I'm gonna get skewered for this, but...

[Pak40.]

Sandbagging means you are slacking, never once heard someone describe it as conservative play.

 

[BlueTalon]

Remember how silly it sounded when 9ers fans said that their OC only opened up half his play book after last December's game?

Absolutely. It still does.

No sillier then this does my friend.

Right. That's what I meant.

 

[BocciHawk]

Sandbagging means you are slacking, never once heard someone describe it as conservative play.

Absolutely not correct. It is to intentionally limit your displays of ability so that someone underestimates you later, and you can take advantage of them then.

Slacking is a totally different thing.

The X factor in all of this is that I could see some logic to trying to get SF to finish as the 5 seed. If they are the 6, they'd play at the 3, and if they won, we'd have them here at home assuming we're the 1 seed. That could be a tough matchup especially after a bye. The 3 will be the NFC North or NFC East winner.

Conversely, if they are the 5, and win, they might very well end up going to play at the 2 (Saints) assuming that 3 beats 6.

By losing the game vs SF, we greatly increase the chance that they are the 5 seed, and that Carolina is the 6 seed... which makes it less likely that we'd face the 49ers in the divisional round.

It's nth dimensional chess, and pretty unlikely that they were thinking this way, but the conservative playcalling and overall conservative mindset is very different than what we did the week before...