Agreed with the author. I think some teams (like the Panthers last week) mistakenly believe that as a young QB without great footwork blitzing Kap is the path to success, but it just ain't true. Instead, if you close his passing lanes (many times) rather than checking down he'll still try to force it, leading to incompletions and interceptions. On a disproportionate # of plays the 9ers offense is designed to clear out space for the primary read, often with only one other option as everyone else is in a decoy role (it was the same with Alex Smith, and the same with Luck at Stanford; one of the reasons even a QB as smart as Luck has struggled with adjusting to a more traditional WCO, despite Pep Hamilton's claim that's not what they're doing).
Putting Irvin in the spy role is also a really good strategy, and IMO uses his skill set much better than the coverage role they've been putting him in.
All of this hinges on Kaepernick not climbing the pocket and not going through is progressions while doing so. Fortunately for the 9ers it is in this area where Kaep has shown the most improvement this year ("improvement" is relative, he started low). If he can't do that somewhat consistently I don't think the 9ers have a chance, and of course he'll be trying to do it against the best secondary in the NFL. One of his problems is that he's still pretty mechanical in his progressions, and if he sees single coverage to his primary or on the high of a high/low he's going to go there, regardless of if it's Richard Sherman with good coverage or not (uh-oh).
Basically, if Kap can do stuff like the below consistently the 9ers will be in decent shape to win the game, but if not, it might be another blowout:
from two angles to see what's going on
(both .gifs from thl408 in this thread from the Webzone, which weekly is the best analysis of what's going on with the 9ers on the entire internet, IMO:
http://www.49erswebzone.com/forum/niner ... ches-film/ )
