The Cardinals didn’t have Kyler Murray, DeAndre Hopkins, or A.J. Green for Sunday’s road game against the 49ers, but they didn’t have any problem offensively.
Arizona rolled up 437 yards and led the 49ers 31-7 in the third quarter of what turned out to be a 31-17 win in Santa Clara. Colt McCoy went 22-of-26 for 249 yards and a touchdown, which was a performance that raised questions about whether the 49ers lowered their guard because Murray wasn’t under center for the Cardinals.
Defensive lineman Arik Armstead said “not at all” when asked about that after the game and head coach Kyle Shanahan said the team talked about not allowing that to happen before the game, but acknowledged that the defense was not stout enough on Sunday.
“I would hope not,” Shanahan said, via 49ersWebZone.com. “That’s something I aggressively talked about last night. For those guys to let down on it -- I think it came down to, you guys saw how we tackled out there. We didn’t stop the run and we didn’t stop those screens, which when you’re giving up some explosive screens and all that free yardage, it didn’t matter who was playing quarterback. We made it extremely easy on him.”
Shanahan said he was caught off guard by how the team played given how the week of practice played out and they’ll have to fix what’s wrong before the Rams visit next Monday night.
