San Francisco 49ers quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo already fielded questions about potentially playing for a tie rather than the win against the Seattle Seahawks on Monday night — a game the Niners lost in overtime.
"It's hard to play for a tie," Garoppolo said. "I don't know if I've ever done that before, and I'm glad we went for the win."
The 49ers received the ball on their own 20-yard line with just under two minutes remaining in overtime. San Francisco could have run out the clock and stayed undefeated because Seattle didn't have any more timeouts.
They didn't, and the 49ers suffered their first loss of the year.
After Wednesday's practice, it was Kyle Shanahan's turn to deal with a similar question. The head coach was asked if he ever considered playing for a tie during overtime.
"When you say 'play for a tie,' do you mean just take three knees?" Shanahan asked.
The reporter clarified: "Or just run the ball three times."
"That's not necessarily playing for a tie," Shanahan responded. "If we would have thought three runs were the best play to go with, we would have done that. But just running, not trying to get yards, to run the clock off, I think you know that answer. I'm pretty sure that we all know that answer. I would hope everyone in the world would be pretty disappointed in that.
"When I look back at that, I wish we had the clock moving, and if we had incompletions, then I could take it over. I should have just called a play that we didn't have an incompletion on. It would have kept the clock running."
So, in short: No.
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