© Cary Edmondson-USA TODAY Sports
Had the 49ers not dropped the ball seven times, they would likely not have lost 27-24 to the Seattle Seahawks. Without Emmanuel Sanders and George Kittle, the team’s deficiencies in the receiving department glared. The main culprits were Kendrick Bourne and Dante Pettis.
Bourne had two drops, both of which should have been intercepted in key situations. Only one was, but it turned the game in the Seahawks’ favor, setting them up for their first lead at 14-7. He did, however, catch a touchdown, a two-point conversion and convert a key first down on the 49ers’ first drive of the game.
Pettis, meanwhile, had a goose egg. He dropped a first down catch on 3rd-and-14, and on the 49ers’ final drive of the game, he failed to haul in a crucial second down pass from Jimmy Garoppolo. While the throw was difficult to secure, head coach Kyle Shanahan said, in no uncertain terms, that it was a ball Pettis needed to catch.
“The quarterback’s always going to look at himself and try to see how much better ball placement he can have but when a ball touches the receiver’s hands, I mean the receiver needs to make that play and I know our guys are capable of doing it,” Shanahan said. “And we had some big [drops] last night. That really hurt us.”
The final drive
Shanahan said in hindsight, he wished he’d have just taken a triplet of knees to end the game in a tie, but that the first- and second-down play calls on the final drive were designed to be easy receptions to get the clock moving.
Instead, the 49ers had three-straight incompletions, turning a drive with 1:50 on the clock and no Seahawks timeouts into a less-than 20 second runoff that allowed Wilson and Seattle to win the game.
“Obviously when you only take a few seconds off the clock and give it back, I wish I would have taken three knees instead of doing that,” Shanahan said. “So you always look at that in hindsight, but you know we were very well aware of the situation we knew the time on the clock. That first down, both we were going to two conservative underneath passes, the first one got tipped, the second one was a little more disappointing.
“I think there’s no doubt we need to be able to make that catch running through that ball. And if we do, then we’ll let the clock run down till a minute left before we try our third-and-three, which could have been a big help. But once we get that tip on first down and we get that drop on second down, now its third-and-10 with 1:42 left, so running the ball there on third-and-10, the best case scenario you’re still giving it back to Russell, and Russell with a minute, when all he needs is a field goal isn’t much different to me as 1:42. So definitely wasn’t expecting to have two incompletions on those first two downs.”
Bourne will keep getting the ball, but Pettis? Shanahan still waiting
With Bourne—who took ownership of his errors after the game—Shanahan said it was a concentration issue.
“When a guy with really good hands drops it, it’s not because he has bad hands,” Shanahan said. “So then you look into why it was and it usually comes back to their eyes and their vision and concentration or someone ripped it out and that’s not what happened, and Bourne, I’ll always put him up there. I think Bourne has as good of hands anyone in this league and sometimes when you have that, you don’t focus you don’t concentrate on it because you’re never scared of dropping it. That’s why you see some guys like Odell Beckham at times, I know he’s had more drops than anyone in the league and that guy’s hands are as good as anyone so those are things you got to account for.”
Despite those lapses, Shanahan said he expects to continue to feed him the ball.
“It’s not okay. Those are two very big drops that Bourne had,” Shanahan said. “That doesn’t mean that we’re not going to keep going to him. He’s a guy who can catch the ball. He’s made a lot of big catches for us and made a really two big catches in that game leading up to that point. But that was a huge change, the pick that bounced off his hands that would have been explosive and then the drop inside the 10 that would have given us a chance to have first-and-goal going for the lead, so hopefully he’ll learn from that. He’ll make sure to look at that regardless of his confidence in his hands and make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
Shanahan was far less impressed with Pettis, who he’s gone back and forth on in terms of defending and calling him out for needing to be better. At this point, the second-year wide out has appeared to have regressed.
“He’s one of the guys that I believed in the most that’s why he’s here, and he’s had his opportunities,” Shanahan said. “The more he doesn’t take advantage of his opportunities, the less opportunities he gets. But he did get a couple last night because of injury. And I didn’t think he made them, so we’ll see how this week goes, but Dante has the ability, but we’re waiting for him to pick it up and have a consistency and take advantage of some of these opportunities gone.”