If you watched the San Francisco 49ers’ 26-23 win over the Los Angeles Rams Thursday night and thought that Mac Jones was cooking, you were absolutely right. But that was due less to Jones himself and more to head coach Kyle Shanahan, who effectively pulled strings inside Jones’s helmet like Remy in Ratatouille. Shanahan put on a clinic in designing and calling an efficient passing game that didn’t ask his backup quarterback to take any risks.
Jones threw for 342 yards and a pair of touchdowns, but his average air yards on passes was just 5.9. That’s an uncommonly bland passing performance for Shanahan’s offense—especially since 2023, when the 49ers entered the Brock Purdy era. Over that span, San Francisco has averaged 8.3 yards per attempt on dropbacks and won 21 games. But only two have come when the offense averaged less than 6 air yards per attempt—one on Thursday, and one against a bad Giants defense in 2023.
Shanahan was able to control the flow of the Rams game by bringing his offense back to its West Coast roots. He ran the kind of quick game and screens that have made viewers and analysts compare quarterbacking under him to playing a video game in “easy mode.” The offense rarely seemed like it was off schedule, in spite of another poor rushing performance by running back Christian McCaffrey and his offensive line (something I’m growing more concerned about every week). And even in obvious passing situations, Jones seemed to have multiple options to get the ball to quickly. His average time to throw on Thursday was just 2.4 seconds, the fourth-fastest time of any quarterback this season—beaten out by two Aaron Rodgers performances and one from Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford, a pair of aging men who are trying desperately to keep pass rushers away.
How can an offense that’s being operated by a backup quarterback look as crisp as the 49ers’ did, especially without support from the run game? Early-down passing, and that’s what Shanahan leaned on to take advantage of the Rams’ zone coverage–heavy defense. Thirty-five of Jones’s 45 dropbacks came on first and second down, which is tied for eighth most in a single game this year, and he had a passer rating of 110.6 on early-down throws. Typically, in a Shanahan offense, several early-down passing plays will come off play-action as the coach tries to take advantage of defenses that sell out to stop the run. That wasn’t the case Thursday, though, as just 21.6 percent of Jones’s early-down dropbacks involved play-action. Jones wasn’t asked to turn his back to Los Angeles’s defense on a play fake—something he has never done particularly well in his pro career. Instead, he was able to quickly dump the ball to McCaffrey or receiver Kendrick Bourne in open space, and as a result, those two combined for 136 yards after the catch.
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The 49ers have tried this dink-and-dunk passing approach in the past—especially in the Jimmy Garoppolo years—but it didn’t typically work. Not against competent defenses, at least, and certainly not against an opponent that’s efficient and imposing as the Rams have been so far this year. But as we saw Thursday night, Shanahan can render any defense helpless when he’s in his bag. No coach seems better prepared to get a viable performance out of a backup in a pinch than Shanahan—whether it’s Jones now, Purdy a couple of years back, or former backup quarterback Nick Mullens a half decade ago. And that’s an invaluable trait given how often his quarterbacks (and key offensive contributors in general) have been banged up in recent years. Jones’s execution made it easy to forget that this offense is missing four of its top five skill players in George Kittle, Brandon Aiyuk, Ricky Pearsall, and Jauan Jennings.
For all the praise I’m giving Shanahan, though, we have to acknowledge that this is an unsustainable way to run a modern offense—especially when you factor in injuries to its key pieces. The 49ers are already without the majority of their playmakers, Purdy’s still out for the foreseeable future after aggravating his turf toe injury at practice, Jones himself is nursing a knee injury, and two of San Francisco’s next three opponents—the Buccaneers and Texans—have very strong defenses.
Frankly, it took some good fortune for the 49ers to survive Thursday’s game—they needed a forced fumble from the defense at the goal line in regulation and a fourth-and-1 stop in overtime to seal the game. Rams head coach Sean McVay did Shanahan the biggest favor of the night when he elected to have Stafford (who had 389 passing yards and three touchdowns on the night) hand the ball off to running back Kyren Williams on that fourth down instead of allowing him to try to convert with his arm. McVay said after the game that he made a “bad call,” but we’ve seen him and his team struggle in these fourth-down situations before, whether because of conservative decisions or poor execution.
The 49ers are now 4-1 and in the driver’s seat of the NFC West, thanks in large part to Shanahan’s flexible approach to the passing game. One of my favorite compliments to pay Shanahan as a play caller is that he operates as the quasi-quarterback of his offense. His passing concepts have answers for most coverages, he’s great at creating the matchups he wants, and he keeps things simple up front so that his quarterback can process information quickly. All he needs is a guy who has quick enough reactions to get the ball out quickly or the courage to stand in the pocket and push it downfield.
Shanahan did a nearly perfect job on Thursday, helping Jones achieve the best passing performance of his NFL career—and making him look even better than the player Shanahan supposedly wanted to take in the top five of the 2021 NFL draft.
