SANTA CLARA — The 49ers struggle to contain mobile quarterbacks no matter who their defensive coordinator is.
They couldn’t contain Russell Wilson for a decade and now they can’t contain Patrick Mahomes. It seems the 49ers give up at least one back-breaking scramble every time they face a quarterback who can move.
This week, I asked defensive coordinator Nick Sorensen why that is.
“Yeah, that’s tough,” Sorensen said. “They’re all a little bit different. Mahomes has his own style. He can almost go anywhere. Some people, some quarterbacks have a rhythm and tendencies, most of them. You never want to just rush past them. You want to, you’d like to get to the level of the quarterback and then you need to, sometimes, just power rush and go into him. It’s not going to be 100-percent of the time and there are some guys that like to escape high, but he’s got a unique ability. And that 33-yarder, it was classic him pumping down the field, getting the extra yards, skirting the sideline. Could we have been better on that? Yeah, there were little things that we could have done better and he made a heck of a play. That’s Mahomes. I think we were talking about it last week, someone asked me how you simulate it. It’s really hard because it’s kind of something a little bit different every time because he is a ball player and makes plays and he made one there.”
It sounds like the defensive linemen are being greedy and selling out to get sacks and giving up gigantic escape lanes in the process.
It sounds like Sorensen’s defense lacks discipline.
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