The San Francisco 49ers' offensive line wasn't overly impressed with the Detroit Lions' defensive line play in Sunday night's 27-19 win at Candlestick Park, according to Matt Maiocco of CSN Bay Area.
Despite allowing more sacks, tackles for loss and quarterback hits than their own defense could compile, the Niners' o-line went out of its way to make it very clear to the media that it wasn't fans of what Detroit did against them in the trenches. Here's what left tackle Joe Staley had to say on the subject:
"Look at the game. We killed them. Every single pressure they got was cheap. It was on a keep or something like that. They weren't beating us one on one. We ran for about 200 yards (148 yards) on the so-called best D-line in all of football."
Furthermore, when asked if he believed that the Lions' front four of Ndamukong Suh, Cliff Avril, Kyle Vanden Bosch and Corey Williams was overrated, Staley replied "extremely."
The tackle on the other side of the 49ers' offensive line, 2010 first round pick Anthony Davis, shared the same sentiment about the Lions' postulated standing as the best d-line unit in the league:
"They think highly of themselves. I heard they said they were the best D-line in the league or something. I feel that's disrespectful to other good defensive lines...It's not really an I'm-going-to-line-up-and-kick-your-(butt) kind of D-line. But people always say stuff like that. They're good at post-play stuff. They're good at getting away with nudging you at the end of a play, stuff like that."
Davis also expressed to the media in his interview how good it felt to line up in the "victory" formation to run out the clock at the end of the game with Lions forced to accept "it's over."
While this sort of talk is to be expected between two teams with such a heated recent history, there still isn't much of a rivalry between these two NFC powerhouses. Sure, both teams may despise each other and all, but the 49ers have won all nine of their most recent matchups against the Lions dating back to 1996.
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