The Right Denominator For De'Zhaun Stribling's First Game Is Twenty-Six, Not Sixty-Five

The twenty-sixth snap San Francisco ran on Thursday night went to its own center.

Brock Purdy took it out of the shotgun at the 49ers' twenty-eight, and the football finished in the hands of Jake Brendel, who is thirty-four, plays center, and got two yards with it. How it got there the game book does not say. What the game book does say, on the same line, is this: "SF-D.Stribling was injured during the play."

De'Zhaun Stribling did not take another snap. He had been off once already that night, hurt in the first quarter, and had come back at the start of the second; David Bonilla of 49ers Webzone reported that this time he needed help getting off the field. San Francisco won 27-7 at the Melbourne Cricket Ground and has published nothing about him since.

So the number everybody now has for his first professional game is twenty-one snaps out of sixty-five. That number is correct and it is the wrong way to read him.

Sixty-five is the wrong denominator#

Twenty-one of sixty-five is thirty-two percent, and thirty-two percent is a fourth receiver, the share a club hands a rookie it is easing in. Nothing about that description survives contact with when the twenty-one happened.

Count San Francisco's plays from scrimmage from the opening drive up to and including the one Brendel caught, and you get twenty-six. Stribling was on the field for twenty-one of them. Eighty-one percent, which is not a package. That is a starter.

The count is checkable and here is the check, because a number you produced yourself is not evidence until the instrument is proved. Run the same tally to the end of the game and it has to land on sixty-five, because the official participation report puts all five 49ers offensive linemen and Purdy at sixty-five snaps apiece, every one of them, one hundred percent of the night. Tallied straight it comes to sixty-four. Add the second-quarter roughing-the-passer penalty that wiped out a play the ball had already been snapped on and it is sixty-five. Same instrument, same game, and it agrees with the league's own participation page at the one place it can be tested.

Twenty-one snaps, then. Purdy did not throw at him on any of them.

Eight 49ers caught a pass in Melbourne. Stribling was not one of them. The center was.

What the room looks like without him#

Six San Francisco receivers took an offensive snap on Thursday and that is the entire list. Mike Evans played forty-nine of them. Demarcus Robinson played forty-one, Deebo Samuel twenty-seven. Then Stribling's twenty-one, Jacob Cowing's five, and a single snap for KhaDarel Hodge, whom the club had activated to the active roster that same day.

Look at what sits in the middle of that list. Luke Farrell, a tight end San Francisco pays to block, played forty-six snaps, more than every receiver on the roster except Evans. Kyle Juszczyk, the fullback, played thirty-three, more than Samuel. This is not an offense with receiver snaps lying around waiting for somebody to claim them. There were a hundred and forty-four of them across sixty-five plays, and in a night that ended for him before halftime Stribling took a seventh of the total.

The other thing about that list is how old it is. Evans is thirty-three, Robinson and Hodge are thirty-one, Samuel is thirty. Four of the five receivers who played a snap alongside Stribling are past thirty, and the fifth is Cowing, who took five of them and returned two punts. Jordan Watkins, who is twenty-four, was one of six 49ers made inactive for the game.

That is the room a second-round pick was being fed into at a starter's rate, and it is the room that now has to get through a Sunday without him.

The part with a date on it#

Kyle Shanahan said after the game, in remarks carried by NBC Sports Bay Area, that the Achilles had been checked and was intact and that the club was "not exactly sure of the magnitude of the ankle injury." The rest of the testing waited on the flight home. Bonilla clocked that flight at thirteen hours and forty-six minutes, wheels down at San Francisco International at 3:06 on Friday afternoon. An MRI machine is a fixed object, and for most of a day the 49ers were nowhere near one.

There is one more line in Stribling's file worth having this week. San Francisco went into the April draft holding the twenty-seventh pick and never used it. It traded down twice on the opening night, first with Miami and then with the Jets, came out the far side holding the first selection of the second round, and spent it on him. Miami is at Levi's Stadium on Sunday.

San Francisco has not filed a Week 2 injury report, because San Francisco has not practiced. Writing on Friday afternoon, Bonilla had the club not expected back on the practice field until the following week, which is the one that starts tomorrow. An injury report is a by-product of a practice, so when the 49ers hold one there will be a line on it carrying Stribling's name and a single word beside it. That word will be the club's first statement about his ankle since Melbourne.

Kickoff against Miami is 1:25 Pacific on the twentieth.