The San Francisco 49ers have quite the challenge ahead of them this week, as they’ll have to find a way to cover Seattle Seahawks star receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba, who is off to a torrid pace this season with 32 catches for 481 yards and six touchdowns through four games.
Regardless of quarterback, Smith-Njigba has produced, and the 49ers will have to find a way to mitigate the defense. Interestingly, they’ve been among the league’s best though at limiting explosives, which is exactly what the Seahawks will try to accomplish when funneling passes to their star receiver.
In years past, when Charvarius Ward was on the team, he could be a corner that the 49ers used to shadow elite outside receivers. Deommodore Lenoir has asked for that assignment as well. But San Francisco has elected not to do so.
Why has that been the case, and why will that likely continue on Sunday?
“There’s always things you can do and that’s always something that’s definitely within the system. But, those guys nowadays are a little bit different,” defensive coordinator Raheem Morris said when asked on Thursday. “Back in the day when you shadowed somebody, you moved, the other people didn’t move. That was back when Marvin Harrison played on one side and Reggie Wayne played on one side and they just sat there. But as you see in today’s game, there’s a bunch of different things that happen, moving parts. People move, they move inside, they move outside, they move into the backfield, particularly these guys and how they game plan. That’s not always the best thing for the team at times.
“[Lenoir] will be matched up with [Smith-Njigba] a bunch. He will match up a little bit. They cannot stay away from each other, but we won’t do necessarily the shadow thing where you follow him inside, you follow him outside. There’s things we have to do, how we play our game, that won’t be able to pinpoint that all the time, but there will definitely be moments that they’ll get a chance to get together. I don’t know if that’s a nice answer of saying no, but it’s just one of those things of it’s just not the same as it used to be.”
One of Smith-Njigba’s biggest assets is the way he wins regardless of placement on the field, and the Seahawks do a good job drawing him targets by aligning him all over the place. That’s a key reason why the 49ers can’t regularly assign a corner to shadow.
“It’s a bunch of different things [why shadowing isn’t ideal],” Morris continued. “You have these corners, whether it be Patrick Surtain or whether it was Jalen Ramsey or whether it’s DMo. Those receivers are all over the place. As you see our guys moving around all over the place, there’s not just a stationary X anymore, a stationary Z. It just doesn’t work that way. There’s definitely times you can. There’s definitely got-to-have-it moments you can match those things up. It’s definitely dictated by the call at times like some of those things give things away. These quarterbacks nowadays are too smart to just go out there and determine things and dictate things before the snap. You want to be able to sort it out a little bit as they’re taking the snap, taking their drop, going through their process, if that makes sense.”
The 49ers will have to devise a gameplan to limit the star wideout’s targets, and they’ve done a great job of limiting explosives so far. But Smith-Njigba will be their biggest challenge yet, and the 49ers will also be on the road in a big rivalry game on Sunday.