The Niners are the last team without a loss in the NFC. Are they a legitimate Super Bowl contender this season?
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Are the 49ers for real? The cases for, against a playoff run
Five weeks into the 2019 NFL season, only two undefeated teams remain. If you had asked before the season began, the
New England Patriots would have been a pretty unanimous pick to be one of the two; while they've had their well-publicized September struggles in recent years, no one has gone broke picking the Patriots to win football games. Identifying the second team, however, would have been trickier. Some likely would have chosen the defending NFC Champion
Los Angeles Rams; others would have backed reigning MVP
Patrick Mahomes and the
Kansas City Chiefs. The
New Orleans Saints,
Los Angeles Chargers and the
Pittsburgh Steelers also looked like dominant teams prior to Week 1.
Not many would have pegged the
San Francisco 49ers, who haven't finished with a winning record since 2013, as the team joining the Patriots atop the NFL, but here they are. After their 31-3 rout of Cleveland on Monday night -- the best single-game performance of the season, per Football Outsiders' DVOA ratings -- the 49ers have put themselves in the conversation of the league's top teams.
It wasn't a one-week nationally televised anomaly, either; San Francisco has been putting up lopsided performances throughout the first month of the season. As a result, the 49ers not only rank
first in DVOA after Week 5, but are the sixth-best team we've ever tracked through a team's first four games, stretching back to 1986.
San Francisco is the only team in the NFL to rank in the top five in both offensive and defensive DVOA. While the narrative says that the 49ers are winning with a punishing ground game and a ferocious pass rush, they've actually been effective no matter the situation; they're the only team to rank in the top 10 in rushing offense, passing offense, rushing defense and passing defense. The 49ers and Patriots are heads, shoulders, knees and toes above the rest of the league at the moment. We've never seen anything like the gap these two top teams are putting between themselves and the rest of the league in terms of their DVOA rating; each of them are a full 30 points higher than third-place Kansas City.
Is this real life? Are the 49ers really a historically great team? Or are they going to come back to Earth after a wild month?
It's not (just) the schedule
The general consensus about San Francisco's hot start, especially before Monday night, was that they hadn't played anyone good yet. San Francisco's schedule has been the fifth-easiest in the league to this point this season, as they've yet to play any of the top 15 teams in the league. Their success, the argument goes, is being inflated by that soft schedule, and they'll be exposed when they take on the Rams this weekend.
There are a couple flaws in that argument. First of all, few are doubting the Patriots despite playing the easiest early schedule we've ever recorded -- their track record is buying them benefit of the doubt, while Kyle Shanahan's team hasn't earned that quite yet. Second, our DVOA metric is adjusted for schedule. This early in the season, the opponent adjustments are only at 50% strength, but it's already taking into account San Francisco's relatively weak schedule, adjusting for it and still ranking this as one of the hottest starts of the past 30 years. Don't be quick to discount big wins over Cincinnati and Cleveland as insignificant because they came over struggling teams, either. Our studies have shown championship teams are generally defined by their ability to
easily win games over inferior teams, rather than their ability to win the close games. Great teams are supposed to win big over bad teams, and that's what the 49ers have been doing.
You may also be tempted to say that of course the 49ers rank highly, because they're undefeated. Teams generally play better when they win than when they lose, after all, so any 4-0 team is going to look good statistically; they haven't had their down games yet. While there's certainly some truth to that, there's a difference between looking
good and looking
great. The last four teams to start 4-0 and miss the playoffs were the 2016 Vikings and Broncos, the 2015 Falcons and the 2012 Cardinals. None of them had a DVOA over 30.0%; the 49ers are pushing 60.0%. If you're waiting for better opposition to declare the 49ers "for real," you're ignoring some dominant performances.
The Niners' path to 4-0
San Francisco's offense starts with the run game;
no team runs more out of neutral situations than the 49ers do. The offensive line is winning on nearly every snap; they lead the league by a wide margin with 5.40
adjusted line yards per carry; second-place Buffalo is at just 5.09. Shanahan's regular use of pre-snap motion takes defenses out of their assignments and forces them to reveal their schemes, making it that much easier for the offensive line to know who to block and for running backs to identify where the holes will be.
It's a true three-man rotation at this point, with
Matt Breida,
Raheem Mostertand
Tevin Coleman splitting the snaps almost exactly in thirds. It keeps all the backs fresh and productive. Breida and Mostert rank first and fourth in
rushing DVOA; Coleman would rank sixth if he had enough snaps to qualify at this point. The running attack in San Francisco's first four games has been a master class in taking advantage of over-pursuing defenders, cutting back against the grain and then turning on the jets. They won't continue to average 200 yards per game, because it is no longer the 1970s, but this is a team built to dominate in the trenches, using misdirection and patience to rip off big gain after big gain.
You don't need 200 rushing yards a game to set up the play-action pass, but it can't hurt. The 49ers use play-action on a full third of their pass plays, and they average 9.5 yards per play when doing so. Teams around the league are generally better when working out of play-action; the 49ers are just taking that philosophy as far as they can this season. But it's not just play-action forcing defenders to think twice in the passing game. Bootlegs, screens, crossing routes; it's all about moving pieces around and then quickly getting the ball to them before defenses can react.
Jimmy Garoppolo has the second-quickest average time to throw in the league this year, per the NFL's
Next Gen Stats.
The end result of all this is a lot of passes to receivers in open space, with the nearest defender often two or three yards away. Per NFL Next Gen Stats data, Garoppolo has the third-highest expected completion percentage in the league, and he's throwing the ball a yard and a half deeper than anyone ahead of him; these are easy catches for solid gains. And, because the receivers have so much cushion, they have room to turn the ball upfield. Last year, the 49ers nearly broke the
record for YAC+, Football Outsiders' measure of gaining more yards after catch than expected given pass distance and situation. They're well on their way to having similar success in 2019.
But while the offense has been efficient, it's the defense that's been the stronger unit. The 49ers have the fourth-best defensive DVOA for any team through four games since 1986. A large part of this is that years of pouring resources into the defensive line has finally started to pay off. First-round picks
Nick Bosa,
Arik Armstead and
DeForest Buckner and trade acquisition (and former first-round pick)
Dee Ford are proving to be more than most teams can handle, and there's depth behind them with
Ronald Blair III and
Solomon Thomas. The 49ers have started using Bosa and Ford on the same side at times, which is part of what unleashed Bosa for his two-sack, five-quarterback hit, forced-fumble, flag-planting coming-out party against Cleveland. All in all, this collection of blue-chip talent ranks third in
adjusted sack rate and seventh in adjusted line yards, joining New England and Tennessee as the only teams in the top 10 in both stats.
Even better, they're pulling off that sort of success while generally rushing just four players, letting the linebackers and secondary drop back into coverage. The 49ers had just two interceptions and seven total takeaways in 2018; those numbers are up to seven and 11 through the first quarter of 2019.
Richard Sherman, now two years removed from his ruptured Achilles tendon, is back to something close to his old self; he's allowing the 11th fewest yards per pass of any cornerback this season, per
Sports Info Solutions' charting. Fellow cornerback
Ahkello Witherspoon is seventh in success rate. Linebacker
Kwon Alexander has been an excellent free-agent acquisition, especially in pass coverage; the 49ers are the top defense in the league against tight ends and "other" receivers. All in all, the entire defense has benefited significantly from the front four making the job that much easier. It's hard to imagine a much better start for the 49ers.
Red flags and warning signs
It's not all sunshine in Santa Clara, California, however. There are some reasons to be concerned about the 49ers' ability to keep up this high level of performance going forward.
The first problem is injuries, as 49ers fans are beginning to get tired of hearing the phrase "out for four to six weeks". San Francisco suffered two major offensive injuries against Cleveland. Fullback
Kyle Juszczyk sprained his left MCL against Cleveland and will miss four to six weeks. For most teams, the loss of a fullback would barely be noticed, but Juszczyk plays a major role in the 49ers' offense, which runs more 21 personnel than anyone else in the league by a wide margin. Juszczyk lines up all over the field and is a major part of all that pre-snap motion that drives the running game. There is no backup fullback on the roster, either; the 49ers will have to either sign one or change their base formation while Juszczyk heals up.
Right tackle
Mike McGlinchey is also out four to six weeks with a right knee injury. Replacing him would be difficult enough on its own, but left tackle
Joe Staley is still out with a broken fibula, meaning it's a pair of backup tackles for the next month or so.
Justin Skule has been doing a decent job in relief of Staley, but it's a lot easier to give help and scheme around one backup tackle than it is to try to work around two missing ones. Add in preexisting injuries to Witherspoon,
Jalen Hurd and
Trent Taylor, and the 49ers' depth is being tested early.
But injured players do come back, and even if the 49ers fall off a little while everyone gets healthy, that's not the long-term worry. A big question mark that still hovers over the team is what will happen when they eventually fall behind early.
The 49ers are built to be a front-running team. They want to be able to run the ball on offense and control possession and the clock. They want to force the other team to go into catch-up, pass-heavy mode, allowing those pass-rushers to focus on the quarterback. What happens when they can't do that, when they have to play catch-up themselves? They have yet to run a play while trailing by more than one score and didn't trail at all in half of their games. The two games 49ers did trail were the two in which they had negative passing DVOA.
Shanahan's offenses have historically featured a top wideout to run the passing game through -- think
Julio Jones in Atlanta or Andre Johnson in Houston. The 49ers do not have that; in fact, no one in their receiving corps has really stepped up to this point. They've struggled with drops and have had multiple passes bounce off their hands directly into the defense for interceptions. Three of the 49ers' four most-targeted wideouts have
negative receiving DVOAs and DYARs. Yes, they have tight end
George Kittle and a small armada of pass-catching running backs, but throwing out wide has been a negative proposition. If the 49ers do find themselves in a game where they have play against type and air the ball out frequently, they may not have the horses to keep up.
Should San Francisco fans be making their playoff plans already?
So, are the 49ers for real? It depends what you mean by "for real." If you mean will they go 16-0 and continue to challenge the all-time single-season DVOA record, then no, probably not; that's rarefied air and not something that should be considered lightly. Four games is a quarter of the season, but it's still not a large sample size.
To help deal with that, Football Outsiders also uses a stat called DAVE, which blends a team's actual DVOA with their preseason projections in order to prevent an early hot or cold streak from entirely warping perceptions of a team. As we projected the 49ers to be a more-or-less average team before the season began, San Francisco drops from a 58.1% DVOA to a 25.8% DAVE. This is probably a better estimate of their actual talent; they've just happened to play some of their best games first.
But a 25.8% DAVE is still second-best in the league, behind only New England. It's a mark that would have them as one of the top two or three teams in the league in any given year, not just 2019. You can argue about whether or not the 49ers should be considered
the top team in the NFC or just
a top team, but they have to be at the forefront of the conversation.
The future looks bright for San Francisco, even using that more modest DAVE. While things do get tougher from here on out, the 49ers' future schedule (based on average DVOA of opponent) ranks just 20th, and it's 14th out of 16 teams in the NFC. While the Los Angeles Rams and
Seattle Seahawks are two high-caliber challengers in the division alone, we give the 49ers the second-highest odds to make the playoffs, at
88.0%. With four wins already in hand, and sitting atop the conference, they have more than a 40% chance of winning home-field advantage in the NFC, more than a 30% chance of reaching the Super Bowl and more than a 15% chance of winning the whole thing. That's a far cry from a team we thought was a year away from a return to the postseason just a month ago.
In reality, the 49ers' odds will probably dip a bit as October continues. The injury bug will be tough to get over, and things just don't roll smoothly for months on end in the NFL. There will be days when the defense doesn't hold after a turnover; when the running game gets stuck in neutral. How San Francisco responds to adversity will be very telling in terms of their chances going forward.
But make no mistake. This week's game against the Rams isn't a chance for the 49ers to prove themselves or an opportunity to be considered a contender. This is a game between two top teams with real championship hopes, even if that's not something most people would have predicted in August.
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