Leaping into the Lumen Field stands to embrace their wives, George Kittle and Kyle Juszczyk celebrated wildly after each of their touchdowns in the fourth quarter on Thursday night.
However, the San Francisco 49ers’ 36-24 win over the Seattle Seahawks was likely as much about relief as it was celebration, with the perennial Super Bowl contenders rebounding from a bitter loss by overcoming a pair of bugaboos in the process.
Twenty-ninth in the NFL in red zone percentage entering the game, the 49ers tallied their last two touchdowns from inside the 10-yard line to avoid losing their third game this season after leading by double-digits.
“You know that we’re sick about those two losses that we had,” head coach Kyle Shanahan said in regard to his team’s first two NFC West tilts, defeats to the Los Angeles Rams and Arizona Cardinals in Week 3 and 5, respectively, in which it held sizable leads. “And I talked about some losses are harder than others, and when you feel like you had those won, especially division games, that’s made us sick about it.”
There was likely an ill feeling creeping up the throats of Shanahan and his 49ers when they saw their 23-3 third-quarter advantage slip into a precarious 23-17 lead. After all, the 49ers are the only team in the NFL that has lost multiple games in which it led by 10 points or more.
First it was a Laviska Shenault 97-yard kickoff return for a score that immediately followed Kittle’s first TD grab of the night.
Then it was a Kenneth Walker touchdown run with 1:24 to play in the same stanza.
What was Shanahan thinking? Not about those Rams and Cardinals losses, according to him.
“I’m not going to go to what happened on our last two losses,” he said. “It was just staying locked in, not trying to get any negative feelings and just trying to take it one play at a time. You try to keep our team that way, but it’s not like I talked to a bunch of people right then. So just calling plays and stuff, you don’t try to think that way. Our goal is to be locked in the entire game regardless of what the score was, and I thought the guys played like that.”
Shanahan has obviously addressed those bitter defeats, though, conveying to his team that that’s just how this league of theirs works. And it’s also perhaps the overconfidence of a talented team thinking it can cruise to a win after a blissful beginning to a game.
“We’ve been talking about how these two losses are a reminder of how the NFL works,” Shanahan said. “I think we got a little spoiled in the way of just human nature, sometimes feeling too relaxed, and you can never feel too relaxed.
“I thought we played real well in the second half, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to win. That’s kind of how it works. We played well. They played well. They came back and made some plays, which made it tighter, and I was glad that our guys could fight through that, realize that games are really never over where you can just sit and chill in the fourth quarter. You’ve got to go beginning to the end, and we got that experience today.”
A game-changing interception by rookie Renardo Green midway through the fourth set up what was essentially the game-sealing score. Kittle, returning from a bathroom break in the locker room, hauled in a 9-yard TD grab from Brock Purdy. Kittle found his wife in the front row, celebrating with her and Juszczyk’s better half, as well.
The Seahawks answered back with a score, but then 49ers rookie back Isaac Guerendo broke loose for a 76-yard scamper. Two plays later, Juszczyk barreled in for 6 yards en route to a repeat front-row celebration with the wives.
That was the nail in the coffin, a comeback from a division rival quelled and a final stat line of 3 for 5 in the red zone.
For a San Francisco team that’s fallen short in two Super Bowls over the past five seasons despite holding double-digit leads in each of those games, the questions and concerns about closing out victories will linger. After all, the 49ers are playing the Chiefs in Week 7, the same Kansas City team that dealt San Francisco heartbreak in those Super Bowl shortfalls.
Though the narrative surrounding the team’s late-game struggles isn’t going anywhere, the 49ers most certainly got a victory they believe they had to have.
“It was definitely a must-win, but I\] kind of look at must-wins a little different,” said wide receiver [Deebo Samuel, who propelled the 49ers to a 10-0 lead in the second quarter with a 76-yard TD catch. “Must-wins are like, if you lose, you’re done. So, at the end of the day, we treated it as a must-win for sure to get back on track.”
The Niners are back on track after Thursday night, sitting atop the division they’ve won the past two seasons. There is no guarantee they won’t squander a big lead or struggle in the red zone going forward, but Thursday’s result -- the celebration and relief of it all -- has them pointed where they want to go.
“To go four quarters with all these different kinds of emotions and parts of the game and to be able to rally together, and defense get a turnover and then us score a touchdown at the end, that’s team football, man, and that’s the sport that we play,” Purdy said. “So, I feel like we did take a step in the right direction for sure.
“We’re always going to have stuff that we’re going to be hard on ourselves (about) and need to grow and get better at, but I really do think that we all as a team came together and found a way.”