We Need to Talk About Evans: The Niners Win, What’s Next for Philly and Week 6 Winners

Mina Kimes (0:04)

Welcome back to The Mina Kimes Show featuring Lenny. Monday Night Football recap edition. Ben Solak, I texted you at half time and said, well, this game sucks, so we might have to get it. Well, we're gonna get into a lot of other stuff. In addition to Commanders Niners, we're gonna talk about the Eagles and their future a little bit. We're gonna do some winners and losers as always. There's little Bears talk, Rams talk, you can guess which side of the equation those guys are on. But the game actually got good in the second half and went down to the wire. So there is a lot to discuss on both sides. I want to start with the winning team, the San Francisco 49ers. It was a tale of two halves or really a tale of Mike Evans and no Mike Evans for this offense. Oh, my goodness.

And it should be, of course, mentioned, and this was obviously discussed a lot during the broadcast. It wasn't just that they were down Mike Evans, they were down literally every receiver. So it was Brock Purdy with CMC and George Kittle.

But I didn't think it would look like, I guess, okay. So I understand the impact that Mike Evans has had on this offense. I understand how good he's been. I am a Mike Evans fantasy manager, so I'm reaping the benefits of that.

Beat Rex Ryan this week, no big deal. But were you shocked at how much things evaporated when Mike Evans exited the lineup? Because it was so dramatic.

Ben Solak (1:27)

Not too much, simply because they did have a 20 point lead. It was, okay, we have no Debo Samuel, we have no Ricky Pearsall, we have no Joan Shriveling, we have no Christian Kirk. It was quite literally Mike and then our day three draft base that we've seen if we could develop into pump returner guys. It was a one last thread holding the other sweater thing. I also, I thought, Doron Jones came out in the second half and said, okay, enough of that. Purdy had 24 drop backs in the first half, he was pressuring on two of them.

Mina Kimes (1:56)

I don't think any of those were with the four-man rush too. They were like the two times that they like the four-man rush. At one point, I think in the first half or early in the second half, I checked the four-man rush for Washington had zero pressures. Do you know how?

Ben Solak (2:09)

Not great. There's a lot of reasons for that.

Mina Kimes (2:11)

Some of it is Purdy's quick release and extending. Some of it is this Niners offensive line, kind of the unsung hero of this offensive.

He's always playing well. But yeah, Durante-Jose, to your point, turned it up finally in the second half.

Ben Solak (2:23)

First half, we had a 29% blitz rate. Second half, we had a 70% blitz rate. Now, Purdy only had 10 drop backs in the second half. They're sitting on a lead. So probably those numbers wouldn't have been so crazy. But half one felt like the Dan Quinn defensive game plan that Kyle Shanahan has always eviscerated for his entire life. And then half two felt like the Durante-Jones, we're gonna throw a lot of stuff at the wall here. Which, how much would you have been able to do that if Mike were still playing? And you're trying to play these zone blitzes with only six guys, five guys, these fire zones, and Mike Evans just in the middle of the field catching everything low, high, sacrificing his body.

You know, it was a constellation of a few stars that led to the 49ers having such a good first half and such a bad second half, but there's no doubt, you and I have both been from week one, been like, man, Mike Evans is going to have a much bigger impact on this passing game in terms of the middle of the field stuff and the way he's got to catch radius for the intermediate stuff. It's gonna have a much bigger impact on this offense. It's just like, oh, cool red zone stuff for the tall receiver, nice goal line save. And so if they're without him for any period of time off the Achilles injury, you have to figure out what does your field stretching look like, what do your middle of field targets look like? Because Christian Kirk, Du Bo Samuels, even if they come back, you don't really want them to be the guys taking in those targets.

Mina Kimes (3:34)

Yeah, I think, first of all, I should have said this. So Mike Evans, injury wise, as far as what we know at the moment, and Kyle Shanahan said this after the game, you and I were just discussing this, it's Achilles tendinitis. It is not, it was a ruptured Achilles, it would have been obviously season over, all that. Something that they're gonna manage. They have the bye week and the next week they have Atlanta and then they have the bye week after that. So one would assume they would probably hold him at least to the bye week. I would err on the side of caution guys, Niners, because this is a Super Bowl caliber team, but I don't think, I don't want to say like definitively this team doesn't want the Super Bowl without Mike Evans, but like, yeah, you need Mike Evans. So I do feel like you want to be fairly conservative in terms of managing him and his return from injury, especially if this is the thing that he risks to be aggravating.