Kyle Shanahan Explains His Questionable Play Calls Against the Browns

With 3:21 left and a one-point lead, he called three straight passes, took only 25 seconds off the clock and punted. Highly questionable time management.

Kyle Shanahan did something very strange near the end of the 49ers' loss to the Browns.

With 3:21 left and a one-point lead, he called three straight passes, took only 25 seconds off the clock and punted. Highly questionable time management.

On Monday, a reporter asked Shanahan about his play calling during this sequence. Here's what Shanahan said:

"You don't plan on throwing it three times in a row. You don't plan on getting intentional grounding on the first one. Second and 20, you could run, but I'm not really worried about time when you have a one-point lead and three-something left. If you get a first down, then time can become a factor. Regardless of the timeouts in the game, you know you're going to throw it one of those downs, so you're not thinking totally about the clock. Yeah, you'd love to stay in bounds, but the clock is not going to matter until you get a first down, so everything is about trying to get a first down. 

"They were blitzing us, and we thought we'd have a really quick pass to Aiyuk on the 1st and 10, which is exactly what we got. We just made a mistake in where we sent our back, which made Aiyuk covered on a hot, unblocked throw, which put Brock in a bad position where he had to just get rid of it. That's why we got intentional grounding. When you're 2nd and 20 and there's three minutes left, I'm not thinking of running out the clock. I'm thinking about trying to get a first down, and we thought the best way was a quick pass to Aiyuk, which we did. It got us back in a competitive down where we had a chance on third down, but we didn't get it. That's why we punted to them. Thought we could stop them. They went down and got a field goal. Then I was very thankful that there was more time on the clock."


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Grant Cohn
GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.