Eli Manning hit Larry Donnell for a 12-yard touchdown with 21 seconds to play as the New York Giants stunned the San Francisco 49ers Sunday night, 30-27.
49ers vs. Giants 2015 final score: Three things we learned from New York’s 30-27 win
Eli Manning threw the winning touchdown pass with 21 seconds to play.
The Giants have now won three straight to take over first place in the NFC East, while the 49ers have lost four straight.
Carlos Hyde gave the 49ers a 27-23 lead with 1:45 left, but they couldn’t finish the game.
The Giants had all three timeouts, but Manning faced the last drive with a banged-up receiver corps. Victor Cruz was in street clothes, while Rueben Randle and Odell Beckham were on the sidelines with hamstring problems.
Manning turned to Shane Vereen as his main target until Beckham returned with 45 seconds to go. Vereen got the Giants to the 20, and Beckham drew a pass interference call at the 12 on the next play.
Manning then hit Donnell in the back of the end zone for the winning score.
After a 3-3 first quarter, the Giants put together a pair of nice drives in the second quarter. The first one resulted in Eli Manning's 2-yard touchdown pass to Vereen, but the second one stalled before Josh Brown made it 13-3 with a field goal.
The Giants should have put the game away at the end of the first half, but they followed up a San Francisco mistake with a bigger one of their own. With 1:11 left in the half, the 49ers had second-and-1 at the Giants 4-yard line. Instead of giving Hyde a shot to pick up the yard and score a touchdown, San Francisco ran a rollout pass that Kaepernick had to throw away and then kicked a chip-shot field goal. As much trouble as the Niners are having scoring, they needed to take a shot at the end zone.
Sure enough, the Giants drove right down the field, and with 11 seconds left, Manning had time for one shot at the end zone. At worst, it was an easy field goal that could have made it 16-6 at the half. Instead, Manning tried to force a pass to Beckham and Tramaine Brock picked it off to keep the Niners within a touchdown.
Given some momentum, San Francisco went 88 yards on their first drive of the second half, with Kaepernick hitting Anquan Boldin to tie the game.
Manning seemed to put a halt to the Niners’ momentum with a 17-yard touchdown pass to Beckham, which OBJ celebrated in his usual low-key manner.
San Francisco, though, came right back to make it 20-20 with 11:53 to play. This time, it was the Giants who got conservative, kicking a 24-yard field goal on fourth-and-1 from the San Francisco 5-yard line to take a three-point lead with 4:37 to go.
Three things we learned
1) Odell Beckham can do more ridiculous things than you realized
Beckham caught his third quarter touchdown pass while running toward the center of the field. Somehow, within one step, he had made a 180-degree turn and sprinted around the defensive backs for a touchdown.
Unfortunately for the Giants, Beckham sustained a hamstring injury, either on the spin move or the celebration, and missed all but the last few seconds of the game.
2) The clocks are not placed well at MetLife Stadium
As the third quarter came to an end, Kaepernick realized that the play clock — located at field level -— was down to four seconds and he wasn’t going to get the play off. He did what most quarterbacks would do: He called a timeout.
What Kaepernick didn’t realize was that there were only two seconds left in the quarter — it was going to expire before the play clock would have hit zero. The problem is that there’s no game clock on field level at MetLife — you have to look up to the top of the first deck to see the two clocks next to each other.
3) Both of these teams have defensive issues
After a low-scoring first quarter, the teams spent the next 45 minutes of game time throwing long drives at each other. During the second half, either team could have won the game by getting two straight defensive stops, but neither came close.
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