Kyle Shanahan on receiving kickoff in OT: We wanted the ball third if it went to sudden death
The 49ers lost the coin toss to begin the game. They won it to start overtime.
Under the current playoff overtime rules, both teams get the ball at least once. If they still are tied after that, the game goes to sudden death.
Instead of deferring or kicking off, Kyle Shanahan chose to receive.
"It’s just something we talked about," Shanahan said in his postgame news conference. "None of us have a ton of experience with it. But we went through all the analytics and talked to those guys. We just thought it would be better. We wanted the ball third. If both teams matched and scored, we wanted to be the ones who had the chance to go win. So got that field goal, so knew we had to hold them to at least a field goal and if we did, we thought it was in our hands after that."
Shanahan said the decision was made before the game.
The 49ers kicked a field goal, with Shanahan saying they gave no thought to going for it on fourth-and-four at the Kansas City 9. The Chiefs then won it with a touchdown.
It kept Andy Reid from having an interesting decision.
If the 49ers had scored a touchdown and kicked the PAT, the Chiefs would have known they would need a touchdown and an extra point to tie. But they also could have elected to attempt to win the with a two-point conversion, negating the third possession.
But we'll never know what the Chiefs would have done because the 49ers scored only a field goal on their overtime possession.
