The San Francisco 49ers banished the demons of recent heartbreaking defeats in which they let leads slip and held on to see off the Seattle Seahawks on Thursday Night Football, overcoming a second-half fightback from the hosts and one of the most bizarre officiating snafus of recent memory.
With the Seahawks threatening to recover from a 20-point deficit and trailing just 23-17 in the third quarter, the 49ers punted to start the fourth quarter, with the ball downed by San Francisco at the 18-yard line. However, the 49ers challenged as the Seahawks' offense took the field, suggesting that the punt had flicked off the hand of return man Dee Williams before being downed by Jalen Graham .
Despite television replays clearly concurring with that assessment, the ball appearing to flick off Williams' finger, the officials upheld the play on the field instead of ruling it a muffed punt and handing possession to San Francisco in the red zone.
As it happened, the play did not prove consequential as the 49ers pulled away late to claim a 36-24 win. Had the Seahawks completed the comeback, the controversy around that play would have been much larger.
The explanation around what happened only made it more bemusing. Per Nick Wagoner of ESPN , the NFL's VP of Instant Replay said:
“Once we had the San Francisco challenge, we were looking to see if the returner did indeed touch the ball. We went through all available angles, and we get the raw feed from the truck. And there was not clear and obvious video evidence that the returner touched the ball. After looking at all available angles, we made the determination that we were going to stand on the call because there was not clear and obvious video evidence. Once Craig [Wrolstad] made his announcement and they came back from TV, the network had an enhanced shot that they did not send at all until after they played his announcement.”
In other words, the NFL command center in New York did not have access the same enhanced replays as Thursday Night Football broadcaster Amazon Prime Video.
Shanahan challenged the play after getting word from the 49ers' VP of football administration, Brian Hampton, that Williams had touched the ball.
Said Shanahan:
"It was awesome by Hamp, he said he could tell by how the guy's hand moved that the ball hit him, and that's all he saw. He couldn't 100 percent see the ball, but he said you could tell how the hand moved and, with it being Thursday Night Football, I felt for sure they'd have a bunch of camera angles. Once he believed that it happened we threw it, thinking that we'd get some better angles, then he just told me that they didn't. Then about two minutes later I heard all the guys in the box freaking out saying they heard another angle and it was a fumble."
Shanahan's words in essence sum up the baffling nature of what could have been a critical error in what was, for a short period, a close game.
In a marquee, island game, the NFL would be widely expected to have every camera angle at their disposal.
It is bizarre that is not the case and, after a near-miss in terms of this mistake affecting the outcome of the game, it is surely something the league should be quickly looking to rectify.
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