Every Super Bowl loss is hard to swallow. San Francisco’s blown 10-point, fourth-quarter lead was especially difficult though. It was so bad, in fact, 49ers wide receiver Emmanuel Sanders likened his five or six rewatches of the game to a disaster movie.
“It’s like watching the Titanic and you hope the ship just doesn’t sink,” Sanders told reporters Wednesday during the team’s locker clean out. “And for some reason, the ship keeps sinking over and over.”
“I go back and watch it again, and you hope that all the plays that we left out there and the possible opportunities that we could’ve come out victorious. But we didn’t and that’s the reality.”
Sanders was nearly on the receiving end of one of those opportunities to win. On a third-and-10 with 1:40 left in the fourth quarter and the 49ers trailing by four, Garoppolo aired out a deep shot for Sanders, who’d beat a pair of defenders for a would-be touchdown. The quarterback overshot his receiver by several yard, and was sacked on the ensuing fourth down, effectively ending the game.
That was just one of several plays though. As difficult as it was to watch in the moment, going back to it makes them seem even closer to victory. If for players it’s anything like watching Jack sink into the sea again and again, that has to be impossibly agonizing.