Carver Willis Was The Best Run Blocker And Nearly The Worst Pass Protector

A preseason score is not information. The men who played in it are.

So this is ten of them from Thursday's 19-13 loss to Tennessee, read two ways: through the grades, and through the film review John Chapman published at 49ers Rush afterward. Chapman coached, he watches the All-22 play by play, and he is not shy. Where he and the numbers agree, that is a floor. Where they disagree is the interesting part, and on two players he takes the model on directly.

Two things to hold onto before any of it. Chapman's first review covered the first half only, which he says repeatedly, while the grades that exist cover the whole game. And a preseason grade sits on a sample measured in dozens of snaps, so treat every ranking below as what one vendor's model made of one short night.

1. Carver Willis, No. 74, was the best run blocker on the field and one of the worst pass protectors#

This is the split that defines the fourth-round rookie's night, and both methods found it.

PFF's grades put Willis first among all 23 49ers charted as run blockers, and near the bottom of the fifteen charted in pass protection. Chapman got there independently: the run game was "A+," the pass protection "so bad." When a model and an ex-coach arrive at the same double-sided verdict from different directions, that is about as settled as a preseason read gets.

It also explains what the club did with him. Willis came off the concussion protocol on August 10 and had been taking second-team left guard reps. On Thursday he played tackle. A man who can move people and cannot yet handle a rusher one on one is a different roster asset than a man who is merely fine at both.

2. The most interesting thing anybody said about the game was an argument with the grade itself#

Chapman's second review contains the sharpest thing on file about the opener, and it is not about a player. It is about method.

He describes a snap where the center and Enrique Cruz Jr. both slid left, a second-level defender came free, and the quarterback got hit. His argument is that the free man was Willis's responsibility under San Francisco's protection rules, and that the grade went somewhere else. His general claim, in his words: "that's kind of the issue of PFF. They don't know everybody's line rules. So wherever the pressure is closest to, they attribute."

That is a real and specific criticism, and it is checkable in shape if not in outcome. PFF's own ledger for that game does not charge Willis with the hit. It charges Isaac Alarcon. So the ledger is consistent with Chapman's description of what the model did. Whether the play was Willis's under this coaching staff's rules is a coaching judgment, and no grades table can settle it.

Keep both halves. A grading model watching from outside cannot know which lineman owned which gap on a given call, so it assigns by what it can see. That is a limitation, not a scandal, and it is the reason a grade is a lens rather than a verdict. It is also the reason a good film review is not redundant with a good model.

3. Robert Jones, No. 65, graded lowest of every 49ers offensive player#

PFF's grades had Jones last among every 49er charted on offense, and last on the line in pass blocking. Chapman's read is blunter than anything a model produces: "not an NFL player." That is his opinion, offered as one, and he is a podcaster rather than a scout in the building.

Two corrections, because both are circulating.

Jones and Connor Colby did not compete head to head on Thursday. The official gamebook has Jones starting at left guard and Colby starting at right guard, in the same lineup, for the same night's work. A quality comparison between them is fair. A framing where one beat the other for a job that night is not, because the job was not on the field.

And the left guard question did not close. It reopened Saturday, when Shanahan said on the record: "There definitely is a battle there. It's open for anybody." Two independent reports had Colby and Willis rotating with the first team. Chapman says Colby is "getting the start," which goes further than the record supports; his preference for Colby is his own and is worth exactly what a preference is worth.

4. Connor Colby, No. 75, graded fifth among 49ers on offense#

The second-year guard out of Iowa took no penalty and was, by the model, the best of the five men who started on the line. Chapman calls him the safest starter at left guard right now.

Colby opened camp taking the first-team left guard reps, moved to the right when Jones was listed as the starter there, and has now been rotating back through the left side. The club has spent three weeks moving him around and has not yet said anything final about where he lands.

And on Sunday the job on the other side of the centre came open too. Dominick Puni, No. 77, entered the NFL's return-to-play protocol after sustaining a concussion on Saturday, and did not practise Sunday (Matt Maiocco, NBC Sports Bay Area, Aug 16; Nick Wagoner, ESPN, Aug 16). The protocol does not issue a timeline. Puni is the incumbent at right guard, which is the spot Colby started in on Thursday, so the interior questions this game raised are now live on both sides of the line with four days until the Chargers.

5. Gracen Halton, No. 93, and the play that does not appear in any statistic#

Chapman on the fourth-round rookie: "I didn't find a negative play."

The example is the value. Halton beat Tennessee's Peter Skoronski and got to Cam Ward, and a penalty on a teammate wiped the sack off the board, so it exists on no stat sheet, in no box score, and in no grade. That is a film review doing the one thing a data pull structurally cannot: telling you about a play the record erased.

Chapman also argues Halton deserves the attention De'Zhaun Stribling is getting. On the numbers he has a case; Halton was among the better defensive grades on the roster that night. He did not practise Sunday, with an ankle (Nick Wagoner, ESPN, Aug 16).

6. Romello Height, No. 94, and a mechanism rather than a score#

PFF's grades put Height among the three lowest-rated 49ers defenders in the game. That is a number, and by itself it teaches nothing.

Chapman supplies the mechanism, and it is the best observation in either review. He says Height's camp one-on-one wins come from predetermined spin moves, which work when there is no second defender and no pocket to preserve, and stop working in a live rush. He adds that Height rushes to ten yards of depth instead of stopping at the quarterback.

That is a coachable, falsifiable, specific claim about why a player who looks good in drills has not looked good in a game. It is worth more than the grade it agrees with, and it is checkable against the next two games.

7. Jordan Watkins, No. 17, and the denominator that ruins a good argument#

Chapman's most vivid passage contrasts Watkins, who he says refuses to block, with Wesley Grimes, No. 18, who he says is physical.

The Watkins half rests on a real sample. He was on the field more than any other 49ers receiver, PFF's grades rate him poorly as a run blocker, and Chapman's eye and the model agree.

The Grimes half does not. Grimes played 13 snaps in the game, and only a small handful of those were run-blocking snaps, against a full night's worth for Watkins. On that sliver, the grades actually rate Grimes lower than Watkins.

So the comparison is rhetoric rather than evidence. The observation about Watkins may well be right; the man used to prove it played too little to prove anything. This is the most common way a preseason argument goes wrong, and it goes wrong the same way whether the evidence is a grade or a pair of eyes.

8. Hayden Rucci, No. 83, and a disagreement worth printing as a disagreement#

Chapman's player of the second half was the tight end, whose blocking he grades "A+."

PFF disagrees, and not narrowly: its grades place Rucci in the bottom half of the 49ers charted as run blockers. Chapman knows and says so: "You look at his PFF grades, I don't think that they did him justice. I don't know how they came up with the grades there."

Neither side gets to be the answer here. A model and an ex-coach watched the same snaps and came away opposed, which happens most often on blocking, where assignment and technique are hard to separate from outcome without knowing the call. It is a flag on Rucci for the next two weeks, not a conclusion about him.

9. Bryson Eason, No. 67, and Darrell Luter Jr., No. 28, who were better than their reputations#

Eason, an undrafted rookie defensive lineman, posted the best defensive grade on the roster that night. Chapman had him first independently, and thinks both he and Luter are underrated.

The context that makes it matter: the corner room thinned out fast. Jack Jones hurt a hand, Nate Hobbs pulled a groin at the joint practice, and the club held tryouts for defensive backs. Luter and Ephesians Prysock, No. 35, went from depth to one injury away from a Sunday role in about a week.

10. Kurtis Rourke, No. 14, and the thing that is not his ribs#

Rourke completed 12 of 14 for 101 yards before he left, and the club's own account is that stadium X-rays showed nothing broken. He was not diagnosed with broken ribs, and no imaging beyond that has been published.

The more useful note is Chapman's, and it is about how he plays rather than how he is hurt. **His diagnosis: *"He's throwing what he sees. He doesn't throw what will be."*** That is the difference between a quarterback who reads a route and one who anticipates it, and Chapman ties it to Rourke holding the ball and taking hits he does not need to take. He offered it before the injury came up, which makes it an observation rather than a retrofit.

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What Thursday actually decided: nothing. The left guard job is open by the head coach's own word, the right guard is in the concussion protocol, the corner room is thinner than it was, and every ranking above sits on one short night against another team's backups.

What it produced is a list of specific things to watch on August 20 at the Chargers. Whether Willis's protection catches up to his run blocking. Whether Height rushes to the quarterback instead of past him. Whether the grade or the ex-coach was right about Rucci. Those are answerable questions, which is more than a preseason score ever is.

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Sources and method. Grades and rankings are PFF's, described as rankings only; this site does not publish subscriber grade values. Film observations and quotations are John Chapman's, from his 49ers Rush reviews of August 15 and 16, cited as his own reporting and opinion. His first review covers the first half only. Starting lineups are from the official gamebook. Passing and rushing lines are from the ESPN box score. Snap counts are as published by Kyle Posey at Niners Nation on August 14. Shanahan's quotation is from his Saturday availability. Sunday's non-participants are as reported by Matt Maiocco (NBC Sports Bay Area) and Nick Wagoner (ESPN) on August 16.