NFL Analysis
8/7/24
6 min read
How Important Is Brandon Aiyuk To The San Francisco 49ers?
editor's note: This story was published prior to Aiyuk signing a four-year, $120 million deal.
Kyle Shanahan excels at maximizing an offense's talent. The scheme can create openings and mismatches on its own, lessening the burden on the individual players. What has made this most recent version of the offense so dangerous is that the individual talent is exceptional at nearly every position.
Christian McCaffrey is a singular player. Deebo Samuel is a singular player. George Kittle is a singular player.
Brandon Aiyuk might not be a singular player in the same way as his teammates, but that doesn’t make his role any less impactful. It might be more. The way he wins opens up the offense for everyone else.
Picture a Shanahan offense, and the impact of an X-receiver probably isn’t at the top of the list. Shanahan has built plenty of efficient offenses without that type of player. He’s also spent plenty of years with quarterbacks incapable of fully taking advantage of a dominant outside receiver.
What Makes Aiyuk Special?
Outside of Julio Jones in Atlanta, Shanahan hasn’t had that type of player. He also hasn’t gone out of his way to acquire one. Even when Aiyuk was drafted, the receiver spent early years in the Shanahan doghouse.
As a rookie, Aiyuk only ran a route on 70.1 percent of the team’s dropbacks, per TruMedia, even as Samuel and Kittle each missed a half-season worth of games. Aiyuk’s 17.3 percent target share led the team, but he didn’t see at least 10 targets in a game until Week 8.
His role only slightly increased in 2021, but his breakout came in 2022 when he had his first 1,000-yard season while running a route on 95 percent of the team’s dropbacks. His 2023 was even better.
Aiyuk was seventh in the league with 1,342 receiving yards while getting under a quarter of the targets (22.3 percent) on a team with one of the league’s lowest pass rates. His 3.06 yards per route run was third to Tyreek Hill and Nico Collins. Only Collins and Justin Jefferson ran fewer routes among 1,000-yard receivers last season.
A receiver like Aiyuk — and specifically in this situation, Aiyuk himself — raises the ceiling for what a Shanahan passing offense can be. Aiyuk has a natural ability to separate and get open, which allows him to win on all three levels of the field. Having that type of player is a cheat code in an offense that already knows most of the answers.
Aiyuk’s role is also not easily duplicated. It’s not just the downfield nature of the route tree but it’s also how successful he is on those routes. Here is the EPA per play and the route frequency for Aiyuk, Deebo Samuel, and George Kittle in 2023.
Aiyuk maximizes Purdy
There’s also a sense that having Aiyuk on the field allows Brock Purdy to actually play quarterback and not be the limited Shanahan creation we’ve seen from other passers.
During the past year and a half, Purdy had 84 dropbacks without Aiyuk on the field. Without Aiyuk, Purdy still averaged 10 yards per attempt, but his average depth of target dropped to 6.1. 32 percent of his passes went behind the line of scrimmage, while 65 percent of his passing yards came after the catch.
On those plays, Purdy averaged 0.03 EPA per play with a 46.7 percent success rate. With Aiyuk, Purdy averaged 0.30 EPA per play with a 52.4 percent success rate.
We won’t draw sweeping conclusions from that small sample, but it’s worth noting how the offense shifted. It’s the difference between Purdy looking like a quarterback solely relying on those around him to create and a quarterback who elevates this offense's ceiling.
Aiyuk is a big part of why Purdy has succeeded in the offense in ways that other quarterbacks have struggled. Purdy’s differentiators of throwing outside the numbers, handling pressure, and extending plays are directly related to Aiyuk’s presence on the field.
When pressured since becoming the starter, Purdy targeted McCaffrey most often. But even with a player like McCaffrey, dump-offs to running backs can be wildly inefficient, though still better than taking a sack, which was the case here.
Aiyuk was the most efficient target while also being the deepest down the field. There was still production on Kittle and Samuel targets, but nothing combined with the success and explosiveness of the plays that involved Aiyuk.
This was the case more often in extended plays. On dropbacks that lasted at least three seconds, Aiyuk led the 49ers in targets and yards.
In 2023 alone, Aiyuk was second in yards behind Amari Cooper and fourth in target share behind Calvin Ridley, Stefon Diggs, and DeAndre Hopkins. Aiyuk’s 3.94 yards per route run in this situation was the best in the league.
Aiyuk certainly gets help from the offensive system, but his route-running and separation could work anywhere. That’s not to say that’s not the case for other players in this offense. But with the likes of McCaffrey, Kittle, and Samuel, the offense becomes a force multiplier for their skills. It’s arguable that Aiyuk, more than the other trio, is the player whose skill becomes a force multiple because he can be agnostic to the scheme.
Having a player who can line up outside and win against whatever is thrown at him is a difficult-to-replace skill. It’s one plenty of teams around the league would line up to pay for if given the chance in a free market.
What's The Holdup?
If the current situation was just whether to pay Aiyuk or not, a deal would be done. San Francisco’s dilemma is weighing the value of Aiyuk’s skill set against the cost of everything else already paid for on the roster.
McCaffrey is at the top of the market for running backs, and Kittle is there for tight ends. Samuel has been bumped down the receiver leaderboard because of the explosion at the top of that market, which impacts what Aiyuk rightfully believes he deserves.
“Pay your good players” becomes a more difficult philosophy when there are so many good players on the roster who have already been paid. Aiyuk finds himself last in a long line.
This offense can work without him, but the league-leading Super Bowl-contending version of it works because of him.
