NFL coaches are petty, ruthless thieves.
It’s a shameless, desperate profession, particularly at the highest level.
All of that worked out wonderfully for the 49ers on Thursday (U.S. time) when new defensive coordinator Raheem Morris took the Rams’ special sauce and turned it right back on them.
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Morris didn’t just beat his former boss, Sean McVay. No, he burglarized his house, stole the silverware, and used it to feed him humble pie.
Football analytics hipsters (a group in which I could never be associated) spent the entire offseason writing breathless dissertations about McVay’s “groundbreaking” 13 personnel.
They acted as if trotting out three tight ends was an intellectual breakthrough on par with splitting the atom.
They completely missed the real revolution.
The Rams didn’t break the league in 2025 by bullying people with heavy offensive sets. No, they did it by running dime personnel on nearly a third of their defensive snaps.
That wasn’t just the highest six-defensive-back rate in football; it was an extraterrestrial anomaly.
Around the rest of the league, a third of the league ran dime on fewer than 5 percent of snaps, and two clubs never called it once, per NFL tracking data.
The 49ers only ran the set 16 times, total, last season.
Yes, the Rams made dime cool. They proved six defensive backs could camp in the box, erase open grass, and suffocate modern offenses.
Morris, clearly, took careful notes.
Then he turned the tables on the Rams on Thursday.
When McVay rolled out his much-hyped beef packages, the coaching textbook said to match bulk with bulk — trot out three thick linebackers, chew on your whistle, and play old-school football.
Morris ignored the textbook and chose psychological warfare instead.
He shoved a fistful of cornerbacks onto the grass and dared McVay to do something about it.
McVay and quarterback Matt Stafford froze like they met a kangaroo in the alleyway.
Upton Stout and Jack Jones didn’t just fill space; they bricked up throwing windows before Stafford could hit the fifth step of his drop. Renardo Green played coverage that perfectly blurred the line between sticky and illegal. Deommodore Lenoir slid inside and tackled ball-carriers as if he had always been a linebacker.
Every mismatch-seeking hot route was accounted for.
Every underneath screen was detonated by a defensive back who was simply too fast for an offensive lineman to touch.
McVay’s entire scheme relies on knowing the answers to the test before the first bell rings. But he clearly didn’t see this coming.
The Niners ran eight plays of dime Thursday, per the NFL (12 percent of snaps) — it registered an interception, a big third-down pass breakup from Jones, a third-down stop with a great open-field tackle, and a fourth-down incomplete.
Watching your own proprietary software crash your operating system has to sting for McVay. His pout deepened with every drive.
And watching it happen while you’re in a jet-lagged fever dream, playing an NFL game on a cricket ground in another hemisphere is outright comedy.
The Rams showed up thinking the Niners would fight beef with beef — that he’d use the much-ballyhooed five-man fronts we saw practiced so often this preseason.
Instead, Morris brought six straight razors and went to work.
Will it work against every team? Probably not, but we’ll see.
But what we did learn in Week 1 is this: Morris’ fabled pragmatism was not a false promise.
He’ll toss out anything and everything if he believes the occasion calls for it.
And against arguably the best play-caller in the NFL — the man who sets the trends that the rest of the NFL copies the next year — he was a step ahead all game.
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That’s a great start.
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