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Making a head coaching mistake that may have led to your team losing the Super Bowl in devastating fashion is one thing.
But doubling down on that mistake days after the loss takes a whole lot of nerve.
Nevertheless, that’s what San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan has decided to do.
Shanahan’s decision to receive the opening kickoff of overtime in Super Bowl 58 came back to bite the Niners when Patrick Mahomes then went down and won the game with a touchdown.
At the time, Shanahan claimed that he made the decision in hopes of getting the ball a second time. Although 49ers players say that they never discussed a plan for overtime and were unaware of the NFL’s playoff overtime rules.
Not great!
Shanahan had a chance to walk back the choice. But instead, he’s opted to further defend it.
“It’s just something we talked about,” he said. “None of us have a ton of experience with it. But we went through all the analytics and talked to those guys. We just thought it would be better. We wanted the ball third. If both teams matched and scored, we wanted to be the ones who had the chance to go win. Got that field goal, so knew we had to hold them to at least a field goal, and if we did, then we thought it was in our hands after that.”
Bold choice!
In theory, Shanahan’s reasoning is sound. You have the opportunity to get one more possession than Kansas City, and that possession would be sudden death.
But that’s assuming both teams match scores on their first possessions.
Instead, Kansas City received the ball with the knowledge of how many points its needed to score in order to win. Even if San Francisco had scored a touchdown on its opening drive, Chiefs star Chris Jones revealed that his team planned to go for 2 and the win if it scored a touchdown as well.
So Shanahan’s grand plan would not have come into play either way.
Something tells us the next team to go to overtime in the NFL playoffs won’t be taking the ball first.