The 49ers are staring at one of their toughest coverage tests of the season, and the answer won’t be a pure shadow job on Jaxon Smith-Njigba.
That’s notable because Smith-Njigba has been a machine through four games, piling up 32 catches for 481 yards and six touchdowns. He’s done it with the quarterback situation changing around him, which only makes the task in front of San Francisco more complicated. The Seahawks know exactly what they have, and they’ve been smart about moving him around to keep the ball flowing his way.
San Francisco has been strong at limiting explosive plays, which is exactly the kind of battle this matchup could turn into. The 49ers will need to keep Smith-Njigba from turning targets into chunk gains, but they won’t handle that by sticking one corner on him everywhere he goes.
That approach has worked at times in the past, especially when Charvarius Ward was on the roster. Deommodore Lenoir has wanted that kind of assignment too. But the 49ers have chosen a different path.
“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.”
Morris pointed to the way modern offenses move their top receivers all over the formation, and Smith-Njigba is a perfect example of why that matters. Seattle gets him involved from different spots, and that makes it harder to keep one defender glued to him snap after snap.
“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.”
So while Lenoir will see plenty of Smith-Njigba, the 49ers are not planning to follow him everywhere. Their job will be more about managing the entire picture, limiting the easy wins, and making Seattle work for every target.
That’s the challenge on Sunday, and it comes on the road in a rivalry game. Smith-Njigba is the biggest problem on the board, and the 49ers have yet to show they’re treating him like a one-man assignment.
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