Everyone wants to talk about Harbaugh and a toxic locker room?

Originally posted by SaksV:

Originally posted by hondakillerzx:
agreed but im just wondering where the hell our offense fell apart. all of the injuries until today have been on defense and vic still had them playing their asses off.

This Offense was never in place to begin with.

The passing philosophy is 4 decades too old. 85% intermediate passing routes with pre-snap reads that cause QBs to develop tunnel vision and operate like robots.

Horrendously flawed pass blocking schemes that put far too much pressure on the interior line.

Little to no outlet our checkdown options in case of inevitable pressure from the opponent.

Running scheme carbon copied from Stanford with a few added minor tweaks.

2011
Installed during the "Lockout" Off-Season, this team was able to get a head start on the rest of the league due to a couple factors:
1) The team had a veteran QB that excels at understanding playbooks
1a) Said QB took it upon himself to be a LEADER and teach what he knew of this new playbook to his teammates rather than flying to another state to do private workouts
2) No team in the NFL besides a few teams that had college coaches on their staff were very familiar with Harbaugh/Roman's Stanford run blocking schemes.
3) The OL finally had some continuity and new techniques to learn after the Singletary/Nolan Era...this motivates a unit
4) Having the above mentioned QB with the brain of a coordinator helped significantly with pre-snap adjustments and audibles if teams keyed in on where we wanted to go with the ball.

Even though we sort of took the league by storm in Harbaugh's first year, there were hints of who we really were...The 2011 Thanksgiving Thursday Night game was Hint #1.


The Arizona loss was Hint #2...

Hint #3 for me was more subtle because it was during that Monday Night game against Pittsburgh when Aldon Smith blew up. I just remember saying to myself "We should be doing more than this...I've seen some of these plays before"

But with a supreme Defense, this was more than enough for us to make a strong push in the 2011 post-season..........turnovers, our lack of playmakers up to that point, and a few untimely injuries down the stretch was what cost us a chance to beat the Patriots in Super Bowl 46

2012:
After we made the switch at QB, our offensive problems were simply masked by the fact that the league was totally unprepared for Kapernick.
Read Option Mania allowed us to mentally-mess with our opponents before a game started and we had a slight advantage for a while....rode it all the way to the Super Bowl in fact..........until we ran into a team coached by a guy who knows our Head Coach like the back of his hand. Go figure.

You think Terrell Suggs comments of some of our Offensive players being "Fake" was just trash talk? No! He studies...he's an All-Pro. He saw through some of our FAKE schemes in film study and it showed in the way they jumped all over us in the first half.

2013
Due to our own success and the success of some other teams with mobile QBs, the NFL spent the 2013 offseason micro-analyzing our playbook.

Roman was not the inventor of the Pistol, he was learning just like everyone else. That's never a good thing if you want to beat your opponent consistently on offense. You gotta have a dynamic coach who understands his personnel and creates a philosophy/scheme on the fly, based on the cards he's got in his hand.
Modern Football doesn't allow you to bring a Scheme in and find players to fit your Scheme ala Bill Walsh's WCO. You must find a way to make things work with your tools. Roman can't do this and hasn't shown he can do this at even an average rate.

Enter 2013 Training Camp:
We no longer had a veteran QB diagnosing and helping to teach the playbook
Lost the only productive receiver we'd had in a decade

Harbaugh and Roman went Hyper Ultra Conservative all 2013 and you see what happened...couldn't put teams away, couldn't convert, rarely scared other teams.


2014
The writing was on the wall for a while. We are who the NFL thought we were....Offensively at least.