Originally posted by Heroism:
I was just thinking about how many times this team was bailed out by our ferocious pass rush from last year, and it really hit me after today's game. We're a shell of ourselves from last year because of the pass rush or lack thereof. It's incredibly disheartening when our defense gets the opposing offense in an obvious passing situation and knowing the opposing QB is going to have all day if we don't send an extra man or two on passing downs.
Kinlaw - As expected: raw as hell. We're getting almost nothing out of our 3technique in regards to rushing the passer. We all knew Kinlaw would take some time to develop, but the drop off from Defo has been killing us these last few games. Defo wasn't a steady pass rusher on a snap-to-snap basis, but you knew he would eventually land one of those arm overs for a sack almost every other week.
AA - Played well to start the year, but he's just a guy at the moment.
EDGE - we have no edge rushers. Dee Ford is hurt like always, and Bosa, a quintessential game-changer, was lost for the year in week 2. We literally have no edgerush.
49ers have a few nice rotational players in Kevin Givens and Kerry Hyder, who has exceeded our expectations, but these are not guys we should be relying on.

+1 ... quite sad. And it's super clear how important EDGE is... I loved DeFo but even in his best years, we were mediocre to poor at pass defense (2017-2018) without any top EDGE rushers.
Last year we had one elite edge rusher (Bosa) which opened up for production from AA and others --> top 3 defense. And when we had Bosa + Ford together, man..... that was nasty.
This year we have Hyder and nobody else at EDGE with AA not really producing. The dropoff is really clear, now we have a good defense -- boosted by some new additions/wrinkles like Verrett, leveraging Warner in coverage to send more blitzers, etc. But you can tell clearly there's a limited amount that talent can do, especially stopping the pass in obvious passing situations. We need more EDGE...