Playoff spoilers
DENVER – Now Mike Shanahan wishes he hadn’t gotten his wish.
Denver’s coach wanted Kansas City to win on Sunday so that the Broncos wouldn’t back into the playoffs but be motivated to play their best football.
Instead, the Broncos tumbled into the offseason when Joe Nedney’s 36-yard field goal with 1:56 left in overtime sent the San Francisco 49ers past the stunned Broncos 26-23.
“Well, you want to play your best football this time of year,” Shanahan said. “If we played like we did today, we wouldn’t go very far in the playoffs. If we played like we did last couple of weeks, we had a chance to do something special.”
Now, their AFC rivals in Kansas City will have that opportunity. Denver’s fifth loss in seven games made the Chiefs (9-7) the final wild-card team.
Had the Chiefs not beaten Jacksonville, the Broncos would be heading to the postseason, even with their loss.
All the Broncos (9-7) needed was a win over the double-digit underdog Niners (7-9) or even a tie to earn a spot in the playoffs but they couldn’t score on three trips inside the Niners 5 and blew an early 13-0 lead.
“Whenever you get on the 1-yard twice and in the red zone three times and you don’t score no touchdowns that’s pathetic,” Broncos rookie receiver Brandon Marshall said. “We have a lot of work to do.
“San Francisco?” Marshall added. “Come on, San Francisco? It was a perfect setup for us.”
And an absolute letdown.
“We had some opportunities early to put the game away,” Shanahan said. “Obviously, San Francisco did a fine job keeping us out.”
Of the end zone and the playoffs.
“You better believe it felt good taking them out,” Niners quarterback Alex Smith said. “If we were going to be home for the playoffs we wanted them to be right with us.”
With a sputtering ground game, the Broncos were unable to run out the clock in overtime.
“We weren’t thinking about a tie,” Cutler said. “That was the last thing on our minds. You play another 15 minutes, somebody’s going to score most of the time.”
San Francisco got the ball back with 4:38 left in overtime and drove 42 yards to the Denver 18, where Nedney kicked his fourth field goal. As it sailed through the uprights, Denver safety John Lynch smashed his helmet on the grass, a crushing end to Denver’s dreams of a franchise-record fourth straight trip to the playoffs.
Niners coach Mike Nolan said that if Chiefs coach Herm Edwards gets a bonus for reaching the playoffs, “I want half of it.”
“It’s terrible, it really is,” said Broncos receiver Rod Smith, one of a handful of holdovers from the Broncos’ championship teams of the late 1990s.
“We’re better than that football team, by far. We didn’t play like it today. It ended our season. We ended our own season. It’s hard to take that. We were in control of our own fate and we chose not to move forward and there’s nothing you can do about it now.”