–The 49ers might have shocked the playoff-contending Denver Broncos in Week 14, but not before one potentially embarrassing moment just as the coaches had begun celebrating on the sideline.
Inexperienced quarterback Nick Mullens mis-timed two consecutive snaps as the 49ers were running out the clock, leaving enough time for the Broncos unnecessarily to get the ball back for one last play, trailing 20-14.
Head coach Kyle Shanahan took time to explain in the aftermath of the near-blunder …
“I don’t think it’s a big deal because we won now. It would have been a huge deal,” he assured, accepting part of the blame.
“You’ve got it measured out with the time and stuff. We can all add and I ask someone else to do it in the heat of battle just so I don’t mess it up. But it was very easy; we could kneel it out.
“On one … I think it was second down, he kneeled it with like five seconds instead of at one, which was the first lesson for him to learn.
“So when we did that … you could see on the play clock, it’s at 18 seconds, but on the game clock there is 19. So you know there’s a second that you have to gain there. But he kneeled it like four seconds early.
“So that happened and we’re realizing that when it’s third down and everyone’s headsets are off, which I’ll never take mine off again. But the headsets are off and we’re all hugging and stuff, and then someone tells me, so I yell to Nick, ‘Hey, you need a slow knee.’ That’s something we go through when you’ve got to step back and kill a second before you take a knee. I’m yelling it because I’m a little panicked and Nick, very calm, just hushes me and tells me to chill out. So, I’m like, ‘Alright, he’s got it.’
“Then he was relaxed and he snapped it and did exactly what he was supposed to do, did a slow knee, took almost two seconds before he did it. The problem was when we were telling him that, he’s not thinking much and you tell him and he looked right up at the scoreboard, you can see it on tape, the scoreboard says third-and-12. It’s fourth-and-12. So he’s like, ‘Alright, I don’t know why Kyle is freaking out, it’s a slow knee, I’ll do a slow knee.’ But he snapped it with five seconds on the play clock thinking he was going to be able to do it again on fourth down. But that was fourth down.
“So he lost track of the downs, just like Tom Brady this week lost track of whether they had a timeout left or not. It does happen. It’s a good learning lesson for him that you snap it at one second no matter what, that you don’t pay attention to the scoreboard because they’re not always on it, and that your coach should never take his headset off. So I’m going to try not to, unless we’re up a lot.”
–Shanahan might have fined himself for the headset snafu, if only he had a little extra cash in order to be able to afford it.
Turns out, the NFL had already docked him $25,000 for his choice of words when berating the linesman in the Week 13 loss at Seattle.
That occurred after linebacker Fred Warner lost a shoe and had to retrieve it after Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson threw it away from him.
With Warner chasing after his shoe and the Seahawks lining up for a play, Shanahan hastily called for a substitution, only to get an offside penalty because Warner hadn’t been able to get off the field.
Shanahan wants the NFL to create a rule for those types of unusual situations.
“(I’d like) for common sense to prevail and allow the guy to get his shoe that was thrown,” he said. “Or give us time to sub. There’s not a rule for it. I don’t know if I can say what they said. I’m not trying to lose any more money. But I’d like something to be done about it, and I think they will next time.”
Shanahan said he would appeal the fine, and hopes to do so face-to-face.
“They’ll tell me when,” he said of a date that has not yet been determined. “Hopefully we can do it talking instead of writing a letter. I’m not as good at that type of stuff.”
QUOTE TO NOTE: “It was a very bad feeling.” — 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan, admitting what he had seen earlier in the day in the Miami-New England game was weighing on his mind when Denver got one final desperation play on offense in the Week 14 win.
BY THE NUMBERS: 746 — The number of passing yards accumulated by Nick Mullens in the last two weeks, most in the NFL.
