Can anyone name the 49’ers 3rd WR?

This is arguably the best Offensive Scheme in the NFL right now and it is heavily based on a wide zone run scheme with alot of play action. They run alot of 11 and 21 personnel. Their QB is considered to be an above average game manager. Two of the other Divisional Championship teams were heavy run teams with alot of play action. The only one that really wasn’t had a dynamic QB. I am saying all of this because it appears this is exactly what the Steelers are building with Arthur Smith. He may not be exactly like Shanahan but there are alot of similarities. So to answer the question above. Who needs a third WR other than for depth.

 

I don’t follow the 49ers much but I really don’t mind if they tie us for SB titles at 6. I am just so tired of hearing about the KC Chiefs. Plus if the Chiefs win then another dynasty begins. Go Niners and for the love of god clean up your nasty city full of homeless drug addicts.

 

Well their 3rd WR duties are probably just split by Jauan Jennings and Ray Ray McCloud. They have Kittle, Aiyuk, Samuel, and McCaffrey as receiving threats, so they aren't short on options. A slot WR would be more viable if you didn't have a high end receiving threat at the TE position. You definitely need the depth (as losing Samuel turns SF's offense from a lion to a house cat), but you don't necessarily NEED a high end #3. It is just nice to have. Generally you'd want your #3 to be someone on a rookie deal that could replace your #1 or #2 when their contract is up and potentially could be a really awesome player.

Purdy might not be as good as Mahomes/Allen/Burrow, etc. but he is still a very good player. Their team is more in line with the old Ravens team that won it all with Flacco (they have even better playmakers than that team). Build a team with a good QB, playmakers, and a solid defense. Pickett is MILES away from being in the same sentence as Purdy. We can win with the team we have if we add a guy like this (which is why I am pretty high on us going after Cousins).

 

In a perfect world I would love Cousins but it isn’t practical to think we could get him and afford to build out the rest of the Roster. My whole point in referencing SF’s offensive system and the others is that you do not need superstar QB play to have a successful team. Finding a franchise QB is probably the hardest position to fill on a roster. They just don’t come along often. So why not build a system that can thrive without having the need for a superstar QB. Honestly the QB I would love to have is Baker Mayfield. I liked him when he was in Cleveland. I though they made a mistake getting rid of him. He has an edge to him and he is more than capable of being as productive if not more productive than Purdy.

With that being said I really do feel like the system often gets undervalued and the players get overvalued. You see guys go to different places and thrive or do terrible after having success elsewhere. I wouldn’t write KP off so soon. If the system is simplified and he has a few quick reads and the offense is built around the run game ... who knows we may see a different KP. A big part of it however is his confidence. I think his condfidence was severely shaken. Hopefully he can regain some of that.

I do not want the Steelers making any trades for QB’s or brining in any high priced veteran QB’s. You see what that did for Denver. Build up the scheme and the rest of the team and see what you have in KP this year. We are close to building out this Roster especially if we have a draft this year similar to last year.

 

It would take a perfect world situation for Cousins to lead us to a SB and Mayfield is a nail biting turnover machine.

 

Kittle.

 

I think we could make it work theoretically, but we'd certainly be in "win now" mode. You don't necessarily need a superstar QB, but you need someone that can play to a near superstar level for short stretches of games (namely, the playoffs). Purdy may not be the quintessential "superstar", but he will end up being in the top 5 for league MVP... so he is far from "just a guy". I can agree with Mayfield. He would be an excellent fit in Smith's scheme and Mayfield has shown that he can put good stretches of really good play together. He would be great here. Baker's estimated market value is like 16-17 million a season. Cheaper than Cousins for sure, but you're getting a guy that isn't as good as Cousins. So there's the trade off.

The problem I have when it comes to Kenny is that I don't think there is a system that is going to make him look a lot better. There aren't many systems that are tailor-made for QB's that can't read a defense, are inaccurate, and have happy feet in the pocket. His flaws are tough to overcome and hard to hide in any system. We all saw the high number of wide open guys Kenny never even saw because he couldn't get through his reads quickly (and didn't understand the defense well enough pre-snap to know what would likely be open).We all saw him repeatedly spin out and away from ghosts and into sacks/throw-aways instead of hanging in, stepping up, and delivering a ball like NFL caliber signal callers do. According to the advanced passing data Kenny was among the league's worst in the number of off-target throws and was only league average in on-target balls (despite having a laughably low YPA that should have made it very easy to deliver a high percentage of throws on target). None of these things are things we see out of guys that become NFL caliber starters. He's been given more opportunity than his level of play has earned. Lets hope for our sake he corrects this quickly.

We may not NEED to this year, but if we draft well again we are literally a QB away from competing. If we want to compete in the next couple years a big upgrade is needed at the QB position. We're a well-built team. We aren't perfect, but if we grab a C and another good player in the secondary we are primed to compete. Just need a competent QB. We don't have one right now.

 

Pickett has made most of the strides he’s going to make. What you saw last year is about it.

 

49ers have proven top tier TE and Fullback to go with their top tier RB and WR...all proven commodities before Purdy got there.

What other teams could possibly be that stacked where the 3rd WR is irrevelant?

BTW Ray Ray McCloud is on the team as probably the 4th WR....

 

Can you name number of QB’s that improved significantly because of better coaching. Now contrast this with number of qb’s that never improved even with coaching change. Steve Young is the only one that comes to mind, but his improved play had to do a lot with Jerry Rice. Usually it’s the QB that makes a coach look good.

 

No idea and also don't care. Not an NFC guy but I'm tired of Mahomes and Company plus that girl. Once NE tied us with 6 I lost interest in that record so Niners are welcome to join us Sunday.

 

Nobody likes turnovers but honestly a QB that is so dang careful with the ball he cripples the offense isn’t ideal either.

 

I think Mcaffrey and their LT make it work.

 

I am leaning towards your thinking. However you see guys who are just as broken as KP and they get in another system and all of the sudden their natural talent comes out. I am at least holding out hope for that. Either way I want to build a program that is as minimally reliant on star QB play as possible if that is even a thing. SO ramp up the run game, solidify the O line and finish building out the defense and if KP isn’t it then we all know what we need next year. It sucks for guys like Heyward, Watt and Minkah because they aren’t getting any younger but it is the proper way of doing things.

 

I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle of what you are saying and what alot of KP detractors are saying. He definitely has some inefficiencies .... can he overcome them, we shall see. Everyone knows the scheme and play calling certainly didn’t help him last year. Hopefully Arthur Smiths scheme will make things alot easier for him and take the pressure off of him and enable him to reach his full potential. Everyone seems to forget how a bad scheme and coaching can dramatically impact a QB’s play and confidence. Look at how many QB’s switched teams and went from great QB’s to garbage or garbage QBs to good or great QB’s. Coaching matters for sure.

 

He has 6 4th Q comebacks in his career. It tells me that the defense did a hell of a job keeping us in the game for the first 50-55 minutes of the game to give Kenny a chance. I can't take those away from him (since he earned them), but it seems super fluky that a guy who is the worst starting QB in the league for the first 3 quarters of every game he starts in suddenly turns into a competent QB the last 10-12 minutes of the game. You can hope its coaching, but its likely somewhat of a fluke. Part of it is him raising his game in crunch time for sure, but the bar of where his "game" is prior to crunch time is pretty low. You can say they allowed Rudolph the ability to get aggressive, but Rudolph earned that right. Kenny was allowed to get aggressive early in 2023 and he fell on his face. He played great in the preseason, they turned him loose, and he played awful. The literal second they allowed him to turn it loose he started throwing picks again like he did early in his career. Idk if you remember but he threw 4 picks in the first 4 games this year and had a couple pretty easy ones that the DB's dropped (I remember a drop by Marcus Peters against the Raiders that would've been a walk in pick 6). Because of this they reigned him back in and just told him to not lose the game, and when he did he stopped turning it over.

Its not garbage though. He is statistically one of the worst QB's in number of off target throws thrown and only middle of the pack in on target throws despite his egregiously low average depth of target. These are stats taken from his actual play. He's inaccurate, that isn't an opinion. I don't care that he was accurate in a few quarters of play in games that don't matter. I care about what he puts on the field when the game matters, and he's put inaccuracy on tape. His advanced passing data was slightly better in 2022 (he was closer to 24th in bad throw percentage than 30th, but still middle of the pack in on target), but not so much so that it shows this season was a fluke.

As for the reading defenses. That is also something that he has shown he has struggled with. Canada didn't have a complex offense and he fairly consistently missed reads and open players. It certainly doesn't help him that he panics in the pocket with the slightest amount of discomfort, leading him to roll out and cut the field in half. But he would have been MUCH more successful in Canada's offense if he was better at this, but he wasn't.

 

We pay those guys well enough that it shouldn't matter. As for the system, it seems like Smith is heavily invested in the run game and play action so that should make you happy

 

Why? Cousins is every bit the player Matthew Stafford was before going to the Rams. Very similar players in pretty similar situations. I don't see why he couldn't

And yeah Mayfield is prone to the turnover, but he also can throw a lot of yards and a lot of touchdowns. I'd prefer someone throw 28 TD's and 10 picks over a guy who throws 6 TD's and 4 picks every day.

 

It's been shown by many of the QBs breaking down film that the reads he was expected to make were at least half the problem. Kurt Warner and others have said the progressions didn't make any sense with what they were designing the routes to accomplish. That changed after Canada was fired. We saw an uptick in yardage and middle of the field usage even with Kenny, but we only saw him for 1 1/2 games. They were moving the ball well in the cardinals game before he went down.

Mitch just was all over the place when he took over, but when Mason came in, he was hitting the revised concepts much better and they started getting better play calling to get in the endzone. (Helps when you hit double explosive plays for TDs)

I'm not saying Mason isn't a good back-up, but what we saw in the playoff game is what we saw from almost every one of the back-ups QBs that became starters and looked like starters for 3-5 games, then crashed back to earth. There was going to come a point where tape was out there and better defenses played them.

I think we know Kenny isn't becoming a superstar QB. That much is a given, but can he be a solid starter with some excellent games? That's what we need to see from him, the occasional win with him being the guy for a whole game.

 

I loved watching Jauan Jennings play here at UT. He was really fun to watch, a tough dude, and a respected leader for the Vols. Almost cut from the Hines Ward cloth. Obviously he doesn’t get as many looks when you have to feed Deebo, Aiyuk, Kittle, and McCaffrey but he is reliable and can easily handle the load if they needed him to.

 

Jennings is considered an excellent blocker for a WR.

 

Jennings is a free agent WR I would like to see the Steelers pursue.