Defensive Coordinator Nick Sorensen Press Conference

Defensive Coordinator Nick Sorensen

Press Conference – December 27, 2024

San Francisco 49ers

This offense of the Lions, has it changed much since you guys game planned for them last year?

“Yeah, they’re pretty consistent with overall scheme. They obviously do a few different things for each team that they play and they have great talent everywhere. [Detroit Lions offensive coordinator] Ben Johnson’s a really good coordinator. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He knows how to game plan for you and then he’s got his wrinkles that everyone sees and those big highlight plays that are so different and creative. So, it’s a tough task because they’ve got great scheme, great coaching all the way around, top to bottom and really good players on every level.”

You talk about those wrinkles, do you think that’s part of the plan is just to get opposing defenses wasting time during the week trying to figure out all the scenarios?
“I mean, there’s probably some aspect to that, but I think it’s just he sees something and has ideas and is creative with it and just thinks of different ways to get guys involved. I think it’s about the players that he has, but also something that he sees and might be able to expose.”

How much do you have to take into account just the willingness to go for it on fourth down as much as they do? I know last year it worked to your advantage a little bit, but just when you’re game planning, thinking it’s not just going to be three.

“You definitely have to be mindful of it. Really in any team that you play, you’ve always got to understand where you are in the field, what’s the personality of the head coach, the play caller and how they might set themselves up if they’re in that position to go for it? It also depends on what time of the game. With these guys, they have gone for it a lot. They are aggressive. They’ve been very successful and it’s worked for them a lot.”

LB Dee Winters had a career high tackles against the Dolphins. Are you happy with how he’s developed? Can you kind of talk about what he’s done since the beginning of the season when it seemed like he was maybe going real fast and sometimes going beyond plays and things like that?

“With him, it was early on it was he was still young and developing and he had some injuries here and there through camp and early in the season that he’s been dealing with. So, with any player they need reps. He gets better every week. I’m just excited to see how he’s going do these next couple weeks.”

What’s unique about Ben Johnson’s scheme?

“Unique is he’ll change, he’ll tweak little things with who he’s playing, I think, with some of the blocking. But as far as like the outside zone, the players he has and how he uses them it’s just what he does in certain parts of the field. It’s fairly simple as far as they’re consistent in how they do things, but they have enough wrinkles to where they just execute well. So you know that they’re on it, they’re well coached. Like I said, from front to back, starting with the line, really good offensive line, probably the best in the league. And then you pair that with, how the quarterback operates in [Detroit Lions QB Jared] Goff and when they can run it and they can play-action pass they’re really, really tough.”

You guys have gone five straight games without an interception. It’s not a new emphasis, but what can you guys do? Do you study more film to try to find extra ways to get to this possible quarterback?

“With getting the ball, first you’ve got to catch the ones that are thrown to you. If you have ops make them and then if you don’t you’ve got to figure out a way to create them. And a lot of times there’s been so many close calls, whether it’s around the quarterback and just finishing. I think the process and the mindset of the guys is right. It just hasn’t happened. There’s been a few drops, there’s been a few times that we’re really close or the ball has come out, it’s been on the ground or you can see if you really look at it, you can see the ball moving. We had some good punches and rips and strips the last couple weeks. It just hasn’t come out. Or even on some of the contact fumbles that you’ll see and just kind of take for granted when you see those on different games for different people and it just hasn’t quite popped out like that for us. So, with the guys I keep emphasizing taking your shots and keep punching and keep being as pinpoint accurate as you can when you’re doing it.”

CB Renardo Green has somewhat quietly put together a nice season. What would you like to see from him in these next two weeks to kind of propel him into next year?
“Just the improvement and the confidence to keep going up because he is very confident. I love how competitive he was. He had a really good game last week actually in the coverage and the tackling. We believe that’s who he is. And just with anybody, first, let’s start with Detroit and have a really good game, this one.”

What have you learned, if anything, just in the past year? Not that you weren’t a coach before, but you weren’t a coordinator. Just about this job, anything that you learned like ‘I’ll tweak this next year’ or ‘this really worked well?’

“A lot would be the answer. It’s not really one thing. I think you’re always learning no matter what position you’re in, but you think you know going into it and you kind of prepare for it, but I think you have to really be able to roll with the punches and be as flexible as possible and continue learning. I think that’s the most important thing that I’ve learned that I’ve got to keep learning and keep growing and being on top of situations where you might, always picturing personnel stuff because we had so much of it this year. So it kind of happened a few times early in the year and it really helped me moving forward. I think that’s where the special teams side helped too is you always have to kind of be looking at who can go where. And I think we just kept pushing, guys getting reps in different positions more because it happened a lot, whether it was during the week having injuries or in game having injuries and you only have a certain amount of guys up. And I think that was a good growing process for us this year.”

For example, having flexibility as far as, ‘hey, have this guy maybe take a few steps here in practice,’ that type of thing?

“Yeah, which is kind of how we approached it. Even with Renardo coming in, you kind of know like guys have to have that flexibility, but it just happened more often this year, I think. And that was one of many things I learned this year.”

Along those lines, how much of your calls during a game are kind of pre-planned ‘this down and distance, this part of the field we’re going to do this’ as opposed to in the moment what your gut tells you?

“I think going into a game, most of it is pretty much you’ve got your pecking order, how you want to do it. And then you try to think ahead of ‘if they’re doing this, I’m going to go to this.’ There’s not a whole lot of big, huge adjustments. We’re doing it within each drive. It’s not just like halftime, it’s like this one time where you have to do something. If there’s in between drives, we need to do it. We talk about it, handle it on each drive on the sideline. If we don’t, we’ve pre-planned like, ‘hey, if they do this, we’ll go to this, this is the next one in this order.’ So, a lot of that stuff is pre-planned and sometimes you’re like, ‘hey, we’ve got to try something different.’ But for the most part, you’d like to feel like you’ve prepared and pre-planned for a lot of those different adjustments that can happen.”