Week 11 confidence check: That’s the defensive line we recall is….

With the 49ers winning against the Jacksonville Jaguars on Sunday, we are officially past the season’s halfway point. Unrelated note: I miss the days when you could break the season into two evenly divided eight-game halves, but now it’s a much uglier number nine to get to the halfway point.

If I had written this after eight games, it would have a different tone, but things feel less gray after the 31-7 win at EverBank Stadium (Levi’s Southeast?). I even think there’s an argument to be made that the 49ers are on a two-game winning streak as re-claiming the NFC West while on bye week should count as a win.

How confident am I in each position group? I’m less optimistic after our last confidence check after the 49ers beat the Dallas Cowboys by 32 points, but I still feel good about the 2023 49ers. And I adjusted like Steve Wilks coming down to the field from the booth. Instead of ranking on low to high confidence, I power ranked each position group in order of most confidence to least:

1. Defensive line

After recording zero sacks in a game for the first time since Week 17 of last season against Minnesota, the 49ers defensive line has bounced back, recording 36 pressures and eight sacks over the previous two games – the most sacks for the 49ers in a two-game stretch since Weeks 6 and 7 last year – with two of the pressures forcing Trevor Lawrence interceptions on Sunday.

Oh, and the 49ers added Chase Young to rush the quarterback across Nick Bosa at the trade deadline, a move that has already paid dividends with the duo splitting a sack against Jacksonville with Bosa forcing a turnover.

The 49ers base defensive line of Bosa, Young, Javon Hargrave, and Arik Armstead has to rank among the best – if not THE best – defensive lines in the league. And that doesn’t include Randy Gregory, Javon Kinlaw, Kevin Givens, and Clelin Ferrell. The acquisition of Young not only gave the 49ers its best pass-rush duo of the Shanahan era, but it also gave it the deepest.

The defensive line has been the group that’s headlined the 49ers for a few years now, and with its current star power, it’s easily the group to be most confident in for the last eight weeks of the season.

2. Linebacker

Three 49ers linebackers have played at least 200 snaps this season: Fred Warner (551), Dre Greenlaw (454), and Oren Burks (200). Here’s how the three rank in some hand-picked stats I found from Pro Football Focus