It’s said so often around football that it’s become trite:
Games are won and lost in the trenches.
And while I’m not here to knock the big men, I have a different spin on things, at least when it comes to the defensive side of the ball.
I have a saying that I’ve used so often that it elicits eye rolls from those who talk football with me most. Yet not one has been able to disprove my theory:
And the 49ers’ destiny has changed for the better in recent weeks.
It has been a long, winding, and often frustrating path to find the right two guys to put on the field without needing to hold your breath on every snap. But if the last three weeks are any indication, the search is over.
The combination of Ji’Ayir Brown and Malik Mustapha hasn’t just been competent as of late; they’ve been marvelous.
Meet the Bay’s new Bash Brothers.
In the National Football League, the back end of the defense is usually where dreams go to die. It’s the place where a blown coverage turns a three-point lead into a heartbreaking loss, or where a missed tackle turns a third-and-long into a first down that drains the clock. For the better part of this season, the Niners have been searching for answers back there, shuffling bodies and hoping for chemistry and competency that hadn’t materialized.
But after a few rusty weeks following offseason ACL surgery, Mustapha is looking like his 2024 self again. And Brown, after starting the season on the bench, stepping up as a special teams ace, and then rotating into a sub-package role, has taken the other starting safety spot and has shown positive, incremental growth week after week.
Brown, intensely studious and both self-confident and self-critical, no longer looks like someone who is thinking through four different possibilities before acting on the field. He’s still making smart plays, but he’s doing so decisively.
Defensive coordinator Robert Saleh calls it the difference between “fit ball” and football.
“He’s improving big time with regard to understanding the game and being more of a football player,” Saleh said last week.
And together, they’ve stabilized a defense that had every reason to turn into one of the NFL’s worst units after their incessant run of critical injuries.
Now, let’s sprinkle in the requisite grain of salt here. Fellow cynics would look at the schedule and point out the obvious: it’s easy to be a safety when you’re playing against Bryce Young and Shedeur Sanders, two quarterbacks who cannot challenge you deep. When you have two strong safeties, like Mustapha and Brown, who want to get into the box and thump — two safeties whose knocks are that they’re questionable in deep coverage — you don’t have to worry much about being burned over the top. (You can’t tell me that general manager John Lynch, a Hall of Fame safety and world-class hitter, hasn’t inserted some opinion into the matter of who to play and seems determined to build a secondary in his own image.)
So yes, it is entirely possible that this is just a positive blip, a mirage created by inept opposition.
But what if it isn’t?
What if this pairing is actually the truth? Because when you turn on the tape, you aren’t just seeing guys routinely getting away with bad play because of bad quarterbacks (though that has shown up once or twice). You are seeing violence. You are seeing Brown and Mustapha smack ball carriers with a ferocity that sets a tone for the entire unit — a necessity in the post-Fred Warner world.
More importantly, you are seeing versatility. The foundation of modern defensive scheming is disguise, and for the first time in a long time, the Niners have a duo that appears interchangeable. They are doing an effective enough job in single-high looks. They are locking it down — and crashing down like madmen — in two-high coverage. They are moving pieces on a chessboard that actually fit the squares they are standing on.
It’s not perfect, but it will more than do for the time being.
And the time being should now last well into January.
It’ll still be fair to wonder whether this “two hammers” approach will work against the high-flying offenses of the NFC in the final two weeks of the regular season and the playoffs. The Rams’ loss in Week 10 was hardly a ringing endorsement that playing two safeties whose primary instinct is to come downhill won’t get you torched over the top.
Yet, here we are. The results are such that even the skeptics — myself included — have to at least pause and praise. Brown and Mustapha have stabilized the ship. They have turned a position of volatility into one of confidence, and perhaps even strength.
Just reaching this point of consistency heading into the bye week is massive. In the NFL, you don’t need to be perfect in September or October. But you absolutely need to figure out who you are by December. You can’t be heading into the playoffs questioning who the men that define your defense — the last line of defense in all things — are.
The Niners’ season might be defined by hardship, but they still have a lot of things going for them. And for the first time all year, they might have found their identity on the back end of their defense.
And that could bring big things in the weeks to come, because, as I’ll say one last time: safeties are destiny.