San Francisco 49ers: Running Backs, Not Receivers, Need to Power Passing Game

2013 won’t be a renaissance season for the 49ers receiving position, which means Jim Harbaugh and Greg Roman need to go back to the drawing board to fix the passing game.

I was among the faithful who had hoped the San Francisco air attack would send-off Candlestick in a style befitting a stadium that saw the best run of wideouts in NFL history.

Dwight Clark and Freddie Solomon, Jerry Rice and John Taylor, Terrell Owens and his ego, for two decades pass catchers in red and gold redefined the nature of the NFL receiving position. 

Then T.O. left and the 49ers wideout torch was dropped, kicked and otherwise extinguished by the likes of Dominique Zeigler, Arnaz Battle, and a decrepit Isaac Bruce. 

But it felt like this season the dark days were finally coming to an end. Michael Crabtree had broken out, Anquan Boldin had bolted Baltimore, between returning veterans and promising young players the San Francisco wideout position looked surprisingly stocked. 

That was until Crabtree’s Achilles tendon blew out and the whole thing went sideways. Suddenly the vets (Mario Manningham, Kyle Williams) are recovering too slowly, A.J. Jenkins can’t shake his stone hands and everyone has pulled a hamstring. 

Next thing you know Trent Baalke is pulling guys off the street and you can hear fans muttering things like: “How many concussions does Austin Collie have again?” 

Even if things stop breaking bad at wideout, the 49ers will enter the opener against Green Bay with a series of giant question marks in the passing game.

Fortunately, the answer is already on the roster and it simply requires dusting off the running back receiving game.

It wasn’t long ago that Frank Gore catching passes was the 49ers best offensive weapon. From 2006-2010 Gore averaged 51 catches and 430 yards per season, despite having basically no wideouts to draw defensive attention.

In the two Harbaugh seasons, Gore has 45 catches and 348 yards—combined. Part of that was the effectiveness of the jumbo and two-tight end packages, part of it was the need to keep a RB in to block.

Now Delanie Walker is gone, the O-line is arguably the best in football, and the 49ers have three good RB’s and only one spot in the backfield.

While Gore is probably a little long in the tooth to reprise his role as primary pass-catcher, LaMichael James and Kendall Hunter are perfectly built to fill the scatback receiver mold.

Having Gore plus one, or even both, of those guys on the field together creates the type of mismatches and personnel confusion that drives NFL defenses crazy.

So while the rest of the league spend nights worrying about how to stop the Pistol, Harbaugh and Co. should be figuring out how to turn Hunter into Darren Sproles and James into Percy Harvin.

With Colin Kaepernick’s improved passing touch, footballs will once again be soaring through the Candlestick sky in the stadium’s swan song season, only the guys catching them will be wearing 20’s and not 80’s.