wide, they see some daylight.

The following EPA per game numbers — “expected points added,” a comprehensive measurement of how efficiently teams perform relative to down and distance that’s explained here — all come courtesy TruMedia. Blue represents above-average performance and red denotes the opposite.

The 49ers, fresh off the NFL’s most efficient offensive performance of the weekend (they posted +19.4 expected points against Chicago, which pushed their 2021 offensive score from red to blue above), now rank No. 10 on that side of the ball.

But their unremarkable defense continues a two-season regression, and EPA does a good job capturing the situational struggles behind it. The 49ers defense might rank well in raw yardage allowed per game (No. 5), but it’s been penalized way more than any other NFL team. It’s also been unspectacular on third down and woefully deficient in the takeaway department (No. 31 with only five forced turnovers).

So after Sunday’s relatively limp performance against a Bears offense that’d struggled terribly against its previous opponents, the 49ers defense ranks No. 20 in EPA and No. 17 in DVOA. These are the most all-encompassing measurements available, and both classify the 49ers defense as a below-average unit.

On the aggregate, the 49ers have been a middling team. It’ll take consistently positive improvement — such as the cohesive strides the offense displayed down the stretch in Chicago — against quality divisional opponents to change that. More on the 49ers’ hopes below.

Let’s compare the 49ers to Arizona and the Rams first.

The Cardinals began coach Kliff Kingsbury’s tenure as a team that was raw offensively — 2019 was also Murray’s rookie season — and terrible defensively. In 2020, their defense surged but the Arizona offense simultaneously trudged through sophom*ore slumps from Murray and possibly even Kingsbury.

Here in 2021, Arizona has fully kicked all phases into gear. The offense ranks in the top five and the defense has been even better at No. 2. In fact, if this Cardinals defense sustains anywhere near the current +11.3 EPA/game pace outlined above, “elite” will be an appropriate descriptor for it — though that’s a tall ask with star defensive lineman J.J. Watt done for the year.

Still, the Cardinals are a problem. So far, their defensive efficiency has come close to matching that of the 2020 Rams (see below) — but Arizona has managed to also pair this defense with a legitimate offense. There’s a reason the Cardinals are just one mistake away from 8-0.

Meanwhile, L.A.’s trajectory illustrates why Rams coach Sean McVay was so eager to replace quarterback Jared Goff with Matthew Stafford earlier this year and why the team made its gambler’s move for Miller earlier this week.

The Rams fielded good offenses to open the McVay era in 2017 and 2018, but their productivity under Goff eroded even while their defense ascended over the next two seasons.

Both trends have reversed direction in 2021 after the Rams acquired Stafford and stocked their offense for him. Corresponding salary-cap constraints cost the Rams four starters from their top-ranked 2020 defense.

So as McVay’s offense has surged to No. 1, his defense has bled significant efficiency and is now ranked No. 9. Those are solid splits that indicate the Rams remain in contention. But L.A. has only beaten one team with a winning record, the Buccaneers, and their lone loss — 37-20 to Arizona — illustrated the inevitable frailty created by any amount of defensive slippage.

Balance wins championships. The Rams don’t want to be helpless against hot performances from the many good quarterbacks remaining on their schedule, so they traded their final bits of valuable near-term draft capital for Miller.

L.A.’s hope is clear: Create an overpowering pass rush, leverage it to regain top-tier defensive status and use the resulting team-wide balance to win a Super Bowl. With 2022 draft capital essentially exhausted and bigger expenditures looming, failure is not an option.

There are two operative truths at play. Take them as general parameters of necessary improvement. Both are layered with varying degrees of specificity and certainty, but we’ve seen enough football and know enough about the 49ers’ roster to make educated assessments.

The defense has a ceiling — and isn’t a particularly high one

A striking takeaway from the tables above is the difference between a defense that’s elite and one that’s merely good.

The Cardinals have surged from good in 2020 (No. 11) to elite in 2021 (No. 2), and EPA estimates that improvement has been worth over 10 points per game. Meanwhile, EPA estimates the Rams have lost 8.5 points per game with their defensive drop from No. 1 to No. 9.

The 49ers are no strangers to this phenomenon. Their fully-stocked 2019 defense was elite. It generated +14.1 EPA in Weeks 1-12 before a significant rash of injuries kicked in and reduced it to an average unit over the rest of the regular season (the 49ers finished at +7.71 EPA overall). When Nick Bosa and so many other key defenders hit the shelf with injuries in 2020, the 49ers still managed to rank No. 6 but they inevitably took yet another step backward in terms of efficiency, finishing at just +4.57 EPA.

Shanahan and Lynch hoped that this 2021 defense would be able to reverse course and regain at least a portion of 2019’s seismic efficiency. Instead, the 49ers have regressed even further, and the inherent fragility of their efforts has been exposed.

Cornerback Jason Verrett and defensive tackle Javon Kinlaw, two key starters who entered the season with concerning injury histories, are both hurt and done for the season. Their absences have cast damaging ripple effects on the 49ers’ ability to cover and slow the interior run — both necessary components of setting pass rushers up for success.

Can the addition of Omenihu give the 49ers defense a tangible boost?

Though all of his seven career sacks came prior to this season, the 6-foot-5, 280-pound end has actually been an impactful rotational pass rusher over his two-plus seasons.

Omenihu led the Texans with 16 QB hits in 2020 (more than Watt, his former teammate) and has notched a 13.8 percent pressure rate this season, which is even slightly better than Bosa’s 13.1 percent. Though Omenihu’s production has come over a relatively smaller load of 207 snaps, he immediately brings more pedigree than lower-end 49ers pass rushers like Jordan Willis and Arden Key.

At the cost of only a 2023 sixth-round draft pick, Omenihu isn’t a splash pickup. But he’s on an affordable rookie contract through 2022 and is a good value add to the 49ers’ sum-of-all-parts strategy up front. Given a critical mass of capable bodies, their pass rush believes it can execute the necessary alignment permutations — shifting Arik Armstead inside to help pick up the slack of Kinlaw’s absence might be the key one — and become a truly strong suit.

Maybe Omenihu’s presence, even if does indeed provide only a limited boost, can be that tipping point for the 49ers’ pass rush.

Still, the ceiling for this defense remains relatively low, largely because the roster is leaking oil beyond the losses of Verrett and Kinlaw. This week, the unit will likely be without both starting safeties, Jimmie Ward and Jaquiski Tartt.

There’s a larger firepower shortage at play, and DeForest Buckner won’t be walking through that door to alleviate it.

Still, it’s realistic to expect that the 49ers can regain slightly above-average defensive efficiency given a boosted edge rush (Shanahan also expects Dee Ford to return from a concussion this week) and improvement in the penalty department (entering last week’s game, the 49ers had lost a staggering 5.5 EPA per game due to defensive penalties). Both potential improvements will be very necessary if this team is going to challenge the Cardinals and Rams over the next two weeks and beyond.

The 49ers just won’t be a defensive powerhouse this season, and that’s OK. Sustaining top-level defensive success is very rare in the NFL, and it just means that the 49ers’ missing efficiency will have to come from elsewhere.

The 49ers offense will have to be the locomotive

In 2019, the team’s defense led the way. But the offense wasn’t an idle follower. The 49ers’ attack also produced, ranking No. 7 in EPA. Balance wins (NFC) championships.

But the defense was dominant enough to pull the train back then, and we’ve established that’s not the case anymore. So the onus has shifted to Shanahan’s offense.

That victory in Chicago served as a handy illustration of this. The 49ers couldn’t kill enough drives defensively, all the way down to their bumbling attempts to tackle Bears quarterback Justin Fields. But the 49ers offense flexed its muscles in response. Jimmy Garoppolo threw for 322 yards. Deebo Samuel dominated, racking up 171 receiving yards. Elijah Mitchell rushed for 137 yards. The 49ers carved through a good defense, albeit one missing edge rusher Khalil Mack, like a hot knife through butter.

That type of offensive showing, if generally repeated through 2021, would do the trick for the 49ers. Even assuming their defense’s ceiling has declined into the “merely good” territory, that level of 49ers offense would be primed to win many, many games.

But of course, the 49ers offense has been a poster child of inconsistency, so it’s fair to be skeptical of the unit’s ability to be consistently good. The 49ers rank No. 19 in Football Outsiders’ measure of offensive DVOA variance from week to week, and they’ve been even more fickle within individual games.

This is where the 49ers must hope that their offensive line and Mitchell combine to be great equalizers.

The front has been a relative strength for the 49ers this season. Pro Football Focus has graded their O-line No. 4 in both run- and pass-blocking so far. The re-signing of left tackle Trent Williams, who’s been dominant, and the addition of center Alex Mack have both delivered desired results featuring plenty of “wow” factor.

But after the 49ers lost speedy running back Raheem Mostert just a few plays into the season opener, their outside-zone rushing effectiveness tanked. Mitchell is fast, but he’s a rookie and for several weeks the advanced metrics indicated that neither he nor any of the 49ers’ other backs were gleaning nearly the same rushing efficiency as their predecessors.

Until the past two weeks.

Mitchell has developed rapidly. He averaged 8.5 yards per carry on runs to the outside against the Bears. He led all of the week’s NFL backs in rushing yards over expectation, measured by NFL Next Gen Stats tracking data.

An established outside-zone run game has been a stabilizing factor for Shanahan offenses in the past, and Mitchell’s burst and ability to slip through tight creases on the outside again formed a true backbone for the attack Sunday.

It also propelled Mitchell to a very respectable spot on the graph below.

Hmm pic.twitter.com/JWWvI1hIKW

— Computer Cowboy (@benbbaldwin) November 1, 2021

Not coincidentally, Mitchell’s surge came in conjunction with larger 49ers’ offensive success. Garoppolo was sharp, with and without play action. Samuel was a game-changer, and other receivers like Brandon Aiyuk were also involved.

Balance wins championships. It’s also indicative of and necessary for a healthy Shanahan offense.

So is that No. 3 ranking in rushing DVOA. That’s where the 49ers stand after Sunday’s outburst, which successfully stretched Chicago’s defense into submission. And that’s a level of efficiency they must maintain.

This obviously won’t be a cakewalk for the 49ers. But continued execution on the ground is absolutely mandatory for them. Because it is apparent that this team’s offense will have to drive victories this season, and this offense’s ability to be consistently good is firmly tied to the success of its rushing concepts — particularly Shanahan’s outside zone.

(Photo of Elijah Mitchell: Michael Zagaris / San Francisco 49ers / Getty Images)