There were a lot of people whose moods changed significantly in the last 4 seconds of the Rams-49ers game on Sunday afternoon – not because the Rams lost, but because of the final score.
With 4 seconds left and the Rams trailing by 10 points, Sean McVay opted to kick a meaningless 38-yard field goal to make the final score 30-23. That might not seem like a big deal, but the spread just happened to be 7.5 points (or 7 points, depending on when you placed your bet).
It was a miraculous backdoor cover by the Rams, but McVay insists he wasn’t aware of the spread.
“Apparently, Artis (Twyman) told me there’s a lot of people in Vegas pissed off about that decision. I clearly was not aware of that stuff,” McVay said.
When asked about the decision Monday, he explained it by saying the Rams were planning to kick a field goal all along, but he hoped they would earlier so they’d have more time left for an onside kick.
“What we were trying to do is we were trying to be able to get a completion to where we kicked the field goal beforehand with the opportunity to be able to – if we had hit that deep in-breaking route, it really would’ve worked out the way that we wanted to,” McVay said. “We were going to try to kick a field goal once we got into field goal position to then be able to kick an onside and try to give ourselves the real opportunity to win the game. By the time it got down to it, didn’t anticipate that in-cut that we hit Puka running that long and just said, ‘Alright, go ahead and kick the field goal.’ Felt like it was an opportunity to be able to not leave Matthew (Stafford) susceptible to an unnecessary heave to the end zone and get an opportunity for our field goal operation. The initial goal was to try to get a two-for-one to where you end up getting into field goal range a little bit earlier with some of the play selections that we had and then ultimately be able to try to have an onside kick to then be able to go try to compete to tie or win the game.”
It would’ve been a lot funnier if McVay said he was just trying to stick it to 49ers bettors with the late cover, but his explanation makes sense. Even if he knew the spread, which nowadays is kind of hard not to know when watching a game, he wouldn’t have based his decisions on that.
… Right?
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