Through his first nine games for the Seahawks, Jadeveon Clowney was adapting to a new system. Monday night, he unleashed hell on the 49ers.
Once again, McGlinchey is Clowney’s huckleberry, and once again, it’s not a fair fight. This time, he gives the right tackle a little foot-fake to get him off his base and then puts McGlinchey on a trackback to the quarterback. He then strips Garoppolo of the ball — a fumble recovered by defensive tackle Poona Ford (No. 97).
This quarterback hurry and subsequent incompletion comes off a neat trick the Seahawks have liked to do for years — they’ll line two defensive ends in close formation over a tackle and a guard. The idea here is to force a one-on-one against the tackle and to force the guard to have to play like a tackle. It certainly doesn’t work here for the 49ers, as Jefferson takes Tomlinson out, Clowney erases left tackle Joe Staley (No. 74) with a quick push, and the subsequent pressure leads Garoppolo to throw an incompletion (and near-interception) that seemed to be aimed more at linebacker Bobby Wagner (No. 54) than it was for receiver Kendrick Bourne (No. 84).
Of course, Clowney’s splash play of the game was his 10-yard fumble return for a touchdown. But here, Staley actually does a decent job of working Clowney through the arc, and it’s defensive tackle Jarran Reed (no. 91) who gets the work done by overpowering Person and creating the strip-sack. These things tend to happen when a defensive line is working in concert, and it could be said that Seattle’s line was doing so for the first time this season.
This game was the first real distillation of Carroll’s belief that, over time, Clowney could be transformed from an off-ball spinner and outside “endbacker” to a true defensive end. Carroll has great success with Cliff Avril and Michael Bennett in previous years when the Seahawks brought the veterans in and got them aligned with his theories, but he’s never had an end with Clowney’s insane assemblage of physical talent. If this is the way Clowney is going to play the rest of the season, it could reverse Seattle’s dismal defensive trends this season, and an 8-2 team with a lot of close wins could be seen as a legitimate Super Bowl contender.
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