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# Osa Odighizuwa Hit Stafford Four Times From the Interior in Week 1
- URL: https://www.statsdigest.com/osa-odighizuwa-interior-pressure-49ers-week-1-2026/
- Published: 2026-09-13T03:09:48.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-13T03:09:48.000Z
- Description: Osa Odighizuwa's four QB hits on Stafford — three on deep throws — mirror his Dallas tape almost exactly.
- Author: Bill Seifert
- Tags: 49ers, Osa Odighizuwa, pass rush, NFL Week 1, Matthew Stafford, QB hits

San Francisco's pass rush finished its 27-7 Week 1 win at the Rams with a zero in the sack column — and eight QB hits on 28 Matthew Stafford dropbacks. That's a 28.6% hit rate without a single takedown, the sort of stat line that looks like nothing on the box score and like the whole story once you look at who was doing the hitting.

Four of those eight hits came from Osa Odighizuwa, the interior defensive tackle San Francisco signed away from Dallas this offseason. Three of them came on deep passes.

**All the numbers below are from one game.** Two of 272 regular-season games have been played. The point of this piece is not to grade a defense off a one-game sample; it's to look at a single player's pressure fingerprint against a specific weakness the 49ers had spent two years accumulating.

## What actually happened to Stafford

Stafford went 15-for-25 for 155 yards with a pick, and here is the full list of every SF defender credited with a QB hit on him, with the depth of the throw they hit him on:

| Defender          | Air yards | Depth              |
| ----------------- | --------- | ------------------ |
| N. Bosa           | 3         | short              |
| **O. Odighizuwa** | **40**    | **deep**           |
| C. West           | 2         | short              |
| **O. Odighizuwa** | **20**    | **deep**           |
| O. Odighizuwa     | \-4       | short              |
| U. Stout          | 17        | deep               |
| **O. Odighizuwa** | **24**    | **deep**           |
| O. Okoronkwo      | 13        | short (on Bennett) |

Four deep-throw hits in the game. Three of them were Odighizuwa. That's the whole reason to write this up.

## The gap this was supposed to fill

San Francisco's team QB hit rate over the last four full seasons:

- 2022: 117 hits on 639 dropbacks — **18.3%**
- 2023: 113 on 671 — **16.8%**
- 2024: 77 on 554 — **13.9%**
- 2025: 57 on 603 — **9.5%**

Halved in three years. And by 2025, the front had gone almost entirely edge-driven: Bryce Huff led the team with 15 QB hits, Sam Okuayinonu had 7, Kalia White 6, Clelin Ferrell 5\. Nick Bosa, on limited snaps, had 3\. Interior contributions were thin — Alfred Collins, the DL who'd have shared the interior with Odighizuwa in Week 1, had 4.

The deep-pass number from 2025 is the one that frames Week 1\. All season long, San Francisco generated **10 QB hits on 119 deep pass attempts** and — matching Week 1's pattern in the wrong direction — **zero sacks** on deep drops. Odighizuwa, in his first game as a 49er, got 3 deep-drop hits by himself on 4 opposing deep attempts.

## Odighizuwa's Dallas profile is the same shape

The reason to be careful about overreading one game is that this is one game. The reason to at least *notice* it is that Odighizuwa's Dallas tape looks exactly like this:

- 2024 with Dallas: **23 QB hits, 4.5 sacks**. Of Dallas's 16 deep-pass QB hits that year, **7 were his** — 44%.
- 2025 with Dallas: **23 QB hits, 3.5 sacks**. Of Dallas's 17 deep-pass hits, **7 were his** again — 41%.

That's a two-year pattern of an interior DT registering nearly half his team's deep-throw hits while converting almost none of his own pressures into sacks. High hit count, low sack count, deep-drop specialty. It's not the edge-rusher archetype the 49ers had built the front around; it's the guy who collapses the pocket up the middle on 5- and 7-step drops and forces the QB off his platform while the ball is in the air.

The Week 1 evidence — hits at 40, 20, and 24 air yards — is the same archetype, on Stafford, in a 49ers uniform.

## Caveats, said plainly

- **One game.** A rate off 28 dropbacks against one opponent is not a season-level number and I'm not going to dress it up as one. Everything above is a description of what happened Thursday night in Week 1, not a projection.
- **Alfred Collins was out** with a knee injury (listed Out, did not practice), which means Odighizuwa played next to a different interior partner than the 49ers presumably planned around. You can read that as "the hits came against a compromised front" or as "the hits came *despite* a compromised front" — my read is closer to the second, but both are defensible.
- **Zero sacks is still zero sacks.** If this Odighizuwa fingerprint is real — lots of hits, very few finishes — then the 49ers didn't sign a sack producer. They signed a pocket-collapser, and whether that's enough depends on whether the hits keep showing up and whether Bosa and Huff convert the ones that spill to the edge.

## What I'd watch

I'd watch two things over the next few weeks. First, does Odighizuwa's deep-drop hit rate stay anywhere near a Week 1 pace once opponents scheme for him (chips, slides, quicker throws)? Second, does the *team's* deep-pass hit number climb out of last year's 10-in-119 basement, or does one interior DT get isolated and neutralized? The first tells you whether the fit is real. The second tells you whether it matters.

For now, the honest sentence is the small one: on his first Thursday in red and gold, the interior DT San Francisco went and got hit the quarterback four times, three of them while the ball was traveling more than 20 yards downfield. That is not a season. It is a very specific answer to a very specific two-year problem, and it's worth paying attention to.