So Crazy It Just Might Work: Vernon Davis at WR

The San Francisco 49ers are in an interesting, challenging spot as they look towards the new NFL season. The team was only a few minutes away from coming back to win the Super Bowl last year, and quite rightly carries renewed championship expectations ahead into this season.

Confidence and experience aside though, injuries already make the team’s chances of a return trip to the title game anything but assured. They face the painful reality that its leading receiver Michael Crabtree will be out until at least November with a torn Achilles tendon, and overall their stable of receivers is untested and underwhelming. One would think that no matter how terrific their defense is, if the Niners expect to have any kind of meaningful success this year Colin Kaepernick is going to need to have guys to throw to before Thanksgiving.

Enter all-everything tight end Vernon Davis.

Davis was already expected to be the Niners primary target from his natural position of TE, but now news has emerged that he has also spent some of training camp lining up at wide receiver. If that doesn’t put the fear of God into several corners in the NFC, I’m not sure what will.

Davis’ speed and athleticism make him an absolute matchup nightmare for most opposing defenses: he is either too fast to be covered one-on-one by a linebacker, or too big and strong to be shut down by a DB when working on the outside.

It therefore only makes sense that the Niners would look for more creative ways to get him the ball, even if it means playing out of position.

Davis is at least 6-foot-3, 245 pounds, yet he is faster than all but a few tight around the league ends. Since he is not primarily used as a blocking end, the potentially adjustment to shifting out wide and playing receiver more often in the season’s first few games while Crabtree recovers should not be overly complex; Davis himself best put the change required into context, saying “I mean, it’s just like tight end…you’re just running routes.”

49ers coach Jim Harbaugh did not address the idea of shifting the Pro Bowler out to receiver, but he said he likes what he’s seen so far in camp. “I see a lot of improvement, in his ability as a football player, his route-running,” Harbaugh said.

Davis told reporters that he played receiver while in high school and that he originally hoped to play outside some once he got to the University of Maryland. Davis says this was squashed by his head coach, who told him, “You’ll be too big.”

“I’m willing to step up and do whatever they ask me to do,” Davis said to reporters this weekend. “They’ve been having me line up at wide receiver, pretty much all over the place. It’s a good thing that I get the opportunity to work with those guys because it not only helps me at the wide receiver position, it also helps me at the tight end position. My feet get quicker, my route-running is better.”

“I don’t play for the Pro Bowl, I don’t play for statistics. Maybe in my younger days I played for statistics. It’s all about that ring,” Davis said.

As great as that soundbite is though, don’t get it twisted: he stands likely put up monster stats if he works outside as the team’s primary receiving threat, so this isn’t exactly a selfless undertaking. The shift would mean he is the primary offensive focus in nearly every offensive package, and that he will be targeted early and often in order to open up the defense downfield so that Kaepernick has time and space to run and create on the fly.

Davis’ 2012 regular-season stats of 41 catches for just 548 yards and five touchdowns were disappointing compared to the standard of his previous few seasons, but he was terrific in when it mattered most, snagging five catches for 106 yards and TD in the NFC Championship Game and six catches for 104 yards in the Super Bowl.

Getting Davis the ball on quick hitches and other out-routes should put him in a position where he would be one-on-one and heads up with a much smaller DB. Even if the corners try to jam him at the line, he should be able to use his strength to rip through any bump-and-run coverage to then explode for longer fly route downfield.

Last year Davis talked openly about his stats being down because he and Cwere not yet on the same page during the first few games the quarterback started; the dramatic improvement during the postseason would seem to suggest that the pair found their groove and that the experience of additional reps gave them better timing to pursue option routes and other changes at the line.

Coach Harbaugh, Bay Area fans, and fantasy owners everywhere will have to wait until Week 1 (and beyond) to actually see if an idea as bizarre as shifting the star tight end out wide will actually pay off, but signs so far seem to suggest a monster season lies ahead.