So, about that final San Francisco 49ers touchdown by Jauan Jennings.
If you were like me, watching this final scoring drive in the 49ers’ 42-38 win over the Chicago Bears, you might have been screaming for Jennings to go down before crossing the goal line. I was in the comments on the game thread, and I wasn’t the only one wondering why Jennings didn’t just take a knee at the 1-yard line. It was something that brought back the PTSD of a 2021 49ers game against
the Green Bay Packers, where Kyle Juszczyk scored with under a minute left, putting the 49ers up by a single point and allowing then-Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers enough time to get downfield for the game-winning field goal.
Juszczyk defended the decision, saying you don’t get to decide when you can score. It’s a valid concern, regardless. Why didn’t the 49ers stop there and start bleeding the clock? The Packers were out of timeouts while the 49ers had all three, and there were 38 seconds left. I get both sides of the argument in that situation. Personally, I’d have coached them to take a knee and then get the clock down so there’s less time for the Packers to get across the field. But I’m not a coach. For good reason.
Ideally, Juszczyk takes a knee, the 49ers bleed the clock to around 20 seconds, call a timeout, then run three plays to punch it in. That leaves the Packers a handful of seconds to try something that would most likely not work.
The Bears’ situation is vastly, vastly different. Both by circumstances and the time that’s on the clock.
If Jennings does go down in bounds, you’re looking at about 2:15 left on the clock. The Bears have all three timeouts.
In a best-case scenario, if Jennings goes down, the 49ers can wait until the two-minute warning kicks in (assuming the Bears don’t burn a timeout beforehand). Now they have four plays to either score a field goal and go to overtime (bad idea in this game) or punch it in. On first down, they just took on clock stoppage (the two-minute warning) away before punching it in at, say, the 1:57 mark.
Yes, 17 seconds is 17 seconds, but not at the cost of a game-winning score. Scores are never guaranteed.
So say the 49ers take a knee for two plays—that’s two timeouts the Bears burn. Now the 49ers need to punch it in on third and goal—and no guarantee that happens. If they fail, there’s a timeout number three burned and the field goal unit coming on.
Now with the game tied, the entire landscape changes. Instead of the Bears needing a touchdown, all they need is a field goal to win this game, and they have under two minutes to do so. That’s a lot different than under a minute (let alone scoring a necessary touchdown to put you up by a point). Do you trust the 49ers’ defense to hold them down inside of two minutes and keep them out of field goal range?
The knee-jerk reaction from some of us is that there was too much time on the clock. I had that. I know several of you were wanting the same thing. When you break things down, you realize how the act would have been far, far too risky. You’d only exhaust a few precious seconds.
Now, had Jennings gone into the red zone in a situation where the Bears already used their timeouts or had one remaining, that would have changed everything. The 49ers could have taken a knee, gone to the two-minute warning, taken a second knee on first down to get the clock going, let it run down, and punched it in with Christian McCaffrey. Ideally, in two plays, but one would at least mean they got the score. That would have left the Bears with roughly a minute and a half to get down the field and score with no timeouts to burn. That still seems like a lot of time, but that would have made a lot more sense.
In this situation, scoring the touchdown was the right move. There was too much risk in not doing so, and the Bears could have mitigated it by using timeouts, letting the next series play out, and assuming the 49ers would score (which they probably would).
What were your thoughts during and after this? Were you screaming for Jennings to take a knee at the 1-yard line, or do you agree the situation doesn’t merit it?
