Montana-Less 49ers Moving Right Along : Pro football: Young has kept the San Francisco offense on track, but Rams hope to capitalize on a vulnerable pass defense.
Joe Montana will be in street clothes today, and maybe forever, given the vicissitudes of serious elbow injuries to 30-something quarterbacks.
Under normal circumstances, this would make the Rams happy, considering that Montana and the San Francisco 49ers have denied them glory so many times.
The Rams will open divisional play only a game behind the 49ers, searching for a victory with substance after beating two winless teams.
Montana isn’t the 49ers’ quarterback anymore, although the NFC West standings hardly show evidence of that.
After spending most of last season in a funk, waiting for his return and failing to make the playoffs, the 49ers this season have put Montana’s recovery on the back burner, turned the offense over to Steve Young and watched him go.
The 49ers are 3-1, atop the division, and have scored 109 points in four games with Young, who has a Montana-like quarterback rating of 112.9 and has run for 168 yards to boot.
“At the beginning of the season last year, there was an awful lot of waiting to see who would be the leader, waiting to see who was going to be the quarterback, waiting to see this and waiting to see that instead of everyone paying attention to their own jobs,” 49er Coach George Seifert said, referring to Montana’s on-again, off-again comeback last season.
The inactive Montana took swipes at Young, saying he thought Young was hunting for his job. Young looked tense on the field, and the 49ers got off to an uncharacteristic 4-6 start before winning their last six.
Trying to head off those troubles this time, and despite the popularity of Steve Bono, Montana’s protege, Seifert declared Young his starter.
“This year, we’re a little more focused on their own jobs and not so much on everyone else,” Seifert said. “That’s a positive.”
The area in which Young has seemed to help the 49er offense most--and can probably hurt the Rams’ defense most--is on the ground. The 49ers’ average of 154 rushing yards is third best in the league; second-year running back Ricky Watters has 314 yards, second-best in the NFC.
The Rams, meanwhile, have the league’s worst run defense, yielding an average of 158 yards, 5.2 yards per carry.
Young is averaging 8.4 yards rushing and, as Ram coaches point out, the 49ers like to use plays designed to let him get around the linebackers and take off.
But Young isn’t merely a runner. He has completed 67.4% of his passes and thrown six touchdown passes--and only one interception.
Young has also been doing it without receiver John Taylor, who suffered a broken leg two weeks ago and will be sidelined for at least another month, and without much production from Jerry Rice, who has been getting double- and triple-teamed in Taylor’s absence and has only 15 catches for 160 yards and one touchdown.
No Taylor, little Rice, no Montana. But the 49er offense has persevered, largely because of Young.
“If you try and just contain him, keep him in the pocket, then you give him a lot of time to throw the football,” Ram Coach Chuck Knox said of Young. “So you have to mix it up and you hope that when he does scramble, you’ve enough speed on defense that somebody can chase him down.
“There’s no one magic formula for stopping him. Nobody else has done it.”
Even in the Rams’ victories at home over the New England Patriots and New York Jets, the offense produced a total of 30 points. The Rams haven’t scored 20 or more points in a game since November of last year, but figure they have to score closer to 30 to beat the 49ers.
“You know, I’m happy to be starting to play against some NFC teams, get this conference thing under way,” receiver Flipper Anderson said. “San Francisco’s going to be a good challenge for us to see where our team is at.”
If the 49ers have one glaring weakness, Anderson says, it is in their secondary, where they have young players.
The 49ers rank 27th against the pass and have yielded the most first downs through the air, 54, in the NFC.
“We’re going to look forward to getting some things on their defensive backs,” Anderson said. “We’ve had some success against them in the past, and we’re going to try to keep it going.”
Ram Notes
The Rams have lost their two previous road games, to Buffalo and Miami, by a combined score of 66-17. . . . The Rams’ last road victory was on Sept. 8 of last season, over the New York Giants, 19-13, in East Rutherford, N.J. and have lost nine consecutive road games. . . . For the 49ers, Mike Sherrard has taken up some of the slack caused by John Taylor’s absence, getting 15 catches for a team-leading 285 yards and a team-leading 19 yards per catch.
