XANDAMERE’S SHOWDOWN SLANT
This is a huge game. The winner takes the NFC West and the overall number 1 seed in the NFC. Yeah, both teams will be going all out here. We have a 47.5 total game here with Seattle favored by 1.5. We also have a couple of critical injury tags with George Kittle and Ricky Pearsall, both listed as questionable by San Francisco, but all the reports are expecting both to play. I’m writing this up as if that’s the case and that they will both be in normal roles, but you could, of course, bet otherwise in your builds. Worth noting is that the Seahawks have largely been winning with their defense. They’ve allowed only two of their last six opponents to even reach the 20-point mark, while Sam Darnold has been more “okay” than “good” since roughly midseason despite a pretty favorable schedule. The 49ers have been on an absolute roll on offense (I think they have something like two or three punts in the entire month of December), but their defense, ravaged by injuries, has been absolutely abysmal. The Titans put up 24 on them, Old Man Rivers and the Colts put up 27, and the Bears put up 38. We’ll talk more about how to consider the offense and defense dynamic between these two teams later on. For now, let’s dig into the positions.
SAN FRANCISCO
I feel like I’ve written up 49ers Showdowns quite a few times this year, so I have to keep writing up CMC, and there’s just not much to say about him. He’s very good. His role is elite. He has five games of 30+ DK points and only a single game under 15.7 points. If you pretended he never handled a single carry, his season receiving stats of 96/890/7 would rank him in the top 15 wide receivers by fantasy scoring….AND he gets carries, too. The matchup sucks, but the role is so damn strong. I do think the massive difference in matchup quality makes the CMC vs. JSN “who’s the best play” discussion an interesting one – and we’ll get into that in a bit – but on paper, CMC is, as always, an elite option. RB2 Brian Robinson has a very modest role in competitive games that is likely to be even more modest in this critical matchup. You can play him as a tourney dart throw, or he could fit in 49ers onslaught builds if you go that direction, as he could potentially play more if the game ends in an (unlikely) blowout.
Showdown Ownership Projections!
Ownership updates automatically
In the passing game, the 49ers will run out Jauan Jennings and Pearsall as their primary wide receivers, with Kendrick Bourne and Demarcus Robinson splitting the WR3 role. Especially with Kittle healthy, San Francisco runs 11 personnel at a low rate. They use a lot of heavy sets with two tight ends or (more often) a fullback, so the first thing we can note here is that Robinson and Bourne are competing for snaps, and I would not play them on a roster together. The second thing to note is that Pearsall led Jennings last week by a wide margin. Pearsall put up a 5/85/0 line on 8 targets, while Jennings went 2/42/1 on 4 targets (annoyingly, if Pearsall had gotten that 38-yard score that Jennings pulled in in the second half, I would have had a solo win in that Showdown…grr). I wrote up that last game and noted Pearsall was a very interesting tourney play because his ceiling was as high or higher than Jennings, and he would be much lower owned, which turned out to be true; it just didn’t matter because of how wildly high scoring that game was. I’m not sure I’d view them the same this time because of the matchup. Seattle has absolutely throttled opposing wide receivers, especially deep stuff on the perimeter, which is where Pearsall makes his bread. Jennings and Pearsall are both primary guys and are thus playable (duh), but I want to be underweight here due to the matchup. Of the two, I have a slight preference for Jennings in this one.
The real star of the passing game show against Seattle, though, has been opposing tight ends. Seattle’s defense overall is great (this isn’t the Bengals we’re talking about here), but they do rank down near the bottom of the league in yards allowed to opposing tight ends, and now they’re facing one of the league’s best. Kittle is going to pull a ton of ownership as this defensive vulnerability isn’t exactly a secret, but he’s my favorite San Francisco pass catcher. We have to assume he’s healthy and playing his full role, which I think he is, but we cannot know completely for sure (want to get really crazy in large field stuff and play Jake Tonges? Have at it, I suppose).
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