[Kray007]

If we were remaking the old Clint Eastwood movie,”The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly,” there was a whole lot of ugly, a lot of bad and not enough good.

To start out with the good, Philip Rivers was little short of magnificent. He put the team on his 44 year old back and carried it to 27 points. If not for the ugly on defense, he would’ve been the talk of the town this morning.

Continuing with the good, the Receivers played pretty well. Without much help from a truncated running game and an inability to attack the third level of the 9’ers D, they did a great job of getting open, making plays, and keeping drives alive.

Without Abdullah’s fumble and the interception, the Offense might have run up 40 points.

As always, this year, injuries played an outsized role.

Jonathan Taylor had a pedestrian night, but he was running behind a line with a RT playing Left, a RG playing RT, and journeymen manning Center and RG. The fact that they gave Rivers time to throw, time to cobble together a 27 point performance, was remarkable.

Not sure if I’d rack it up on the the good side of the ledger, but one of the most significant developments to come out of Braden Smith’s injury is that it looks more and more like we don’t need to ante up a big bucks free agent contract to keep him around.

Needless to say, most of the ugly came on D. 48 points…AAARGH. It was like watching Charlie Brown move from Kicker to DE. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t brought Lucy along to play Corner.

It’s cold comfort that the 49’ers point total was padded by an extra possession gifted to them by Abdullah and an unfortunate int return for a TD. Personally, I take little solace in the belief that they might only have lost by 10.

At the end of the day, I cant help plagiarizing and mangling James Carville’s quote…it’s the injuries, stupid. Not only were they starting a couple of refugees from the practice squad at Corner, but Deforest Buckner was far from healthy.

We were told that the pinched nerve had affected Buckner’s strength, and that was on full display. He was a liability against the run and didn’t have the ability to penetrate and disrupt the pocket. It would have been better to stick with someone like Gallimore.

But, it was the injuries at Corner that created problems simply because they constrain and distort what Anarumo can do. If Gardner and Ward had been on the field, we would have seen a lot of man coverage, a lot more blitzing.

Anarumo could have moved more bodies into the box and tried to take away the things that made San Francisco’s Offense hum.

He could have double teamed Kittle on every snap, chucked him as he released, flooded the short zone with defenders.

Of course, it would have been nice to have at least one Linebacker who could cover a 60 year old in a wheelchair.

The bottom line is that the 49’ers had the perfect Offense to attack our D. A technician at Quarterback, an all pro RB going up against a depleted run D, and and a great TE facing a Linebacker corps featuring Larry, Cutly, and Moe.