SANTA CLARA — The name “Shanahan” in the NFL means the outside zone blocking scheme.
It’s the family business that 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan inherited from his dad, Super Bowl-winning coach Mike Shanahan. It’s that synchronized ballet of an offensive line firing off the ball in unison, moving left or right, attacking space first and defenders second.
This scheme is the reason roughly half the coaches in this league have jobs.
And it’s supposed to be art.
But for the first six weeks of this 49ers’ season, that art has looked more like a toddler’s finger-painting project.
San Francisco was last in the NFL in yards per carry, despite having the best left tackle in football and a running back who was an MVP candidate less than two years ago.
It was all terribly unbecoming, and it was threatening to torpedo a 49ers season that started with such promise.
So what did the younger Shanahan, in front of the entire world on a standalone night game, do Sunday against the Falcons? How did the offensive genius finally figure out how to run the ball?
By not running his offense.
The Niners stopped being dancers and became bouncers against Atlanta.
Forget finesse. Forget angles. This was pure, unadulterated power.
It was simple. It was brutal. It was opposite day for the Niners.
And it worked. Sunday was the best the Niners have looked running the football all season. San Francisco ran for 174 yards against the Falcons, sparking a 20-10 win that might have changed the course of the Niners’ season.
For most folks watching at home, the change was imperceptible. But for anyone who has ever put a hand in the dirt, it was jarring.
It was like watching Adam Sandler, the king of slapstick, suddenly show up in a serious drama.
But there are some serious chops there.
The gap scheme isn’t about stretching a defense; it’s about caving in its face. You pull a guard, you “trap” a tackle, and you tell your running back to follow the big man and run through whatever’s left in his wake.
It was a joy to watch.
“It was a joy to play,” left tackle Trent Williams told me.
The star of the performance was running back Christian McCaffrey, who ran for 60 yards more than his previous season-high with a 129-yard, two-touchdown performance. He added a team-high 72 yards in the pass game.
Two hundred and one yards will earn you plenty of accommodation.
But the highest praise he received was that he, once again, looked like Christian McCaffrey.
“He reads everything perfectly,” Falcons linebacker Kaden Elliss said of the Niners’ running back. “He’s so precise… He got the best of us today.”
But he was hardly alone in deserving praise. Let’s give some love to the guys who cleared the lanes for McCaffrey to deliver a vintage performance.
Not just Shanahan, the playcaller, but fullback Kyle Juszczyk, who had his best game of the season by running around the backfield like he was peak Tyreek Hill.
The move was called “dash motion,” and Juszczyk said it was done to help him have a head of speed as a lead blocker for the gap blocking scheme.
This was some honest-to-god fullbacking, folks. Old school stuff. And compared to what Juszczyk usually does, he said it was “night and day.”
“I think we ran power (the definitive gap-scheme play) seven or eight times, and we ran counter twice, and then we ran slice, which is the same as counter for me,” Juszczyk said. “It’s so much different.”
“I’m going to have a few more bruises tomorrow, but when you win, the soreness, you appreciate it.”
And it wasn’t just Juszczyk out in space, making plays. The Niners on those seven or eight power plays were pulling right guard Dominick Puni.
Puni called it “running transportation.”
“We were just trying to find a way from mumbling everything up in the middle,” he said.
And they did.
But Puni’s outstanding “transportation” service was no small achievement, considering he has fought a knee injury all season and wasn’t able to practice fully until the Niners’ Friday walkthrough this week.
Puni convinced the Niners coaches he could play by arguing “adrenaline would take over.”
That adrenaline took over the game.
“Tomorrow, maybe tonight, it won’t be pretty, but I’ll do anything for these guys to win, man,” Puni told me. “It makes it all worth it.”
“That’s what an offensive lineman is — tough, physical,” right tackle Colton McKivitz said of Puni. “He’s fighting through something that some guys will play, some guys won’t… [Him playing] speaks to who he is.”
But is this who the Niners are moving forward? Is the Shanahan offense now a gap-scheme team?
The opposing defense will dictate that — Atlanta’s fire-off-the-line defense was asking to be hit with the gap scheme — but the Niners can now win with multiple run-game looks.
That said, there was energy for the gap scheme to be the default moving forward.
“That’s us. That’s how we should run the ball,” Puni said. “It did feel like a coming-out party.”