Run Game Coordinator/Offensive Line Chris Foerster Press Conference

Run Game Coordinator/Offensive Line Chris Foerster

Press Conference – October 17, 2024

San Francisco 49ers

This week you guys get Kansas City Chiefs DL Chris Jones and you played former Los Angeles Rams DL Aaron Donal, you’ve been in the league a long time. You’ve seen former DL Reggie White and former DL Bruce Smith and all these great players. Where is this guy in the greats of the great at the interior spot? Is this guy at the top of the list?

“He’s not top. He’s in that group. He’s a guy you have to account for in every place. Some way, shape or form if you can. You got to do the best job you can. They have ways to isolate him one-on-one. They put him in all different positions. Their defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo does a great job of putting these guys in different places. This defense has evolved so much and Chris Jones is such an integral piece of it. I think he’s playing his best football. This is probably the best I’ve seen him play, short sample size. I thought he had a great year last year, but he’s starting off having an MVP kind of season. He’s really playing well, run game, pass game, everything he does. There’s a thought behind everything he does. Really a challenging player to play. Everybody has different things. This guy’s a monster. He’s a big guy. And then at the same time, he’s got athleticism. He can move, he’s got quickness, he’s got all the things that it takes to be a dominant defensive lineman, which obviously he is. So, we have our hands full, but we have our hands full every week. Believe me, we have our hands full every week. This one I just keep waking up with 95, 95 and that’s what my every day is like that. So, I’m hoping to get over that dream this weekend.”

Obviously, OL Dominick Puni has played pretty well throughout this season, but how do you think he will kind of respond to this challenge of having to go up against Chris Jones?

“Check with me after the game on Sunday, I’ll let you know. I think he’s going to definitely have his hands full. Puni has done an excellent job for us, but every week it’s a different challenge and every week when the new guys show up, he’s got something else he’s got to work on. And now it’s another guy. The better players now have more of a book on him. They’ve seen four or five, six games on Dom and all of a sudden some things have shown up. So will Chris use that? How many times will they put him over there to get the one-on-ones with them? I know every great rusher, they find a place to put their guy that they think the best matchup is so he can best exploit. Not that Chris Jones and [T] Trent [Williams], it’s a great matchup. It’s fun to watch him, Chris Jones, have a chance to beat Trent. But in the same sense, if you could put him somewhere else, you might want to put him there and strategically they place him in their defense. I have confidence in Dom. I want to see more how Dom reacts as the game goes on. And then next week it follows up. To say that he’s going to go in there and dominate, he’s going to have his hands full. I know he will.”

In the Super Bowl there were a few plays that there were key protection breakdowns. Obviously, this is aside from Jones, it’s a physical front, especially in the middle. How much do you go back to those plays in that film preparing for this week or is that separately?

“Yeah, we prepared. We used every game, started off with the Super Bowl and then the games from the season was my starting point because we kind of prepped for that game last year with all the games previous. So I had all the cut ups from that done. I took the Super Bowl and worked from there. And so obviously everything we did in that game comes under scrutiny and research because we hadn’t played them since ‘22. So we played them then and I go back to ‘19 and watch that Super Bowl as well. I look at anything. I could see if team’s similar to us, the way they attack us. We made mistakes. I told the guys on the sideline; this is my fault. I really didn’t prep them well enough. I could have done a better job, especially the two protections that we messed up with both [OL Aaron] Banks early in the game and then with [OL Spencer Burford] Spence later in the game. We hadn’t prepped that protection for as much as they gave us with that and it kind of come that way. It’d been a protection we added a few years ago and hadn’t quite been completely vetted through and we’ve cleaned it up. But it’s still a challenge with what we do with it. It always has been that this style of protection. So that being said, we chose a time to not play our best game up front. The Chiefs did a great job, all credit to them. They won the game. There’s no looking back, as Trent said earlier, that ship sailed. This is a whole new season, a whole new game, whole new teams. It always is a new year. But at the same sense, we didn’t play our best game. So I hope we can put our best foot forward this week, can play a little bit better game up front and do a good job. They’re great front, great defense, well-coordinated. They present a lot of issues and problems, which they presented to us, and we didn’t pass the test as well as we could have. I’m hoping the guys are a little more prepared.”

It seems like they kind of dial up the blitz even more in the fourth quarter relative to the other three quarters. What kind of challenge is that just in terms of kind of making sure your guys are staying sharp at the end of the game when fatigue might be setting in?

“Yeah, I think every protection we’ve talked about it. We know the strengths and weaknesses. Like I said, that protection, we knew the strengths and weaknesses, but it hadn’t been played out as much. So it has been played out now, there’s other things. That’s my job is to always think ahead. We’re going to call this in the red zone. We’re going to call this on third down. We had one last week, we got a pressure on our quarterback. There was a third-down call that I blame myself. I hadn’t emphasized it enough that [OL] Colton [McKivitz] could have helped [OL] Jake [Brendel] on one, it was a third-and-two pass where the three-technique got up the field and Colton could have helped. And we talked about it. It had never come up. I’ve talked about it ever since I’ve been the line coach here that, ‘hey, when we get this play and this call, it happens to be a wider — this is what you need to do.’ I could have emphasized a little bit more. Those things have to be because it’s those critical times. It’s like I used to joke all the time. We used to have these discussions as coaches. We’d talk and we’d say, ‘yeah, gosh, it might just happen once.’ I’m like, ‘great, you guys all go home and go to bed.’ What if that once is the third-and-three in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl in overtime? It happens that one time we’re like, ‘ah, crap, they got us.’ Wait a minute. You don’t know when that one time’s going to be, so you have make sure you go through it all. Now, same sense, you can’t practice 12 hours a day and you don’t get the reps at everything every week. You just can’t do it. That’s why you hope over time guys have experience. They learn, they listen, they take good notes, and when it comes up in the game, bam, it’s there. And that one last week and others in the past, I blame myself first and foremost. I will say, I could have emphasized it more. In the same sense, you’re a professional football player. I say it once, should you get it? I don’t know. That’s the tradeoff. As a coach, I got to make sure they get it just because they’re a pro football player and get paid, there’s still a lot going through that brain. And they have the physical challenge of that was brought up earlier. I got to block Chris Jones. Okay, coach had all these nice coaching points in a nice, air-conditioned room and watching tape. I can take all the notes and I can talk about it. We have a walkthrough, and [OL] Ben Bartch is playing Chris Jones, great, I got no problems today. But then all of a sudden, it’s live bullets and all of a sudden, I got to block this guy and remember all these coaching points and it’s going a hundred miles an hour. And granted that’s what they get paid to do but it’s not easy. And that’s why it’s my job to alleviate as many of those things as I can to make sure they’re able to succeed.”

Why are play action passes difficult to execute against defenses that are putting six defenders on the line of scrimmage?

“Well, I’ll put it this way, a lot of play action passes you’re selling a run where you’re able to actually help each other, right? So you can come off the ball like a run and there’s people to help and protect you. When all of a sudden you have five or six-man blocks, how aggressive can you really be when all of a sudden if I go after a guy, he just jumps inside or jumps outside, I have to temper what I do a little bit more. So while the ball action may still show how aggressive can I really be? We had one a couple weeks ago we called one that was a play two weeks ago, Arizona, it might have been last week too. I can’t remember the week. It was second and 18. And we called a play, sort of a play action pass kind of play. And I’m always like, ‘hey, at your own risk, bro’ because it’s like second and 18, I’m not sure they’re buying the run. It’s like the three-technique last week that beat Jake up the field that Colton probably could have helped him on. Like I say, my fault, not Colton’s. They’re probably not playing the run on third-and-two or three, even though we’ve run the run, they’re not going to honor it as much on third-and-two to three. Same thing with the play action. So situationally, five or six-line of scrimmage you’re not having help, where so many of our play action passes there’s help inside so you can come off the ball a little bit harder and then when you don’t have the help, you come off the ball a little less. So all of a sudden you take five or six guys not able to come off the ball as hard, it’s harder to sell the runs.”

You guys ran it really well against eight-man fronts this week. That play where RB Isaac Guerendo had the 76-yard run, Puni took two guys out on that play. You were really excited about Guerendo and we saw it this week. What’s the key to run blocking for a guy who’s a little raw, but has great speed?

“Well, it’s like when we had 31 here before I talked about [Miami Dolphins RB] Raheem [Mostert], and obviously he’s not as fast. We’ve talked about this. If you give the guy the space, if you give the guy the crease, he’s going to hit it and he has a chance to really make things happen. The challenge is the same challenge. You’re still trying to create the same amount of space for [RB Jordan Mason] JP, for [RB] Christian [McCaffrey], for everything else. What’s exciting about 31 is he keeps seeing it. I think I told you when we played the Rams and Banks missed a play that you’d have loved to see. It comes out because I think Isaac could have split the safeties and gone a long way. But Banks missed the block, so we didn’t get to see it. This was one where he happened to create a nice scene for the kid and the safety took a bad angle, which sometimes they take bad angles, they’re faster. That’s the exciting thing. When we used to call [Miami Dolphins Head Coach] Mike McDaniel had a term for Raheem. He said he’s the angle assassin, meaning that you think there’s an angle, the proper angle for most safeties to take out a runner is this. But with Raheem, he was the assassin. He would beat those angles because you couldn’t take the same angle with Raheem because he was so fast. Guys with a little more speed, it changes those angles. So those guys are used to fitting a run a certain way and just all of a sudden you can’t. Great story, [President of Football Operations/General Manager] John Lynch, right? He tells the story I might’ve told before. [Former WR] Randy Moss is one of his first games. John, Tampa Two, let’s say they’re supposed to line up at 12 yards deep. I don’t know what their depth was as a safety, but playing Randy, all of a sudden John looked up in the third and fourth quarter and [former CB] Herman Edwards looking at him and saying, ‘Hey, bro you’re 20 yards deep here. Why are you 20 yards deep?’ Well, because Randy, you’d stay at 12 and all of a sudden you have to play the deep pass on Randy, he’s past you. So all of a sudden that changed the whole dynamic of how he played. And he found himself at 20, deeper than he should be. John tells a story better than me, but the same thing with this. So that’s the excitement of playing with a guy like that because boy, when you can get through there, all of a sudden it might be just a little bit different than they’re used to. And that’s that change of pace back.”

Did he really slide or was he caught in the trip?

“I’m saying slide. I saw a change in his gate. I thought he did. Now he said he turned the sideline. Now I didn’t say slide. I said score. My hand’s going like this, ‘score, score, score, score, score.’ I don’t say slide. You can argue that with our analytics department, but I saw the kid’s gate changed. Now maybe the refrigerator jumped on his back and slowed down after 75 yards or so. It looked like he was trying to slide down. Now he says he was too, I’m believing him.”

TE George Kittle told me to ask you, what is ‘God’s play?’

“Okay, well he says it’s power. [Former Head Coach] Marty Schottenheimer in his football life story says it’s God’s play is power. Now I like outside zone. I was a power guy my whole career until I came to work for [former NFL head coach] Mike and [Head Coach] Kyle Shanahan in Washington. We ran a ton of power in with [former FB] Mike Alstott and [former RB] Warrick Dunn and guys like that in Tampa. And power’s a great play. I love power. We still run some power in our offense. He calls it ‘God’s play’. Power and counter are kind of the same thing, but yeah, that’s what he calls it.”

Do you view the Kansas City staff as the elite staff?

“Well, [Kansas City Chiefs Head Coach] Andy’s been doing it for so long, does a great job on offense. I don’t study their offense very much. And I think Andy, their offensive line coach is outstanding. Steve Spagnuolo, I said as an outstanding defense coordinator, one of the best. It’s just evolved through time, how much better. I liken him to like Kyle, what Kyle did when he was with the Texans and what we did with Washington when we did every step of the way to where he is today with our offense. You see them on defense. It’s the same way, he’s evolved. It’s not just the same old defense. It’s evolved and there’s a lot of moving pieces to it. And I think Joe Cullen, their [Kansas City Chiefs] Defensive Line Coach. I think all the D-Line coaches, I respect all the guys we go against, but Joe Cullen is one of the best. I noticed that when he was in Baltimore because it wasn’t just the starters that played well. He had these second-tier guys, they were like, ‘holy cow, this guy’s a stud man.’ He’s doing everything. You actually could go look at the second-tier players that weren’t as talented maybe that you saw the technique he was trying to coach because they did everything exactly right. Well, that’s a coach man. He’s getting his guys to do everything right. I think Joe Cullen and Spags, those are two guys that stand out to me on that side. And then they take the O-line coach with Andy on the other side. I’m not going to crown them. I’m glad to know that was the most important question. The rest of them I’ll discard from here on out. But that one right there, that’s a very, very good staff.”