Robert Saleh might not have just said the quiet part out loud, but he definitely said a quiet part out loud.
The San Francisco 49ers lead the NFC West with a 3-0 record despite a spate of injuries including pass rusher Nick Bosa, who’s out for the season with a torn ACL. This week, they welcome the 2-1 Jacksonville Jaguars to town.
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Saleh was asked Thursday what he expects to be the biggest challenge against the Jaguars without Bosa, and how the team has been preparing to combat it. After starting his answer by saying Jacksonville had a “young and talented” group, the 49ers’ defensive coordinator paused a couple beats and, well, shifted gears.
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He started talking, unprompted, about the Jaguars’ signal-stealing system under head coach Liam Coen, who was not the only coach mentioned. He also repeatedly stressed its legality.
Liam (Coen) and his staff, a couple of guys coming from Minnesota, they’ve got — legally — a really advanced signal-stealing type system where they always find a way to put themselves in an advantageous situation. They do a great job with it. They formation you, they just try to find any nugget they can, so we’ve got to be great with our signals and we’ve got to be great with our communication to combat some of the tells that we might give on the field. They’re almost elite in that regard, that whole entire tree from Sean (McVay) to Kevin O’Connell to all those guys. They all do it.
While Saleh himself has never coached on the same staff as Coen, McVay or O’Connell, he’s more than familiar with coaching against them. McVay has been the Rams’ head coach since 2017, and Coen and O’Connell both spent years on his staff, squaring off against Saleh’s 49ers defenses multiple times before Saleh took the New York Jets head coaching job in 2021. 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan knows McVay and his tactics intimately, and Saleh also spent the second half of last season with the Green Bay Packers, who lost to O’Connell’s Vikings in December.
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Saleh was later asked who the Jaguars and other teams were stealing the signals from.
I don’t really know, and that’s the ultimate trick. Whether it’s people from the sideline or whether it’s our individual hand signals, whatever nugget they can find, they catch it, and they always happen to find themselves in good situations based on the coverages showed. And there’s nothing illegal about it. I’m not suggesting that. It’s just you can tell that they’ve got a system that’s getting them into a very advantageous position multiple times during the course of a game.
It’s important to remember signal stealing is legal to a certain extent in the NFL, as Saleh repeatedly stressed. Teams are allowed to use TV tape and All-22 film in an attempt to decipher hand signals and other codes, as well as have their own staff positioned in the press box during games to try to break down signals being relayed. Some coaches will tell you it’s bush league, others will tell you it’s gamesmanship, but either way it’s not penalized by the league.
When asked directly if he’d ever experienced it during a game, Saleh garbled out a “no” but then smiled and went in depth.
Were there findings and I was like, ‘Damn, how’d they know to get to that play?’ Yeah. We dealt with it in Minnesota last year. They got us into a couple of situations. You can see it on tape when they’re studying us, like damn, how’d they know how to be in that call at that time? We’ve exprienced it with the Rams a little bit. It’s not an uncommon thing, it’s just this group of people, they’re pretty damn good at it.
So what does Coen himself have to say about this? He was asked about it Friday during Jaguars media availability.
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“Yeah, I’m not gonna speak on that fully right now,” he said. “Have a huge game for us coming up this weekend. Got a great defense that we’ve gotta go attack, and that’s where our whole mindset and mentality is right now.”
Coen also didn’t answer a question about whether or not he was surprised Saleh went there.
That’s OK. All questions will be answered here when the 49ers and Jaguars clash on Sunday. Especially when Coen’s offense faces Saleh’s defense.
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