Originally posted by NCommand:yeah, I've stated before - and to make my point I'll briefly summarize - I think Kyle thinks he can get away with smaller OLinemen because of scheme (the outside zone) because he needs more athleticism vs power at the point of attack. The outside zone run requires the Running back to draw the DLine one way or another at the point of attack, and cut/accelerate against that tendency for yardage. So he (in a sense) needs athletic OLinemen to simply screen the DLinemen instead of actually blocking them at the point of attack. You need a certain amount of agility and acceleration vs power with that kind of run game system - so he tends to favor smaller offensive linemen.
Originally posted by Giedi:
Originally posted by NCommand:
Originally posted by 9ers4eva:
Originally posted by NCommand:
LOL. Understatement there. 31st in health over the past 7 years. That said this is the healthiest we've been so don't want to jinx it.
What changed about the scheme this year that has kept them all healthy? Surely with all your in depth research you have the answers.
Well, OL (Williams, Banks, Burford, McKivitz) and RB's (CMC, Mitchell) are still getting hurt. Deebo. Ray-Ray. Kittle. So nothing new. They just haven't had season ending I.R. losses and most have been able to rejoin after a couple weeks. So nothing really other then the longevity.
Agree and I'll just add that in 2020 I think the 49ers had 9 games on astro-turf. It was one of the most injury riddled teams in Kyle's tenure. Right now, I'm looking (for the whole season) at around 3-ish games or so, on astro turf, the rest, including the upcoming Eagle's game is on natural grass.
It's convenient to ignore this though. Ignoring the neglect on the OL is parallel to the same crowd ignoring our outlier injury trends too. #BlindFaith
My point: the problem with smaller OLinemen going against bigger DLinemen is the loads on the tendons, muscles and bones. Structurally the bigger the more it can take the stress, the lesser, the less (whether it be bones, tendons, or muscles) stress it can take. So - basically - smaller OLinemen (all else being equal) will tend to get injured MORE than bigger OLinemen. So the key for Kyle is to have a stock of good OLinemen around to plug and play when one of them gets injured. So when Richburg went down, he didn't have enough OLine depth to shore up the Right Guard and hence Person got dominated by Chris jones. That's why I was so upset about the Camron Latu pick, that should have been a OLine pick, for depth and health reasons.