5 reasons why 49ers ultimately lost NFC championship to Rams
By Peter Panacy
No. 2: 49ers couldn’t get their run game going vs. Rams
In Week 10, when San Francisco throttled LA by a score of 31-10, a run-first and ball-controlling offense was vital. In Week 18, the 49ers managed to execute an effective-enough run game to overcome a 17-point deficit.
But whatever ground attack head coach Kyle Shanahan tried to engineer in the NFC Championship game simply didn’t work.
At all.
The final stats tell a lot of the story. Los Angeles held the Niners to a mere 50 yards rushing and an average of only 2.5 yards per carry, frequently stacking the box with seven or eight defenders and not allowing running back Elijah Mitchell or wide receiver Deebo Samuel to get to the outside where fewer defenders were present.
And the runs up the middle simply weren’t working at all either.
This led to San Francisco facing far too many 2nd- and 3rd-and-long downs, where it ultimately went 3-of-9.
Coincidentally, the 49ers defense was awful at preventing the same thing from happening on the flip side, as LA went 11-of-18 on third downs.