A bizarre sequence before halftime left the Seahawks digging out of a hole they never needed to create, and it started with a call that looked risky the moment it was made.
With 18 seconds left in the second quarter, Seattle ran the ball from its own 4-yard line. George Holani, who had already dropped the ball without contact earlier in the half, put it on the ground again, and the 49ers turned the mistake into a touchdown.
On the surface, the play invited the obvious reaction: just take a knee and get to halftime. That was the point made on PFT Live, where Simms said the Seahawks should have simply ended the half instead of running the ball.
At first glance, that felt like the clean answer because a 96-yard touchdown run was never really in the cards. The danger was the turnover, and that’s exactly what happened.
But the situation was messier than it first appeared.
Seattle had already burned through its timeouts as a 49ers drive in Seahawks territory stalled and ended in a punt with 27 seconds left. Then a fourth-down play from the Seahawks’ 42 led to a punt that was touched at the 4 and downed before it could reach the end zone.
That left Seattle in a tricky spot. San Francisco still had all three timeouts, and if the Seahawks had simply knelt, the 49ers could have forced them to punt from their own end zone with about 10 seconds remaining.
Even if the clock had expired on the punt, a fair catch would have opened the door to a free kick on an untimed down from that spot, with three points in play.
So Seattle tried to steal a few yards and chew up a little more clock. Instead, Holani coughed it up.
There was another layer to the decision, too. If the Seahawks had chosen not to use their own timeouts earlier, the 49ers could have let the clock bleed down and finished the half with either a Hail Mary or a 60-yard field goal attempt. Either way, there wasn’t a clean escape route once San Francisco got the ball inside the five.
That’s what made the whole thing a maze. The only truly simple answer was to avoid the fumble. And there’s also the question of whether Seattle should have trusted Holani with the ball at all after the earlier drop so close to his own goal line.
The Seahawks did bounce back enough to make it a game, taking a 23-21 lead and later a 26-21 lead. But giving the 49ers an easy seven points right before halftime made the climb a lot steeper than it had to be.
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