[QUOTE=etv78]
Didn’t the safety swing the betting?
[/QUOTE]
And made an equal number of squares players happy. 
It paid $440 to the wife of the couple we were watching it with. She was rooting for SF, and had stopped paying attention to her square notes, but when the safety happened it was, Hey Wait A Minute I Think I Won! Boy, did she stop rooting for SF.
He is one tough guy to like. Piss and moan about every thing from the officiating to the snack tray in the locker room.
This was my thought. With 2nd and goal and 2 minutes on the clock, why not run the ball at all? Why didn’t Colin scramble on the 2nd-down play? He wouldn’t have made it but it was better odds than the throw he made, and the clock would have run down some more (didn’t matter, but could have). You have a good running game (including a really fast QB) that has finally started moving the ball against a tired front line, refusing to use it with the game on the line and only needing 7 yards in 3 plays was pretty bad, IMO.
I think you can dismiss the no-call on 4th down, for several reasons. As you say, there was mutual contact; the ball was overthrown; and the refs tend to swallow their whistles instead of making a judgment call on 4th down that could swing the game. BUT … I thought the play on, was it 2nd or 3rd down, was a much clearer case of PI. The one where Kaep rolled out and threw to Crabtree coming back to the ball right near the pylon. Crabtree got hit early by the Ravens defender, well before the ball got there. That should have been called, in my opinion. Crabtree had a much better chance to catch that ball instead of the 4th down play, but the Ravens defender was climbing on his back at the time.
That holding was blatantly obvious on the replay. Really made it clear how Jones could find an opening right up the middle on that return.
This, this, this. That was perhaps the worst goal-to-go playcalling I have seen, ever. Terrible job by the Niners coaching staff.
Exactly, and his over-the-top sideline antics on nearly every call didn’t help. I heard a postgame interview in which he bitched about the lack of a holding-in-the-endzone call on the safety play, a call which would have made absoultely no difference in the outcome. The guy is an incredible whiner.
If the 49ers hadn’t gotten a 2nd chance at a field goal earlier, they would have been down 8 instead of 5, so even with a touchdown they might not have caught up.
I was rooting for the 49ers, but have no problem with the calls by the refs at the end. The calls by the 49ers themselves could have been better.
No. The outcome would be the same (clock chewed up, safety awarded), but it shows how much the refs were swallowing their whistles, especially at the end of the game.
Which is another reason to call a running play or two - let your big guys do some uncalled holding of their own, ya know? You think the refs are going to call back a game-winning QB scramble just because a tackle maybe did a little grab-job? Nah.
Either way, yet another SB that was entertaining as a game and not just a spectacle.
Was the gameclock misoperating in the 3rd quarter, after the power interruption?
It looked like several times plays went out of bounds, and the clock kept running. In one case Kupernick ran the ball out of bounds and the clock did stop, but when they lined up for the next play it was running again.
It looked like there were 1-2 minutes lost in this way, that I could see.
I realize what’s on the screen isn’t necessarily ‘official time’ but it never seemed to get set back either.
The 49’ers could have used another minute or two at the end of the game.
Out of bounds only stops the clock during the last two minutes of the first half and the last five minutes of the second half (cite). The rest of the game, the clock stops when the player goes out of bounds but then restarts when the ball is spotted.
I agree that murder trumps rape… but for the record it wasn’t date rape, it was rape rape. And Ben has been accused of it three times, one of which he paid to settle the lawsuit. I just got irritated about the Murderin’ Ray comments from people whose team is led by a serial rapist.
Everytime I see them blow it in the red zone I miss Joe Montana. In fact, I always miss Joe Montana. There was never anyone better with under 2 minutes left on the clock.
I came in here to ask this very question. When the 49ers were down by 22 I figured they had to go for 2 on their next touchdown. I’m still not sure why they didn’t. They could have easily taken that game to overtime if they had made that first two point conversion or, failing that, made the next two. If a two-point conversion is a 50/50 proposition, that raises your chances of catching up from 50% to 75% (assuming the PAT is essentially 100%).
The probably consulted the all-knowing 2 point chart.
http://www.footballcommentary.com/twoptchart.htm
I’ve heard coaches blame the chart many times when an obvious 2 point play should have been attempted. You can see it’s a pretty rare occasion that the chart strongly recommends going for 2.
According to that chart, if you are down by 16 with 21 minutes remaining you should go for the two point conversion if your chance of success is more than 36%.
If you are down by 9 with 20 minutes remaining, you should go for two if your success rate is over 40%.
SF did not attempt any two point conversions this year, so no stats on that. In the 20 seconds I tried to find the Ravens stats on defending the two-point conversion, I didn’t see a quick stat.
A quick look for stats on two-point conversion success rate is around 40% to 45%, so there is no reason for SF not to have gone for this.
The H brothers make it very hard to root for either team. So I’m glad I don’t have to.
I get Jim, but I’m not sure why you’re down on John too. Was it just the holding on the intentional safety, or is there more going on that I’m missing?
It goes from 50% to 62.5%, but yeah.
With so much time left in the game, it’s at least arguable that taking the PAT is correct. For example, there was a somewhat similar question after the Atlanta-Seattle game, where Atlanta could have tried to go up 28-7 instead of taking 27-7. But say they went for 2 there and missed, making the score 26-7. Then after Seattle’s comeback, they would have gone for 2, in order to go up 29-26 instead of 28-26. Atlanta’s final field goal is then for a tie rather than a win.
Or even just look at how the game itself turned out. Baltimore ended up with 34 points, so exactly 21 more than SF had after taking the PAT.