Kyle Shanahan got real on what his biggest mistake was during the NFC Championship game. The San Francisco 49ers head coach analyzed the match against the Philadelphia Eagles and revealed what he could have done differently.
The 49ers ended their hopes with a very tough loss against the Eagles for the NFC title. The team’s quarterbacks Brock Purdy and Josh Johnson got injured during the game and this was one of their main problems to defeat Philadelphia.
But not everything was the players’ fault. Kyle Shanahan, the team’s head coach, got real on what was his biggest mistake during the game and it is something that may have changed its course.
Kyle Shanahan gets real on his biggest mistake against the Eagles
The 49ers had a rough time at Philadelphia last Sunday. They were eliminated by the Eagles, who were able to use the home advantage very well and defeat San Francisco.
But during the game, there was a play that could have changed everything. DeVonta Smith made an incredible catch on fourth-and-three for 29 yards, which then led to a touchdown on Eagles’ opening drive. After the play, cameras revealed that maybe the receiver didn’t complete the catch, but Shanahan decided not to challenge it.
“The replay we saw didn’t definitively show that,” Shanahansaid postgame. “We saw one up on the scoreboard. I wasn’t going to throw one anyways just to hope to take the chance. But they showed one up on the scoreboard that didn’t have all those angles you guys saw. That looked like a catch and we didn’t want to waste a timeout. Which we definitely would have if we didn’t see that. I heard they got a couple other angles and you guys ended up seeing later that it was not a catch.”
Maybe the game could have unfolded differently if he called that challenge, but Shanahan was not very sure about it and preferred to keep a timeout in case the call standed. Despite this, the head coach revealed he would have wanted to see more replays.
“I wish,” Shanahan said when asked if the team had other angles of the play. “But I mean there’s people, I mean I think the NFL can do that, if they can see it, they’re supposed to do it. But I mean, we didn’t see it. There’s a play clock. You have 40 seconds. They’re going to get it off. They got it off. I wasn’t going to throw it anyway. I was just hoping. But it looked like he caught it. And then they showed a replay up there. Which I was shocked they showed it. But it ended up looking like a catch on the replay too because you couldn’t see the other angles. So that’s why we didn’t. I was told at the end of the drive they saw a couple other angles and I was told that it was incomplete.”
