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Kyle Shanahan breaks down challenge of preparing for Micah Parsons

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© Tim Heitman-USA TODAY Sports

The most high-profile matchup of the season is quickly approaching. The 49ers-Cowboys rivalry has had myriad defining players over the years, but when you think of the Cowboys today, Micah Parsons is the first name that comes to mind.

How do you prepare for Parsons’ elite pass-rushing ability and propensity to line up anywhere? Kyle Shanahan was asked that by Tolbert and Copes on Thursday.

Shanahan said the problem with defending him has nothing to do with figuring out where he is on the field.

“It’s not hard to locate him because we all know his number and we know who that guy is. We know exactly where he is,” Shanahan said. “The hard thing is, you want to make sure really good players don’t mess the game up. If you ignore them, the odds are they really are. They’re gonna affect the game huge just going back to Aaron Donald and stuff like that.

“But it’s really hard to put together a schematic game plan when you don’t know where he’s going to be till you break the huddle. Because you can’t just take two guys to somebody all the time. There’s too many issues and they know exactly what they’re doing with fronts and things like that, when to move him, where to move him, how to get them on certain people, how to make it really tough for you to help them. If you try to cover everything, your quarterback and your offense are going to be frozen because you’re going to have to change every single play every single time, which then no one’s coming off the ball and really playing good football.”

In other words, you have to make adjustments to defend Parsons, but because he can move around, there are limited options for protecting against him on the fly.

If you try and do too much to account for him, it could ruin the integrity and structure of you offense.

Shanahan suggested that there’s fundamentals you rely on in facing a player like Parsons, because he’s going to get his opportunities.

So there’s an element of how you design something to make it tougher for that guy and to help our guys not have to be in too many positions where they’re just completely on their own having to deal with a player like that.

But you’ve also got to realize that it’s going to happen, and when he does win his, you got to make sure it’s not a turnover. You got to make sure that the worst case scenario is just a sack. You got to protect that ball and it’s also why you got to be balanced, to do a lot of things, to not allow him to tee off because when he tees off he’s he’s tough to deal with and all the guys they got around them can tee off too.

I mean, DeMarcus Lawrence is still the same guy that we saw six years ago or seven years ago when we were here. I had to go against him in Atlanta, so he’s been around forever and Dan [Quinn], with all the guys that you don’t know who are inside and the backups, they all can rush the passer and they’re all moving.

But 11 is definitely the one you got to know where he is every play.

Listen to the full interview above. You can listen to every KNBR interview on our podcast page at knbr.com/podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Catch Tolbert & Copes weekdays from 2 p.m. – 6 p.m. on KNBR 104.5 / 680 and streaming live on KNBR.com.