Kyle Shanahan wanted his team to run the ball on Sunday against the Rams. Sean McVay wanted his team the run the ball on Sunday against the 49ers. One team did it a lot more than the other, and that team won.
Then, after the game, Shanahan, whose 49ers ran it 37 times to the Rams’ 19, said his plan going into it was precisely to tally up the most running attempts. Easy, really!
“Our goal was to get more runs than the other team,” Shanahan said of the 49ers’ 24-16 victory. “I know both teams were trying to run the ball. The whole team, for us to get 37 runs there when you’re not just killing them with run average says a lot about how everybody played.”
Shanahan has said similar things in the recent past, mostly about a relatively magic number of running plays: He wants his team to get 30 or more. He said exactly that after the 49ers pummeled the Vikings in the NFC divisional-round playoff last January, when they ran it…
