In Reply to: Re: Rest the defense posted by SehornBlew on February 11, 2024 at 22:03:07
here's what Shanahan said:
"The 49ers lost the coin toss to begin the game. They won it to start overtime.
Under the current playoff overtime rules, both teams get the ball at least once. If they still are tied after that, the game goes to sudden death.
Instead of deferring or kicking off, Kyle Shanahan chose to receive.
“It’s just something we talked about,” Shanahan said in his postgame news conference. “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. So got that field goal, so knew we had to hold them to at least a field goal and if we did, we thought it was in our hands after that.”
Shanahan said the decision was made before the game."