Rams News: Watching tape on the 49ers

Los Angeles Rams News and Links for 11/11/21

By Blane Dydasco@BlaneDydasco Nov 11, 2021, 8:05am CST

The 7-2 Los Angeles Rams will travel to San Francisco to play the 3-5 49ers on Monday Night Football. The 49ers have won this matchup all of the last four times but the Rams will be looking to end that streak in week ten.

Lets have a look at one of the stand out play designs of the 49ers and Arizona Cardinals matchup in week nine.

This play happens on a third and eleven with the 49ers in possession 24 yards away from the end zone.

San Francisco lines up in a shotgun formation with Deebo Samuel to the right and Brandon Aiyuk and Mohamed Sanu to the left, Aiyuk in the slot.

The Cardinals match in a pre snap single high look and soft coverage up front. On the snap they roll into a cover two zone.

Aiyuk runs fifteen yards upfield and cuts out, Sanu runs an out and up, on the backside Samuel comes under on a crosser.

Aiyuk, on the midfield out route seems to be the primary read and is open once he clears the linebackers and finds the area between linebackers and deep safeties. He breaks out, catches the ball and is immediately tackled by the safety from over top.

The play is a nice design as all three receivers seem to find the soft spots in the cover two with decent route distribution and spacing. However, the play could have been better if not bigger. Aiyuk breaks to the outside and keeps running out of the open area and into a tackler. If Aiyuk was able to read the roll to cover two, anticipate the soft area in between the safeties, maybe he would have sat or hooked up instead of breaking out and set himself up for a bigger run after catch. Even better, if included in the design, he could have read the roll to cover two and broke upfield with a skinny post splitting the safeties, essentially hitting the middle area that the rolling safety vacated and might have had a score instead of a first and ten.

And now for today’s links: