Detroit Lions quarterback Jared Goff certainly has familiarity playing against the San Francisco 49ers.
After spending the first five seasons of his career with the Los Angeles Rams, Goff has spent numerous hours preparing against the challenging defensive scheme of former 49ers defensive coordinator Robert Saleh.
This past offseason, Saleh was hired by the New York Jets and DeMeco Ryans was promoted to defensive coordinator, after spending the past three seasons as the 49ers inside linebackers coach.
“There will be some of the similar scheme things that we’ve done in the past where you will see some similarities there, but you will see some wrinkles. You will see some wrinkles, you will see my brand of football on it," Ryans told reporters when he was hired. "Like I talked about earlier, I want to be known as an attacking defensive line. Our D-Line is going to attack. Our linebackers and secondary, they’re going to play with base fundamentals. We’re going to play off our defensive line. We’re going to let our D-Line just get off the ball and attack, and we’re going to clean up things behind them, but we will be a more, I feel like aggressive, attacking defense.”
For Goff, he experienced early success playing against a divisional rival, as he completed 22-of-28 passes for 292 yards and three touchdowns, leading the Rams to a 41–39 win over the 49ers in Week 3 of his second season on Thursday Night Football.
Despite the challenges of preparing for obvious wrinkles that will be new from the 49ers defense, Goff and Co. are focusing on executing the aspects of the offense they can rely upon, like running the football.
"It's always different. You got to think that some of the principles that they've been doing for the years they have been successful will remain," Goff expressed Wednesday prior to practice. "At the time, there will be some wrinkles with a new defensive coordinator that they want to do."
"You can overthink it. You do your stuff," Goff commented further. "You do what you do well and roll out there on Sunday what you do well, and then throughout the game make adjustments as things go by."
Head coach Dan Campbell expressed on Monday how he is preparing for wrinkles that 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan could bring to the table in the season opener.
“I think they are as good as anybody with some of this downhill run, but then they’ll stretch, stretch, stretch, and then they’ll stretch and bring misdirection, whether it’s with toss or some of the other things they do. Then on top of all of that, they build their play-action pass game, their run-action pass game off of all of the same stuff. It’s easy to say, if you can stop the run game, then it’s going to make your life a lot easier," Campbell said. "It’ll make it a lot easier, but that’s easier said than done. These guys on defense, our guys, they’re going to have to be very disciplined with what their keys are and what we’re asking them to do because theses guys will get on you, they will, and then if you let them get some explosive runs on you, we’re going to be in trouble.”
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