NFC Notes: 49ers, Trent Williams, Cardinals
Trent Williams
49ers OT Trent Williams recently said he had a difficult time in 2022 playing at his age. HC Kyle Shanahan responded that he thinks time away from the game will be a positive for Williams.
“I didn’t read his words as that’s a big thing for him,” Shanahan said, via ProFootballTalk. “I know Trent loves football. I know it’s very hard at his age, in any situation to do what you do for that long and come up short… I’d be really surprised if Trent wasn’t fired up in a few weeks.”
- Williams was fined $12,731 for his actions that led to an ejection late in the NFC title game against the Eagles. (Tom Pelissero)
49ers
49ers LB Fred Warner assumes that they want to bring in a defensive coordinator who can replicate their current system.
“We’ve drafted guys to play in that scheme,” Warner said, via Eric Branch of the SF Chronicle. “So to completely change the scheme up, we’d have to tear things down and build it back up. So we’re just trying to make it as seamless as possible, I’m assuming.”
49ers DE Nick Bosa doesn’t think his decline in sacks toward the end of last season is alarming and feels there’s more to the game than accumulating stats.
“I think you kind of get comfortable seeing sacks on the stat sheet every week,” Bosa said. “But a lot of the time, the impact of a game, there’s a lot more to it. Sacks are an important stat and a great stat. There’s a lot more to playing football. I didn’t change anything. So I’ll keep doing the same things.”
- 49ers LB Dre Greenlaw was fined $10,430 for unnecessary roughness in last week’s game. (Ian Rapoport)
- During an anonymous poll of players at the Pro Bowl, Greg Auman revealed that most players said they would like to play for 49ers HC Kyle Shanahan over any other coach in the league.
Cardinals
Cardinals S Budda Baker still doesn’t know who his next head coach will be or if DC Vance Joseph will be back with Arizona in 2023. His preference would be for Joseph to be back one way or another but he understands the reality of how things usually work in the NFL.
“My job is to just kinda wait on that and go from there,” he said via NFL Media’s Grant Gordon. “Hopefully our whole defense isn’t going to be taken away, but we know with new head coaches usually they bring in their people.”
Baker thought the Cardinals were poised to build off of a playoff season the year before as they came into the 2022 season. But they never got into a rhythm during camp and Baker said that was exposed in their blowout Week 1 loss to the Chiefs.
“I definitely felt like we were on the right path,” Baker said. “You know in training camp it was definitely startling to not see a lot of the starters practicing and stuff like that. Cause I knew, you know especially with the preseason games none of us played in the preseason, it’s kinda just going through training camp, which was not a lot of people, and then we get to Week 1, it showed who was prepared. I don’t think we were as prepared in the beginning of when it all started than what we could’ve been.”
