Run Game Coordinator/Offensive Line Chris Foerster Press Conference

Run Game Coordinator/Offensive Line Chris Foerster

Press Conference – November 21, 2024

San Francisco 49ers

The Packers defensive front has four number-one picks on it. When you watch them on film, what stands out about their front four?

“Green Bay’s always done a great job, to me, of prototypical guys. They have a standard, the length of the arms, the cut of the player, the speed, the agility, things like that. That’s what stands out. They all are very well-put together, they’re very well-coached and they all attack you. You can see all the talent in their body. Long arms, play with a high motor, good strength, they’re able to push the pocket, they’re able to get on your edges. They do a lot of good things on the front. They’re really well-coached and they’re a very good, talented group of guys.”

Forgive me if I’m forcing a parallel here, but the last time you went to Green Bay, you weren’t favored. Things in some ways look bleak. This is not a playoff game, circumstances are different, but it’s gloom and doom and the sky is falling. Are there any sort of similarities or things you can draw from?

“Gloom and doom? I’ve never gone there in a gloom and doom game, so I wouldn’t know what that is.”

The media does.

“Okay. It’s gloom and doom. Okay. When you have a good opponent on the road, they have a good record, they’ve won the close games, we haven’t won the close games. We’ve got to get in there and do a great job. We have to play like we haven’t, we have to play like we played when we’ve won. We’ve won games, we’ve done the right things, we’ve played the right things, we’ve stopped when we should, we make the conversions. When we don’t, we don’t. Every season is different. So five-and-five is, obviously we don’t want to be at five-and-five. You can look at the games we’ve lost and say, ‘Could we have won?’ There are a thousand different ways to cut this thing up. The bottom line is, we have five losses and we have five wins and we’re going up to play a tough opponent this week in Green Bay, a team that’s won some close games this year, and a team that is a real challenge for us, obviously. Offensively, whatever they do. Defensively, our challenges is, like we just talked about, they have a really good front, they have a change in defensive philosophy, how they play is somewhat a little bit more similar to how we play, different than what they played in the past. That presents a great challenge. They’re a very talented group. They’ve been taking the ball away. We’ve got to make sure we take care of the football. We’ve got to run the ball with consistency. Anytime you go on the road and have to have games that quote, unquote are must-wins, I’m not sure we’re quite at must wins, but really need to win. You need to win every game. It becomes a challenge. And that’s what the challenge is. The gloom and doom thing kind of threw me off. I’ll get over it here in a minute. I’m being sarcastic. I just, I think it’s so far from gloom, seven games left in the season is like an eternity. It feels like, because it’s Thanksgiving, we’ve been doing this thing forever, and all of a sudden you’re sitting here going, ‘There are seven freaking games left. So much can happen in seven games.’ Right? If you do the math, right, what was our record last year? 12-and-five. There are seven games left. And you’d say, what if it did happen, you’d be like, ‘That’s a weird way to get to 12-and-five,’ and so was last year. [President of football operations/general manager] John Lynch made the comment, last year’s team, it was funny. He was mad we were 12-and-five. We lost that last game to the Rams, kind of played it like a preseason game a little bit, played guys for a little bit and took them out. He goes, ‘I was on a 13-win team that was nowhere near as good as this 12-win team was that we were on last year.’ You know what I’m saying? And so, there are a lot of different ways to cut it up. There are a lot of ways to try to get in this thing. All we’re trying to do is win one game. And after losing last week in a disappointing fashion, it’d be nice just to get back on track again and get a win this week.”

That game, that win that was huge, massive, a playoff victory. What pops into your mind when you think of that game?

“Cold. Literally, I was freezing cold the whole game. What really pops to my mind is just what a team effort it was. A game that we had many opportunities. We drove down the field, all the back and forths in that game. And then that blocked field goal and the blocked punt and how exciting it was to win that game, in that atmosphere. It was actually one of the bucket list games for my family, and my wife who has since passed away, that was a bucket list game for her. And they went there in that game. All my kids were there, they were all up there sitting. They were at the top row of that stadium and you guys know it was freezing cold there, right? At halftime, when we came out at halftime and all of a sudden the snow started falling and it was just, it was a surreal moment. They were all, I’m going to get choked up, they were in tears at what a cool, cool, and then to win the game, are you kidding me? Oh my God, it was the greatest thing in the world. I grew up in Wisconsin, so Lambeau Field has a great mystique and aura to me and to win that game, in that environment, the snow falling, to see how they were, they literally, they were the last people on the stadium. The people came and said, ‘You people have to leave.’ They wanted to take it in for every last second. That’s what that game is, because a playoff game in January in Lambeau and to win it, it has special meaning. Every game is special, but that was, that was a really cool game. So that’s what comes back to me, personally.”

I know the numbers have been pretty good for the run game, but you used the term just a minute ago, the consistency, run the ball consistently. How would you assess where the run game is right now?

“The same place the season is. Like I said, you can look at it as glass half empty or glass half full. It’s like, we have a couple plays in every game where it’s like, if we just see this or if we just block this one guy, and yet that’s why you end up five-and-five, because you don’t see it or you don’t quite block it, and that’s what it’s been. It’s just been that one or two or three plays that are different. Just like at the end of every game, somebody makes one play at the end of one of these games on defense or one play at the end of these games on offense, that’s a whole different game. We convert on this, or we don’t get a holding call here, but we’re getting them right now. And the second you don’t get them, all of a sudden one win becomes two, becomes three, becomes four. But if you keep going in the same cycle where somebody continues to not quite see it, and maybe it’s just the way our camp went, maybe it’s the way the beginning of the season, I don’t know what it is and why we’re playing like this, but we are. And we either get out of that cycle right now and it I see glass half full, because I see when we hit the things that we hit, all of a sudden there are explosive runs, there’s finishing in the fourth quarter on offense with the defense not even needing to go back on the field. All those things can happen with consistency. But whether it’s the runner, whether it’s the blocker, every game it’s three or four things that keep you from being very explosive to not.”

One of the bread and butters of that has been WR Deebo Samuel Sr. in recent years. And even going back to that playoff game, he obviously had the game-clinching run there, setting up the field goal. What has been going on there?

“Same thing, I think [head coach] Kyle [Shanahan] hit it, it’s the same thing. There are not many ops for him. He doesn’t get 10 carries a game, he gets a couple carries, and if you miss one or two, either we are not executing properly, wrong call or he misses it. You take the one that [WR] Jauan [Jennings] got the holding on in the short-yardage play, [T] Trent [Williams] was just a little late getting through, I don’t know if he would’ve got him or not, but if he’d have got the 13 [Seattle Seahawks LB Ernest Jones IV] the middle linebacker, that play turns up. In other years, Trent maybe gets him and Jauan’s block is not even a factor. He cuts up that thing and he’s on the safety, it might be a 25-yard gain. Or he breaks the tackle and it’s even more. Every week, it seems like there’s a play like that. And on those ops, he’s either missed or we’ve missed the opportunity to get him in there.”

How do you feel that RB Christian McCaffrey’s chemistry is in his second game back? He’s only been back for two. Do you feel like he’s Christian?

“It’s getting better every week. Christian, I’m sure he’s self-admitted, he doesn’t feel like he’s quite back in the groove. And I’m not saying he’s not. Like I say every week, it’s very hard for me to talk negatively about Christian. He’s awesome. Every week, that’s why he takes reps. That’s why he needs to be out there. He loves seeing it. He’s a grinder. He has to be out there working it every single day. As he gets that feel, he becomes better and better. That’s what’s encouraging too. I see glass half full, how this thing goes going forward with him.”

Is that a timing thing with Christian?

“It’s vision. It’s more vision. It’s just no matter how many times you do it, it’s like anything else. We talk about how guys have to practice, every sport, you have to practice, you have to go out and practice. And they practice full speed to some degree. Some of the sports that have longer seasons, they don’t practice hard. But the point of it is you don’t hit – how many full speed reps do you get at running certain plays? And even though you’ve seen it in previous years, you’ll get back and groove faster, but you still have to go out and do it. You still have to go out and see it. You still have to get out in live tempo. You still have to get hit and tackled and get up and get back again and see it and the game flows differently. So it’s just a matter of getting a few more looks at it, I think, for him.”

You practiced the combo tackle tight end blocks and climbs to that second level. I saw you guys played OL Jaylon Moore at tight end. He looked pretty good. It seemed like he wasn’t natural for him to climb to the second level. How did Jaylon do as a blocker at tight end?

“He did okay. It’s typical. You think here, we’re going to take this 300-pound guy and put him at tight end and we’re naturally going to become a better blocking team, right? But there are all different nuances to the position, which he doesn’t quite know. He did a serviceable job, at pass pro he did a really good job. In fact, he got to release to the flat one time. He did an excellent job at that as well. So, we’re in good shape.”