2022 NFL Season Football • Page 646

Not having depth makes you vulnerable to having an off year, sure, but it’s not a thing that works the same the inverse way - having depth doesn’t necessarily make you win *more* or actually boost your roster. Unless your team is legitimately loaded, and is destined to lose a couple of its many impact players (like LAR). That’s when depth can help a top 5, or at least top 8 team, have more playoff success than other top 10 teams. But a team that’s already average-to-bad is not better because they have depth and a team that’s pretty good is not 26th because they don’t.

Like, if most your starters aren’t that much better than the depth. Then you’d just have ONLY subpar players at that position lol and depth doesn’t move the needle at all because some of your starters getting hurt isn’t a big drop. This is the case for some Jags position groups - TE, WR, 2 of our OL positions, safety, and IDL are all like that. I could see ANY of those starters losing their jobs to their backups HEALTHY.

 

the “on first down” part is important though. If it’s 3rd and 10 of course they throw to Deebo and Kittle past the sticks, but early down philosophy is what sets different offenses apart. There are some coaches who like to get aggressive with passing and shock the defense with it. But what do the 49ers do on first down if they’re throwing?

probably doing something cheeky to offset the run and tire the defense out. It’s not even just the underneath drags and slants to Deebo, which he still runs a lot of even though he got some downfield attention. It’s also just how many screens and simple rollout plays they call on first down. They have some more complex reads in their passing playbook but they really try to keep it simple smash mouth football whenever they have options or momentum, and aren’t desperate. That’s Shanahan’s style.

it’ll be the same with Trey Lance. I mean look at George Kittle too, does he have downfield plays hell yeah… but why overcomplicate things more than you need to, when he can also go hulk and turn a basic 4 yard pass into 30 YAC? First down I’d rather place my wager on him breaking a few tackles than on my quarterback (sorry Jimmy) nailing a downfield read. Kittle, Deebo, the screen passes to extremely fast runningbacks, now Trey Lance’s legs… it’s all part of an offense designed to control the pace and get the easy yards, with underneath ball control and excellent blocking.

 

If Shanahan drafted Lance over Mac Jones to run the same offense he’s running with Jimmy then he deserves to get fired

 

Elijah Mitchell is my dude, but outside of that literally all the 49ers runningbacks are slow as shit.

 

Amazing too, since they used to have the fastest damn backfield in the league year after year.

 

yeah this is what I was referring to. They always have somebody fast as fuck whose sole job is to catch screens and run toss plays lol. Before Mitchell it was Mostert and before Mostert it was Brieda.

 

Lance is 10000% a better fit for that offense. Compare plays not quarterbacks

 

Just seems weird to make a declarative statement that the Niners offense will be the same with Lance as it is with Jimmy since the widely accepted understanding is that they are very different QBs, which is why so many people thought Shanahan wanted Mac over Lance

 

Imo Jimmy’s been holding Kyle back from running the offense the way he really wants to run it.

what I was suggesting would be the same is not the whole offense, just the concept of them trusting their ballcarriers and downfield blocking and keeping most early-down passing concepts simple.

 

Using the Jags as an example of there not being a big drop from starters to backups sure is an indictment of the Jags’ starters lol

Having depth is valuable and I 100% understand the reasoning for valuing one roster over another for having good depth. Players need to take snaps off. Not everyone plays close to 100% of the snaps. And, hell, the Eagles won a super bowl in part because they had solid depth. It pays to have good depth.

 

Also it's just a roster grade, not commentary on how many games a team will win.

 

as a 49ers draft pick owner, I myself hope that Trey Lance is dookie

sorry if this offends!

 

Yeah, it was lol. Intentionally. All those position groups I listed I am not happy with who we have starting. Jags have a long way to go which is why I was arguing they shouldn’t be ranked 5 spots ahead of Pittsburgh even if we do have more “depth”. Our starting roster is way worse lol

Yeah but how much should it raise or drop a team? Do you agree with Pittsburgh being the 6th worst team in the league cause I don’t haha. I think you can compare them to similarly good teams and put them below because of depth; but I don’t think it should drop them by an entire tier or two. The Ravens lost their entire secondary and several other key players, plus Lamar had a bad year, and they still finished middle of the pack.

I also explicitly said in that post that yes, depth can help you win in the playoffs against other loaded teams, but it’s kind of a non-issue when your team isn’t that good anyway

 

also, we're only like 3 weeks from training camps opening

we almost made it

 

My honest opinion is that I don’t agree or disagree that Pittsburgh is the sixth worst roster in the lease or not because I don’t care enough to argue about arbitrary rankings that won’t ultimately amount to anything. That probably makes me seem like a buzzkill, but I just scroll past rankings that social media departments share to generate discussion that doesn’t lead to anything.

Then again, he were are talking about the value of depth so maybe I’m wrong.

 

Depth is a weird one because it’s simultaneously very easy to point out on a depth chart (ie. saying the Colts had no depth at tackle with Julien Davenport somehow winning the training camp competition as the swing tackle going into the season) and very hard to pinpoint on a depth chart (ie. trading for Matt Pryor at roster cutdowns apparently solved that and it wasn’t actually that big of a deal unless both tackles were hurt)

 

Depth is also weighted. I don't weight QB/OL depth as heavily as RB or another position that rotates a bunch/is injury prone.

Granted, I did give Philly a bump for their crazy OL depth cause they literally have a whole entire starting roster on the bench

 

I also think that just cause you haven’t heard of a guy doesn’t mean they aren’t good depth.

it’d be a fool’s errand to try to know every UDFA or 7th round pick who has bounced around practice squads until they finally stuck on a roster… and we also don’t have the context to know why they did eventually make the cut. (Granted, if anyone does it’s @CarpetElf, but even for him I’d think it’s presumptuous to think he can accurately rate even half of the second-string players in the league.)

It is always possible that a player we wrote off before and forgot about, or never heard of to begin with, becomes a great depth player over time after years of coaching. I would bet a lot of teams have depth like that where we’d grade it poorly cause most of them aren’t guys who were recently drafted or ex-starters that we’d recognize… but actually some of those bench players can play and we just have never seen it

 

You're right, I forgot to consider things that are impossible to know lol

 

Well, you did the opposite haha, you hyper-considered something that a lot of which is impossible to know

 

And I am giving you credit at the same time. You probably know the backstory & have at least a little knowledge about more depth players than any of us, but I still think that’s just a tall task to accurately appraise a group of players that we mostly haven’t seen play

 

I didn't actually. Depth literally has to be considered when judging the ENTIRE roster. Why are you arguing lol

 

You weighed it a LOT though. Instead of just weighing it a little. That’s what I disagree with haha. I don’t feel we can truly, knowledgeably say “well im dropping Pittsburgh to the bottom quarter of the league because their depth sucks”, I’d maybe be like “I’m dropping them by 3 spots cause I haven’t heard of any of their depth”. But we can end the discussion here it’s not my ranking I just wanted to assess yours :) lmao

 

You have no idea how much I weighted it! Lol