49ers’ Fred Warner needed help getting his mind right. The tackles soon followed (paywall)
“Warner used positive self-talk and writings, visualization and breathing techniques, and he and Afremow had nine sessions together over the phone.
“I don’t think I worked with him much that following year because I didn’t want it to become a crutch, either,” Warner said. “I didn’t want to feel like, man, I have to talk to this dude. I had all the answers to the test to begin with. I just needed somebody to kind
of veer me back on the path, right?”
The king of the jungle also keeps an eye on his teammates’ happiness as well as their success on the field.
“I try to keep a good feel of the locker room and the guys that I feel like might need that kind of a push,” he said. “If all of a sudden they’re a little off, I can kind of ask questions to make sure they’re good.
“I can tell them things that helped me in the past, and maybe there is something they can hold on to.”
No veterans did that for Warner when he was a rookie in 2018 because “let’s be honest, athletes weren’t talking much about mental health back then,” he said.”
49ers’ John Lynch opens up about Kyle Shanahan partnership, trade outlook
“”And so, that’s why you’ve got to have a lot of different ideas, if you feel like you need something. And you also have to be able to say, ‘No, I like our team. We’re going to roll with this.’ And next year’s draft is real important, too. That’s the lifeblood of these teams. So, you always want to have enough assets to improve your team via the draft, because that’s the best way.”
49ers’ Renardo Green addresses Kyle Shanahan sideline confrontation, game slowing down
“When you just done played so much ball, been in so many situations, been around so many great minds, and then, think about it, I do play around a whole bunch of great players,” Green said. “You just learn and pick the game up, and from that point on, it’s like, now you’re just processing everything, and it’s just happening—it’s just slow. Everything just happening slow.”
I graded every single DeForest Buckner snap this season. Here’s what he’ll bring (back) to the 49ers. (Paywall)
“I really wanted to get a sense of what Buckner’s plan of attack is. Overwhelmingly, he relies on a stab/swim combo. It can look a little different depending on the scenario, where he sometimes doesn’t need the stab, or he gets attached, reacts, and then pulls out the swim.
His real secondary move is power. His height should make it far trickier to pull off, because he has to lower himself to really get into the chest of offensive linemen. But he’s so crafty, strong, and leverage conscious that he’s extremely effective when he uses it (it’s also a slight alternative to what offensive linemen expect). He’ll occasionally mix in the ole Reggie White hump move, too.
When he wants to split a double team and knows it’s coming, he also tries to get skinny and rip through, but that hasn’t been exceedingly effective in the six reps he tried it out. The occasional cross-chop is fun though….He’s an exceptionally difficult pass rusher to handle and requires double teams on most snaps. If I had a criticism, it’s that stumpier guards like Peter Skoronski and John Simpson gave him a little bit of trouble….
…The interesting thing about watching Buckner wasn’t that he had run game weaknesses. Those were clear, as I show in the video above. But based on the narrative, I would have expected him to be a worse run defender than what I saw.
Is he gettable? Sure. I’ll get into that shortly. But he had some tremendous, singlehanded run stuffs, and generally looked like a positive player in the run game.”
John Lynch on Mike Evans’ Achilles injury: ‘I think the idea is you’ve just got to quiet that thing down’
“Mike’s been working tirelessly.” On KNBR, Lynch said, “He’ll continue to do that. He’s on a great plan, and I think the idea is you’ve just got to quiet that thing down. We dealt with that with Christian [McCaffrey] last year — remember, he had that bilateral. We talked about that a lot, and fortunately, with Mike, it’s just on the one side.”
