San Francisco 49ers kicker Robbie Gould is having a great season. Over the course of the past three games, he has made all 15 of his field goal attempts. Gould has quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo to thank for that. Garoppolo has managed to move the 49ers offense down the field enough to give Gould each of his opportunities.
Of course, you could make the argument that the 49ers offense's failure to get into the end zone has also given Gould his opportunities.
On Monday, head coach Kyle Shanahan was asked about the 49ers offense's inability to finish drives by breaking the plane of the end zone.
"I think the penalties have been a big part of it," Shanahan said. "You look at our red zones yesterday, the penalties weren't all of it. I think we had first-and-goal on the 10 at the end of the second quarter. We ran a run play on first down, and we had a couple busts in how we targeted those runs, so we ended up getting zero yards on that, so we had second-and-goal from the 10, had the man-to-man play to [WR Kendrick Bourne] KB on second-and-goal from the 10, corner made a good play, and then we had third-and-goal from the 10 and we didn't get that either.
"I think we've got to be more efficient in what we do. When we don't have a penalty, we've got to get positive yards. You don't want to call a run play on first-and-goal from the 10 and get zero yards. Kind of puts you behind the eight-ball and if you have a lot of third-and-goals from the 10, that's not going to go very well.
"Next time down there I believe we had a good play on first down, but we ended up getting a clipping by [RB Matt] Breida that took us out. We ended up having third-and-goal from the 18, which is pretty not good, so we threw a quick screen, and I thought the guys made a hell of a play, but they took that back with an offensive [pass interference].
"It's been a little bit of both. We've got to get better down there. We've got to execute better. We've got to be more disciplined. We got to the, I thought we did one good job overcoming something. We had fist-and-goal from the seven, I believe, on our first time down there, ran it to the one, had second-and-goal on the one, missed a run-through backer on the backside who got a loss of five yards and we had third-and-goal from the six. Jimmy did a good job going off schedule and hitting [TE Garrett] Celek in the end zone, so we overcame that, but we haven't overcome much else all those other times."