getnasty":69duobqg said:
Not using his timeouts before the end of the first half isn't getting enough talk in my opinion. He had a chance to get the ball back with over 2 minutes but decided to just let the Chiefs run the clock.
First, he didn't have a chance to get the ball back with over two minutes. The two minute warning happened between second and third down when the Chiefs had the ball.
They failed to convert on third down with about 1:50 left on the clock on the 49 yard line.
In hindsight, because the Chiefs punt was a touchback, it's easy as pie to say that Shanahan should have called a timeout with 1:50 on the clock instead of getting the ball back with 1 minute on the clock.
That's all well and good but it's using hindsight. Back in the real world in real time when you don't have hindsight, the chiefs were about 1/4 of a yard away from pinning the 49ers on the 1 yard line with that punt. Basically, with a 1/4 of a yard difference, Shanahan becomes an idiot FOR calling a timeout instead of an idiot for NOT calling a timeout.
And as for why he wasn't expecting a touchback, it's because he's an NFL head coach and knows something that NFL fans don't know because they don't care about kicking and don't follow the game that closely: the biggest change in punting is that touchbacks off of punts have basically been cut in half in the last 20 years. They're just very rare.
What Shanahan was doing was being strategic and playing the odds. If you get the ball within your ten yard line with under two minutes left, your strategy is to try to just get a first down so you don't have to give the other team the ball back only 15 or 20 yards away from being able to convert a field goal. I didn't object to his thinking on it in the moment, and I don't object to it now, because in the moment I didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
If Colquitt barely pins them on the 1 instead of barely not pinning them on the 1 we're not talking about any of this. If Kittle doesn't get called for OPI down in the Chiefs redzone we're not talking about any of this either.
When the legitimacy of an argument about strategy comes down to an inch here or an inch there after the fact, I just don't think you have a good strategy argument to begin with.
I'm sticking with how I felt in the moment -- I understood the logic of what he was doing and thought it made sense -- because anything after that is using information that nobody had at the time to inform the decision (which just doesn't make any sense).