Kurtenbach: The 49ers’ defense is truly elite. That actually matters in the NFL this season

The 2022 49ers’ blueprint is established: This is a defense-first team.

And for the first time in more than a decade, that might be the right model for winning in the NFL.

Per a league study, after three weeks, NFL scoring was down nearly a touchdown per game — the lowest output since 2010. Anecdotally, Week 4 didn’t do much to change the paradigm.

The cause of the downturn is easy to spot: After years of unfettered passing growth and increasing points, advanced metrics show that offensive success through the air is marginal in 2022.

What’s changed?

Defenses might have finally figured things out.

We’ll see if this sticks, but a quarter of the way through the season, NFL defenses — and especially the Niners — have found success with a combination of using two high safeties more often and blitzing with increasing frequency.

For the Niners, this scheme is something they moved towards in 2019, en route to the Super Bowl. After a strange 2020 season and a tough start to the 2021 campaign, the Niners fully committed to playing zone and more two-high safety looks under then-first-year defensive coordinator DeMeco Ryans. The defense thrived.

The schematics are simple. Classic. Keeping two high safeties — showing Cover 2 or Cover 4 — limits explosive plays, the new lifeblood of the NFL offense thanks to uber-talented quarterbacks like Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen.

With these looks, defenses are giving offenses all the short throws and runs they want. They’re daring offenses to be disciplined and consistently execute.

They don’t seem to want to do it.

Blitzing keeps the quarterback off-balance and can help against the run. And blitzing from a two-high safety look makes it near impossible for quarterbacks to take anything but the short throw.

It’s hard to complete a 40-yard pass with that many players in the defensive backfield and a Nick Bosa or Talanoa Hufanga breathing down your neck.

We saw this Monday night when the 49ers played the Rams. Nothing was happening deep downfield for the Rams’ offense — the Niners had everyone covered, sometimes twice — and LA quarterback Matt Stafford didn’t have time to stand back in the pocket and scan the field, because San Francisco defensive coordinator Ryans blitzed on nearly a third of the Niners’ defensive snaps, bringing linebackers, cornerbacks, and especially strong safety Hufanga into the pass-rush blender. (When Hufanga blitzed, Ryans often rotated nickel back Deommodore Lenoir into a safety role, maintaining two high.)

All Stafford had was dink-and-dunk throws to Cooper Kupp, who was targeted 19 times and averaged fewer than seven yards per target. That’s not an offense; that’s a slow death march to a loss.

By playing two high safeties and having great corners and a better pass rush, the Niners dared the Rams to run the ball (they can’t) and complete 10-plus play drives to score touchdowns (they didn’t).

This is the formula for defensive success in the NFL in 2022, and no team is better equipped to execute it than the 49ers.

The Niners have allowed four touchdowns, total, in four games. And San Francisco’s defense is the highest-rated unit in the NFL per Pro Football Focus — its No. 1 grade is 15 percent better than the No. 2 ranked team.

There is nothing this defense isn’t good at. The Niners are sound, if not exceptional, at every level, and Ryans has the magic touch when it comes to calling plays.

We use the word “elite” a lot in sports. Now it just means “one of the best.”

But this Niners’ defense is actually elite. It has a chance to be generationally good in a generation of the game that is — was? — defined by anything but defense.

And all of this might just matter at the end of the season.

Valuing defense again is a big change. Even the 49ers believed the league had irrevocably changed to be an offense-first operation. And this change might be short-lived — either offenses find a counter, or the league steps in and changes the rules after the season under the guise of improving the television product.

But at 2-2, San Francisco’s defense might just be so good it can buoy this entire team in a wide-open (or perhaps downright bad) NFC.

Being called a “defense-first” team used to be a backhanded compliment. Now it means you’re a Super Bowl contender.

And the Niners have the best defense in the NFL. It’s not even close.