San Francisco 49ers tight end Vance McDonald got into the end zone Sunday against the New England Patriots, and while his fourth score of the season helped him surpass his 2015 touchdown total, it does not remove the sting of the team being 1-9. The team has been close at the half in several games but still can’t stay consistent enough to pull out a win.
McDonald hauled in three of the six passes thrown his way for 46 yards and a touchdown, making him the top receiver in the game.
Kaepernick was sacked early and often and McDonald said that the Patriots defense was doing things that they hadn’t seen much in the first part of the season. He continued saying that there are constant discussions on the sidelines to make adjustments to correct those mistakes. He agrees with head coach Chip Kelly that the team needs that “extra strain” to correctly execute more plays. After all, it is a game of inches.
Here’s the entire transcript:
(Question inaudible)
Yeah, you come in at halftime, yeah. You feel like you're in it. It was such a weird game too, you know you never see rain but yeah. It is, we’re that close in so many levels, special teams, defense, and offense.
Halftime you’re just down three points, this quarter starts and five straight punts and three straight three and outs. What’s the difference in the second half?
Yeah, I mean it’s tough not having another look at it but we come in and Chip said it, and he’s kind of right. It’s almost just like the extra strain, and it’s all 11 guys whether it’s straining up front and giving Kap one more hitch for his delivery, or a receiver getting one more strain to get that much more separation. I don’t know. It is, it’s tough and because you are that close it’s even more frustrating but we’ll get there.
Is it sort of mystifying?
Mystifying by us? I don’t think so. Not internally, no, and Chip’s done a great job. Again I think I’ve talked about this before. We’re never chasing ghosts on anything statistic wise or flat out it’s one thing whether it’s the turnover battle, managing the ball, taking care of yourself in the redzone, and tonight it really is, it’s a game, and then third quarter we kind of, you know, three and outs on offense and then Tom does what he does.
Take us through the touchdown. It looked like a well thrown ball.
Yeah, it was man to man we practiced that route all week. We know the Patriots were going to play a lot of man and so yeah, That’s been a route that we’ve thrown to Kerley a lot so finally brought it to the tight end room and we could handle it from day one but yeah, it was exciting to execute that one for sure.
The five sacks early, was there anything that was talked about on the sidelines?
Yeah they were bringing a couple of pressures that we hadn’t necessarily seen or game planned for, not game planned for but we hadn’t brought a ton of early in the season or the first half. It really does, every football game, whether it’s getting blitzed or executing in the run game. There’s always adjustments being made early and a lot of talk and communication that happens so again it was something that we hadn't seen a lot of.