The San Francisco 49ers and Seattle Seahawks first matchup of the season didn't fall short on intrigue.
It was perfect, then, that Sunday's back-and-forth tussle at Lumen Field came down to a matter of inches on a play that required replay review.
San Francisco held a 32-29 lead and Seattle faced a fourth-and-10 from the 50 with 54 seconds remaining. Quarterback Sam Darnold hit wide receiver Cooper Kupp short of the sticks. Kupp shook one tackle and dove for the first-down marker as he was being shoved out of bounds by 49ers safety Malik Mustapha.
Officials ruled Kupp just short of the line to gain, but it went to review where the call on the field stood. NFL Vice President of Instant Replay Mark Butterworth explained to ESPN's Brady Henderson
after the game why the call wasn't overturned to a Seattle first down.
"With all of our available angles, including our boundary line cameras, there was no video evidence to overturn the call on the field," Butterworth told Henderson. "A key thing to remember is we are looking at when the ball breaks from green, the field of play, to white, out of bounds. There was nothing clear and obvious to overturn the call on the field."
Replays showed Kupp vaulting forward and getting the ball past the line to gain, but Butterworth confirmed "it's not where his body part lands out of bounds, it's where the ball breaks the plane from inbounds to out of bounds."
"The line to gain we treat differently than the goal line," he said. "The runner gets goal line extended with a body part in the end zone. For the line to gain we are looking at where the ball breaks from green to white."
With that in mind, it was impossible to find an angle where Kupp definitively had the ball in bounds beyond the line to gain. It was a perfectly strange ending to a wild contest that featured seven turnovers, 38 points off turnovers, and the most points in a game with 520 yards or fewer since 2003.
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This article originally appeared on Niners Wire: What refs said about wild play at end of 49ers vs. Seahawks game
