The 49ers survived and advanced.
But now the stakes increase and the opponents become markedly tougher.
San Francisco will need to improve across the board.
The Niners defense, which played great on Sunday against Dallas, will have to up its game against Aaron Rodgers. The 49ers offense cannot play like it did in Sunday’s second half for a single moment, lest they be run off the field by the NFC’s No. 1 seed.
But all of those things are easier said than done.
There’s something that the Niners can do to increase their chances of winning on Saturday in Green Bay and beyond that doesn’t require any additional practice or performance.
Kyle Shanahan can stop being so conservative on fourth down.
Sunday was anything but a masterclass from the Niners’ head coach. His risk-averse decisions throughout the game provided a struggling Dallas team multiple chances to win a game that had no business being so close.
Shanahan twice punted on fourth-and-1 in the second half, to let Dallas back into the game — a contest that was, in part, still in question behind Shanahan’s first-half decision to take the points and kick a 40-yard field goal on fourth-and-1 from Dallas’ 22-yard line.
That kind of passiveness will not work as the Niners face better head coaches, better quarterbacks, and better teams moving forward.
It is shocking how Shanahan can never seem to get his game management right. He throws when he should run the ball, runs when he should throw, and the clock never seems to be his friend.
And we can all admit that the goalposts are forever moving when it comes to judging these things. I legitimately feel bad for the guy, who can’t seem to get off the schneid with this. He’s this generation’s Andy Reid in this and so many other ways.
The truth is that it is ultimately player execution that decides games. Yes, you can love a decision to go for it on fourth down all you want, but folks usually second-guess if the offense doesn’t convert.
For instance, when the Niners did go for it on fourth down against the Cowboys on Sunday, they picked up a five-yard false start penalty.
The decision was sound. The execution was anything but.
That’s the way it goes sometimes.
So let’s be really specific about the issue here: Shanahan is too conservative. He has been all season.
The Niners were in the bottom half of the NFL this season when it came to “go rate” — meaning they incorrectly elected to kick on fourth down more than the average team.
On Sunday, Shanahan’s three decisions to kick on fourth-and-1 decreased the Niners’ chances of winning by a cumulative 25 percent, per EDJ Sports’ simulation model.
Decry “analytics” all you want. They’re just stats packaged into more useful ways, but apparently, they’re the boogeyman to the old guard.
So let’s take it one step further and put Shanahan’s decisions in brutish, football terms to remove the stigma of big, scary numbers:
Shanahan’s refusal to put his foot on the throat of an opponent who is down is going to burn him and the Niners, a team where execution comes and goes.
Much like it was indefensible for Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy to kick a field goal to keep it a two-score game, Shanahan’s decision to kick the field goal early in the second quarter to make the game 13-0 was puzzling — particularly with the way the Niners were running the ball.
The Niners can’t “take the points” against the NFL’s high-powered offenses — the kind they’ll see starting Saturday with their divisional round game against Green Bay. Rodgers does not leave such crimes unpunished.
The third-quarter decision to punt on fourth-and-1 from their own 34 can be justified by field position — and it was backed up by the Niners turning Dallas over in the subsequent possession — but it was ultimately another lifeline to a disorganized Cowboys team that needed nine or 10.
But the fourth-quarter call to punt (after two deliberate penalties, of course) with 2:51 remaining at the Dallas 49 yard line in a six-point game is baffling.
It took all of 23 seconds of game time for Dallas — who received the ball with no timeouts — to return to where San Francisco conceded possession.
Instead of winning the game right then and there — killing the Cowboys where they lie — Shanahan opted to take the conservative route with the game on the line.
A conversion would have set up a game-winning field goal attempt or left Dallas with roughly half a minute and no timeouts to go the length of the field, should San Francisco have simply run it three times into the back of their offensive linemen.
Yes, in a vacuum, all of Shanahan’s decisions were individually defensible.
But collectively, Shanahan’s fourth-down decisions on Sunday against the Cowboys (and, indeed, all season long,) showed a coach that refused to exert dominance in moments where such a thing was required.
The requirement goes to a new level this weekend. It’ll take everything for this Niners team to win Saturday and beyond. That includes the head coach not doing things that will actively hurt the team’s chances of winning.
Let’s see if Shanahan is up for the task.
