Ok, I'm back in action fully tomorrow night.
A few thoughts on the game.
Last season, Linehan and Co. had trouble with the play calling too, and it took the hand over of duties to Olsen to sort it out. Olsen has the keys this year, but I suspect he and Linehan gamed out that dredfully conservative approach. No downfield throws of note until too late. This offense wasn't built for conservative approaches. As much as I'm glad to see the haphazard pass at all costs strategy gone, I sill expect Bulger to connect with Bruce and Holt and McMichael.
Steven Jackson will get it worked out. No worries there. This team is a relatively young team, and the jitters were obvious.
Pass protection no doubt had Linehan worried, but they've got to find the form they had last season when Pace went down. It's there, keep looking, because this team is going to have to pass to make Jackson more effective. And let's face it, the secondary isn't Carolina's strength, we should have seen way more passes.
SF can't be happy that they barely got by Arizona. Things will settle more in the West next week.
The defense...we'll I'm still on vacation so I won't start thinking about that until tomorrow night.