The San Francisco 49ers scored 36 points against the Seattle Seahawks back in Week 6, when they won on the road in primetime, but head coach Kyle Shanahan believes his offense actually performed better in Sunday's 20-17 loss to the same opposition.
Yes, you read that correctly.
San Francisco averaged just 4.9 yards per play in finishing with 277 yards of offense, 12 fewer than Seattle.
But Shanahan believes the game would have been a lot different if not for one key thing holding his offense back, penalties.
The 49ers committed nine penalties in the defeat to the Seahawks, seven of which came on offense. Speaking on his Monday conference call, Shanahan was quick to point to those errors as the primary cause of San Francisco's poor offensive production.
Said Shanahan:
"Yeah, that was a huge thing. I thought that was one of the biggest problems for the offense on the day. And I actually thought we played a better game offensively than we did on that Thursday night game. We didn’t get, you know, on that Thursday night game we got the busted coverage on [WR] Deebo’s [Samuel] 70-yarder and we got those two explosive runs which really helped. But we played better football this game. We just didn’t at all with the penalties and you know, we had one 14-play drive where, I don’t know how many 14-play drives that I’ve been a part of that don’t end with points or a missed field goal or turnover. To go 14 plays and then punt it, we had eight plays inside the 50 after that turnover for the field goal having to overcome it a couple times and get them again. So, that was our biggest problem on the day I felt offensively."
Shanahan is right to identify the penalties as being critical to the 49ers' demise and he is accurate in singling out a 14-play drive late in the second quarter that ended in a punt and the 49ers' first offensive series of the third, which came following a Geno Smith interception returned deep into Seattle territory, as the possessions on which those miscues loomed largest.
But he is still only telling half the story. It is when and where the penalties happened on those drives, along with what happened immediately after, that had the biggest influence on the upset loss.
On the 14-play drive in the second quarter, the 49ers had moved the ball to the Seattle 34, comfortably inside Jake Moody's field goal range. Then, on first down, right tackle Colton McKivitz committed a false start. After the ball was moved back five yards, McKivitz was beaten for an eight-yard sack. The 49ers lost 13 yards in space of a play. Some questionable play-calling led to two straight incompletions on second and third down, and the 49ers punted. A shot at a minimum of three points down the drain.
In the third quarter, the 49ers took over at the Seattle 26-yard line following Isaac Yiadom's interception of Smith. The 49ers picked up a first down and had first-and-10 at the Seattle 16.
Purdy appeared to have the Niners inside the 10 after an eight-yard scramble, only for left guard Aaron Banks to be called for a holding penalty.
Christian McCaffrey gained 14 yards on a first-and-20 run, but saw that carry wiped out by an illegal formation penalty. With the Seahawks able to play conservative and protect the first-down marker, the 49ers gained just 16 yards from first-and-25 to set up a 33-yard Moody field goal.
With the 49ers' red zone struggles this year, there's nothing to say they definitely would have punched the ball in on that third-quarter possession, but the penalties on that drive took away the chance for San Francisco to add four points to its tally in a game the Niners lost by three.
So much of the talk around the 49ers' underwhelming season has surrounded an inability to finish games in the fourth quarter, but they have also struggled to execute properly in the key moments earlier in games, wasting opportunities to make the final frame more comfortable. Sunday's game, in which they let a possible 11 points slip through their fingers because of penalties on those two drives, was the perfect encapsulation of that failing.
