San Francisco 49ers: How Frank Gore and Company Can Run on the Chicago Bears

If you happen to live in the Chicago area, you will have witnessed some intense gnashing of teeth recently in the wake of the Chicago Bears’ loss to the Buffalo Bills.  The Chicago Tribune’s Steve Rosenbloom actually called the season over (subscription required) after only one game.

Obviously, that’s a bit of an overstatement, but it still bodes well for the San Francisco 49ers, who take on the Bears in their home opener this Sunday night.  The Bears revamped their defense this offseason, adding Jared Allen, Lamar Houston, Willie Young and Trevor Scott to a defensive line that gave up a league-leading 161.4 yards per game on the ground last season.

How is that revamp going?  Well, it didn’t do spectacularly against Buffalo, which should have Frank Gore and Carlos Hyde licking their chops.

Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press

The Bears did manage to stop any Buffalo rusher from going over 100 yards, which sounds great—until you realize they had three top the 50-yard mark.  C.J. Spiller, Fred Jackson and ex-49er Anthony Dixon led the way, as the Bills ran for 193 yards on 33 carries—an average of 5.8 yards a carry.

The raw stats can be misleading, however, so let’s look a little bit closer at the game itself.

The Bills had two huge runs that inflated their stats significantly—a 47-yard run by Anthony Dixon in the second quarter and Fred Jackson’s 38-yard scamper in overtime to set up the game-winning field goal.

Remove those two runs and the Bills barely top 100 yards in five quarters of play.  Now, you can’t just remove those two runs and pretend they never happened, but they do make the day seem better than it actually was.

The average run for the Bills was 5.8 yards, but the median was only four—useful carries but not absolutely slicing up the opposing defense like the raw numbers show.  That being said, there’s room to attack.

Bills offensive lineman Chris Williams, himself a former Bear, had a fairly harsh critique of the Bears’ offensive front, according to CBS Chicago:

"

We saw they play a pretty predictable front. We knew where they were gonna be at, and they’d let us double team them and rely on linebackers to make plays.

"

The Bears’ new wrinkle for this season was some two-gap looks on their defensive front—this means they were attacking the offensive linemen head-on and guarding the holes on both sides of the linemen, rather than just crashing into one gap.  That means they’re responsible for reading and reacting more than in a one-gap system, and that’s where the 49ers can take advantage.

You can see some of the Bears' trouble with reacting in the following picture of Anthony Dixon's 47-yard run.  Lance Briggs (No. 55) has bit on Manuel's read-option, abandoning his gap in the middle of the field to track down the quarterback.  With the defensive line unable to generate any forward push, that gives Dixon a huge hole to burst through.

Credit: NFL Game Rewind

The Bears had trouble with their gap discipline against Buffalo’s solid rushing attack, and San Francisco has several looks up its sleeve to punish predictable run defenses with poor discipline.

First and foremost, as always, is the read-option.

Matt Bowen breaks this down pretty well in this Chalk Talk video—showing how the 49ers can use the read-option to break contain on the outside and earn big yards on the ground.

You can see EJ Manuel and the Bills using it here for a score against the Bears.  Note how the entire Bears defensive line bites on the handoff and how Jared Allen (No. 69) is unable to turn around to have a chance at stopping Manuel before he walks into the end zone.  The only one who diagnoses the play properly is free safety Chris Conte, and he doesn’t have a chance to catch Manuel before he gets into the end zone.

The 49ers also will attack this poor gap discipline using their more traditional trap and wham plays.

Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press

The idea in both the trap and wham plays is to let a defensive lineman through the initial blocking scheme, only to have a fullback or pulling lineman come back and slam them hard.  Basically, this allows the offensive linemen to quickly release and get to the second level, while the defensive player gets blind-sided by an unexpected block.

This punishes defenses which are too quick to get upfield and abandon their responsibilities—just like the Bears did against the Bills. 

You’re going to see the 49ers release someone like defensive tackle Stephen Paea into the backfield, only to be smashed out of the play by Bruce Miller.  This will free Daniel Kilgore and either Joe Looney or Alex Boone to take the linebackers out of the picture, allowing either Gore or Hyde to get up to full speed and power their way forward.  This could open some huge holes.

San Francisco fans know full well what Gore can do, and they were introduced to Carlos Hyde against the Dallas Cowboys.

The touchdown he scored was almost his least impressive carry.  Hyde had 27 of his 50 yards after contact, according to Pro Football Focus (subscription required), as he bowled through contact in the middle of the line. 

Get him with a full head of steam and he’s going to smash right through the Bears secondary into the end zone.  It’s only been one game, but this combination of Gore and Hyde might be the 49ers’ best running duo since Garrison Hearst and Kevan Barlow in the early 2000s.

Credit: NFL Game Rewind

The Bears know they have a problem, and Jared Allen addressed it in the aftermath of the loss reports Jeff Dickerson of ESPNChicago.com:

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When you give up that many rushing yards, it's embarrassing. What can I say?  It all starts with the run game. I know this league is about sacks and rushing the quarterback, but you do not win unless you stop the run. You don't get chances to rush the quarterback unless you stop the run. 

Obviously, we have to go back and watch the film and figure out where our run fits are, and play our fits. You got to make plays. We have to clean that up. If we stop the run today, it's a totally different game. 

"

If the Bears’ run-game problems are fixable, they need to do that and quickly.  Otherwise, the triple-headed monster of Gore, Hyde and Colin Kaepernick is going to find itself with plenty of room to run on Sunday night.

Bryan Knowles is a featured columnist for Bleacher Report, covering the San Francisco 49ers.  Follow him @BryKno on Twitter.