In Week 10, Jake Moody was the goat – the bad kind – of the San Francisco 49ers’ Week 10 win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers… at least until he became the goat – the good kind – at the end of the game.
That’s right, after missing three of his first five field goal attempts in Week 10, frustrating his teammates to such a degree that Deebo Samuel was throwing punches on the sidelines, the 49ers needed their third-round kicker to hit a 44-yarder for the walk-off victory and hit it he did, sending fans home happy with the surprising win.
Asked how it must have felt for Moody to go from the 49ers’ biggest loser to the hero of the show, Kyle Shanahan broke down how the game turned into a major teachable moment for his team.
“Yeah, always. That’s stuff we talk about all the time. No one has a perfect game, ever, that I’ve seen. I mean kickers, I guess, can because you’re just judged on your attempts. But I mean just most football players, there are so many highs and lows that go in a game. Sometimes it could be in front of everybody, which usually is a quarterback or a missed tackle, a corner getting beat on something, a receiver dropping a ball, a penalty.”
While things do go wrong in football almost as often as they go well, as every positive play has someone who does something negative on the other end, Shanahan believes his players can learn from their mistakes to grow into the future.
Kyle Shanahan is proud of the 49ers’ resilience
Continuing his comments on the 49ers’ big-time effort in Week 10, Shanahan noted just how important resilience is to winning games in the NFL, as things can turn around either way in the blink of an eye.
“But all that stuff’s going to happen. It’s about wiping it out and going to the next play, good or bad. I’ve had so many guys have such a good, I’ve been around guys who, it’s the opposite too,” Shanahan told reporters. “You’re unbelievable for three quarters, you do all this good stuff, you’re feeling good, great about yourself, and then you don’t look the ball in, and then you drop it on a crucial play in the fourth. And that’s all anyone remembers, and that’s all the team remembers, because that’s one that looks like it costs the game. So everything is about not being too high or too low and just staying even keel and worrying about whatever happened once you get in the locker room and watch the tape.”
Had Moody gotten discouraged by his first three misses, who knows, maybe he wouldn’t have scored those final three points in Week 10, the game would have gone to overtime, and the Buccaneers would have ended their losing streak instead of San Francisco getting right back into the swing of the NFC West. Fortunately, the 49ers are a well-coached team, and in the end, they were able to secure the win and keep their team together when things very easily could have fallen apart in a spectacular way.
