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49ers HC Kyle Shanahan Sizes Up the Vikings Defense

Their defense ranks 21st out of 32 teams in points allowed, which isn't great.
Grant Cohn|
49ers HC Kyle Shanahan Sizes Up the Vikings Defense
49ers HC Kyle Shanahan Sizes Up the Vikings Defense

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San Francisco 49ers

The Browns just wrote the blueprint of how to shut down the 49ers offense. Are the Vikings equipped to follow it?

The Browns have the No. 1 defense in the NFL, while the Vikings don't. Their defense ranks 21st out of 32 teams in points allowed, which isn't great. And their schemes are different, too. The Browns like to rush four defensive linemen and play tight man-to-man coverage, while the Vikings like to blitz.

"They blitz more than anyone in the league," Kyle Shanahan said on Thursday. "You can never just relax and just run a play, because there's always a thousand things that could go wrong just because of the threat of what they do in any situation. They're on you a lot with that. They get you to make mistakes in that way. You look at the two games that they won, it's because they created a turnover with those pressures where they didn't have a guy to block a buy, they didn't have a hot throw, the quarterback fumbles it and they've returned two for touchdowns there in the second half that has gotten them both of their wins. They're a team that challenges you schematically in everything. And when they do that, you have to be on it."

Fortunately for the 49ers, Brock Purdy always is on it. The Giants tried blitzing him into oblivion in Week 3 and he shredded them to pieces. Purdy is far too smart and prepared to fold in the face of a blitz. He has been defeating those since his first extended action last season when Jimmy Garoppolo broke his foot against the Dolphins.

Expect Purdy to make the Vikings defense look terrible on Monday night.

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Grant Cohn
GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.

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