The San Francisco 49ers are heading into Week 6, where they’ll face the 4-1 Tampa Bay Buccaneers on the road in one of their toughest tests to date. The injury bug still remains an issue for the 49ers,
with 18 players on Wednesday’s injury report to open the week.
But, San Francisco showed last week how resilient it could be without several key starters, making plays at the right moments. One of the biggest in the game was Alfred Collins’s forced fumble on Kyren Williams late in the fourth quarter at the two-yard line with the Rams looking to take the lead.
Collins hammered Williams after splitting the double team, forced the fumble, and came away with a big-time recovery.
“That was probably one of the coolest individual efforts I’ve ever seen in a game of football,” defensive coordinator Robert Saleh acknowledged about the play.
Collins has had an interesting start to his 49ers career. He had a slower start in the offseason, getting up to speed while also dealing with injuries. But, he’s become a key cog defensively, seeing his snaps go up every week.
After playing in only 17.3 percent of the defensive snaps in Week 1, he’s gone to 33.8 percent, 47 percent, 33.8 percent, and now 58.8 percent in Week 5 against the Rams, where he had his best individual game.
He’s starting to show his potential, and Saleh had an interesting comparison to a former 49er player for Collins when describing the forced fumble.
“A cool side note to Alfred is during the evaluation process, we talked about how Alfred gives us something that we haven’t really had since [DeForest] Buckner or [Arik] Armstead,” Saleh said. “He’s just a guy with tremendous length to be able to make those plays where he is just sprawling out and making a play that most D-Linemen in this League can’t make. It showed up there [on the forced fumble]. The amount of strain and individual effort that it took for him to split the double team and a violent punch out, it was probably one of the coolest and most impressive individual efforts I’ve seen from an interior lineman that close to the goal line.”
“So, that clip will be on teach tapes for a very, very, very long time. I could promise that. But you know, Alfred, he did get off to a slow start in training camp, but that young man, he’s made of the right stuff, his day-in and day-out attitude, his work ethic, his strain, all of it. It’s important to him. He loves this game and he’s going to be a problem. He’ll continue to grow and he’s going to be a big, big problem in this League if he keeps [the] same mindset and the trajectory that he’s going on.”
As a whole, the 49ers defensive line hasn’t been getting pressure at a high level, which has led to calls for a trade near the deadline. But, San Francisco’s run defense has improved this season, while relying much more on younger players like Collins, which is a good sign for the future.
