Carver Willis Is Missing One Step, And It Is Picking His Position For Him

An anchor step is a small piece of work and none of it is pretty. A rusher comes at your chest with his hands and his weight behind them. Instead of meeting him going forward, you put one foot behind you, turn it out, drop your hips down over it and hold. The back goes concave. For as long as it lasts you stop being an athlete and become furniture.

Carver Willis does not take one.

That reading belongs to John Chapman, who is not in the building and has never said he was. He breaks down San Francisco's film on his own podcast and has coached, by his own accounting on that show, the defensive line, linebackers, offensive line, receivers and defensive backs. On August 18 a subscriber asked him whether an anchor can be taught or whether a man either has one or does not. Chapman said it can be taught. Then he spent several minutes on why nobody should expect it soon.

The 49ers cut to 53 on Sunday, at three o'clock in the afternoon.

Durango#

Willis is 24. He was born in Llano, Texas, on April 20, 2002, grew up in Durango, Colorado, and played for the Durango Demons under David Vogt. He lettered in basketball too.

He went to Kansas State and stayed five years, and they were not a straight line. He played four games as a true freshman in 2020, at left tackle, one of nine true freshmen the Wildcats used that season and the only one of the nine on the offensive line. In 2021 he did not get on the field once. He was a reserve in seven games in 2022, one of them the Sugar Bowl. Then he started the first seven games of 2023 at right tackle, and 11 more at right tackle in 2024, when his teammates voted him a captain.

Washington took him for a sixth season and he started all 10 games at left tackle. San Francisco drafted him in the fourth round, 127th overall.

Six seasons, 45 games, 28 starts. Every one of the 28 was at tackle: 18 at right tackle for Kansas State, 10 at left tackle for Washington. He has never started a football game at guard.

What he told them#

Here is how he sold himself, in his own words at rookie minicamp: "One of my main selling points in this whole process was, 'Hey, I can be a legitimate backup at all five.'"

He had something to point at. The club's own release notes that he took reps at all five offensive line positions at the Senior Bowl and again at Washington's pro day. That is where the other four exist. In an audition and a workout, in front of scouts.

San Francisco drafted a tackle and moved him inside.

The forklift#

What Chapman describes is not effort and it is not want-to. It is a body doing the wrong thing.

Willis bends at the waist rather than at the knees, which leaves his weight out over his feet. A lineman standing that way has lost the argument about leverage before anybody touches him. Interior linemen have a move for exactly this. They get their hands under the shoulder pads and lift. Chapman calls it the forklift, and once a man has been stood up he is not heavy anymore. What is left is reaching and grabbing, which is what a lineman does when the thing he meant to do did not work.

The fix is the part that matters this week, and Chapman was specific about it. Functional strength, hand placement, flexibility and footwork all have to move at once, in a man who got to the NFL without the step after six college seasons. Chapman said not to expect it in two weeks. He said not to expect it in two months either.

Inside#

Here is the part that turns a flaw into a career.

Chapman put a rate on how often each interior lineman is left alone. A center goes one-on-one in pass protection something like three to six times a game. A guard goes one-on-one seven to fifteen times. The difference is help. The center almost always has a guard beside him with a hand free, and a guard often does not.

So a lineman who cannot anchor gets moved inside, because inside is where the problem comes up least often. Willis has already made that move. He came out of college a tackle, the most exposed job on the line, and San Francisco put him at guard. On August 10, the day he cleared the concussion protocol, Marc Adams of 49ers Webzone watched him take consecutive reps at center and at guard, and wrote that C.J. West "beat him cleanly at center, but Willis responded with a strong rep at guard against Osa Odighizuwa."

Chapman thinks Willis ends up a center, and not this year.

Read the sequence in one line and it stops being a question about Sunday. A man sold five positions. One step he does not take is going down that list and crossing them off, from the outside in.

Sunday#

San Francisco named the race itself on Tuesday. Its own account of the last full practice of camp put one position battle still open, at left guard, between Connor Colby and Carver Willis.

Colby is 23, out of Iowa, and the club's own roster page lists him with two years of experience. Willis has not started a game at guard anywhere.

"It's close to being decided, and it needs to be close," Kyle Shanahan said after that practice. "Today is the second-to-last day that we'll get to evaluate. We'll get it on the game."

The game is Thursday, at Las Vegas, and Shanahan does not expect many starters in it. So the last long look San Francisco gets at Willis before it cuts to 53 is one preseason night in Las Vegas, at a position that will ask him, some number of times, to stand still and hold. Chapman's estimate for how long that takes to build was not two weeks and not two months.

The room around the decision is thinner than a two-man race sounds. Dominick Puni, the incumbent right guard, cleared the concussion protocol, reported symptoms again after Tuesday's practice and is likely to go back into it. Robert Jones, the veteran Shanahan still counts in the left guard competition, has a calf and did not practise.

Then the roster is due Sunday at 3:00 p.m., and 11 days after that the 49ers open against the Rams at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

The step itself is still small, and it is still the whole thing. One foot behind you. Turn it out. Sit down into it. Do not move.

Sources: Carver Willis's Kansas State biography, read in full August 26, for the year-by-year college record; the 49ers' draft release, five-things release, roster page and Melbourne schedule announcement, same day. The left guard competition, the Shanahan quotations of August 25 and the practice status of Puni and Jones come from the club's own Day 17 camp recap, published August 25. The anchor, waist-bending, forklift and one-on-one descriptions are John Chapman's, August 18. Marc Adams, 49ers Webzone, August 10. Matt Maiocco, NBC Sports Bay Area, August 25.