All 49ers

How the 49ers Should Defend Travis Kelce

It's impossible to stop Kelce with zone coverage.

Grant Cohn

In this story:

The most prolific receivers in playoff history are Jerry Rice and Travis Kelce. Which means the 49ers better have a good plan for defending Kelce in the Super Bowl.

The last time the 49ers faced Kelce was Week 7 of 2022, and in that game he caught 6 passes for 98 yards, and the Chiefs won 44-23. Whatever the 49ers did, it didn't work.

To be fair, DeMeco Ryans was the defensive coordinator for that team, and now the DC is Steve Wilks. He most likely will have a completely different game plan than the one Ryans failed with last season.

Both Ryans and Wilks like to use zone coverage, and Ryans attempted to use it last season against the Chiefs. Big mistake. Kelce eats zone coverage for breakfast. He adjusts his routes so that he finds the holes in the zones, and Mahomes knows where he's going. It's impossible to stop Kelce with zone coverage.

Which means the 49ers have to cover him man to man. And even that's not enough -- they need to double cover. Put a safety and a linebacker on him and force Patrick Mahomes to throw it to someone else.

Because the Chiefs don't have dominant wide receivers. They have Rashee Rice, who's a solid rookie, but he's not as good as Charvarius Ward, who will cover him. The Chiefs also have Marquez Valdes-Scantling, who's a decent deep threat, but he's not as good as Deommodore Lenoir, who will match up with him.

Double covering Kelce is the key to the game for the 49ers. Everything starts with shutting him down.

Published
Grant Cohn
GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.

Home/News