49ers vowed to halt frustrating late-game cycle in win vs. Seahawks originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area
SEATTLE — It almost was like déjà vu Thursday night.
At the end of the third quarter in the 49ers’ 36-24 win over the Seattle Seahawks, it appeared coach Kyle Shanahan and his team were headed down a familiar path with a healthy lead slipping away.
Linebacker Fred Warner and several teammates recognized the feeling of their past two losses against the Los Angeles Rams and Arizona Cardinals — and they vowed not to let it happen again.
“One thousand percent,” Warner said. “It sucked, but yes, it was something that felt familiar for sure, and I’m like, ‘Hey, we can go one of two ways right here. We can stand tall in a hostile environment in a game that we know we got to get, or we can settle for exactly how we’ve been playing in the last couple of losses that we’ve had.’
“That’s what I’m most probably proud of right now, is the way we stood up.”
The 49ers entered halftime with a 16-3 lead, and Brock Purdy and the offense opened the second half with a nine-play, 70-yard drive capped by a 10-yard George Kittle touchdown catch that stretched the lead to 20 points.
Then things appeared to go off the rails in all phases of the game, and a total 49ers collapse seemed imminent.
Lavishka Shenault returned the ensuing kickoff for a 97-yard touchdown, bringing the Seahawks within 13 points after the 49ers’ special-teams unit missed multiple tackles on the play.
The 49ers’ offense could muster just 19 yards on four plays on its next drive and was forced to punt. The Seahawks then answered with a 13-play, 94-yard touchdown drive that closed the 49ers’ lead to six.
Shanahan tried as much as he could to suppress the feeling that he’d been down the same road before.
“I’m not going to go to what’s happened on our last two losses,” Shanahan said. “Just staying locked in, not trying to get any negative feelings, and just try to do it one play at a time. Our goal is to be locked in the entire game regardless of what the score was, and I thought the guys played like that.”
Fullback Kyle Juszczyk, whose 6-yard TD run with 1:17 remaining in the game closed the door on a potential Seahawks comeback, shared that there was sideline talk about the responsibility the offense felt to win it.
“The message on our sideline was, ‘All right, we’re faced with this again, Let’s go take it,’ ” Juszczyk said. “ ‘Let’s not hope that we did enough already, that we built a big enough lead, and hopefully things work out and we get the win. No, let’s go cement this win, going in to score and put it on our shoulders.’
“That’s exactly what we did, and I’m happy it ended that way. That was definitely a point of emphasis.”
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