SHANAHAN HAS ACHIEVED MUCH AT 44 AND MUST WIN TO AVOID A GHOSTLY 0-3
It’s hard to believe he blew two major Super Bowl leads, and this time, he can’t afford another fourth-quarter lapse with the 49ers if he wants to avoid infamy like Marv Levy, Bud Grant and Dan Reeves
When his beard turns gray and pale, with hair uncovered by an old truckers’ cap, Kyle Shanahan looks like a grizzled football coach. He does not look 44, younger than Tom Brady and 21 years younger than Andy Reid. It’s stunning to realize seven Super Bowls have passed since he held a 28-3 edge over New England and blew the game, as Atlanta’s offensive coordinator. And that three years later with the 49ers, he was outscored 21-0 in the final six-plus minutes and tanked a lead to Kansas City.
So, when he’s not much older than Taylor Swift, Shanahan is stuck in his dosage. Rarely has a coach who has accomplished so much in life’s springtime taken on the look of a ghost who’d better win next Sunday. His complexion suggests he can’t afford to go 0-and-3, a night in Las Vegas determining the difference between his standing as a superb coach and a big-game loser. What’s really crazy: Shanahan is a prevalent mind in his sport, with an innovative offense that dispenses assistants to other NFL teams. His father, Mike, won two Super Bowls in Denver. When will his son, who watched when he wasn’t far removed from backyard throwing, win a third?
Favored to beat the Chiefs and Patrick Mahomes, though by precious little at the sportsbook, Shanahan is toughest on himself to engineer enough offense to survive this time. He has compiled extreme talent on both sides — Christian McCaffrey, Deebo Samuel, George Kittle and Trent Williams on offense; Fred Warner and Nick Bosa on defense — and the 49ers have enjoyed two recent weeks off. Logistically, they could beat a fatigued team that played each week from Nov. 20 through the AFC championship game. Personally, they might capture Jason Kelce in a frenzied time when he awaits Taylor from Tokyo, if airport jets allow her plane space. He is 8-3 in the postseason, behind only Vince Lombardi in winning percentage after at least 10 games. Years pass. He keeps winning in his 40s.
Yet, this is a man who has lost twice in February and nearly lost to Green Bay and Detroit last month. “I am so mad,” Shanahan said after losing to the Chiefs in 2020. Four years later, he doesn’t want another thud when no one remembers the losers.
“There’s been a lot of good things, but the ultimate goal, we always say it, there’s only one team happy at the end of the year,” Shanahan said. “We’re real proud of a lot of things that we’ve accomplished here in the last five years or so. We still want to be that one team that’s happy. No matter what you accomplish, if you don’t win that Super Bowl, it’s always disappointing.”
He’d be distraught to lose again. Marv Levy, Bud Grant and Dan Reeves lost four Super Bowls without winning once. Don Shula won twice but lost four. Shanahan is gifted enough, at a ripe age, to keep arriving on center stage. He’s also a historian, knowing how those men suffered and how thrilled he was when his father won with John Elway. “I think if you’re not hard on yourself, it’s kind of hard to put in the work and stuff that it takes I think to be an NFL coach,” he said. “I think most of us are pretty hard on ourselves. We’re kind of perfectionists because you know how hard it is to win for everybody. So you demand a lot out of everybody, just like you demand a lot out of yourself. It’s a very fine line of winning and losing so you question every single thing, every moment, and that always starts with yourself.”
The issue, again, will be his quarterback. Is Shanahan exposing the same flaw by thrusting Brock Purdy down America’s jugular? He has reminded us of his fixation, from the moment he told assistants in the war room that he was taking Purdy with the final choice of the 2022 draft. He had traded three first-round picks to take Trey Lance in 2021. Jimmy Garoppolo was the starter. Didn’t matter. Purdy became No. 262, frustrating personnel people around the facility.
The love affair soon went maddening. Shanahan called his owner, Jed York, with extraordinary news after the first week of training camp. “He’s like, ‘I think our third-string quarterback is our best quarterback,’ ” York said. “I’m like, ‘OK. What does that mean?’ One thing that owners don’t love to hear when they’ve invested money and or draft picks or both into people is that the last pick in the draft is the guy we think is the best. That’s generally not great news.” What it meant was Garoppolo would be shipped away, after struggling against Mahomes in the Super Bowl loss. Lance was lost to an injury and became a project who eventually was shipped out, despite the three top draft picks.
Mr. Irrelevant has become Mr. Super Bowl Sunday, taking over in Week 13 and leading the 49ers to last year’s NFC title game. An elbow injury flattened him, but here he is, after struggling against Green Bay and in the first half against Detroit, finally ready to confirm Shanahan as a quarterback swindler. Or, to prove again that Purdy is the latest QB to lose ugly, as the Falcons and Garoppolo did. When Mahomes is the leader in full command, gunning for his third trophy at 28, no one forgets his dominance against Baltimore and Buffalo while Purdy was embracing incompetence. What if Shanahan loses again because Purdy should be throwing snowballs in Ames, Iowa? “There’s been a lot of weird situations over there in San Francisco, I’ll just leave it at that,” said Garoppolo, who was shipped to Vegas before another injury sidelined him.
This is weird, yep. But York loves Shanahan. The 49ers were haunted for years after Jim Harbaugh left town, dealing with Colin Kaepernick’s sideline kneeling and poor coaching choices in Jim Tomsula and Chip Kelly. “I love Kyle,” York said. “It would be hard for me to say that I’ve enjoyed working with anybody more than I enjoy working with Kyle. I think Kyle’s a phenomenal coach, and he’s done a phenomenal job with our club. I mean, I don’t really care what the outside perception is. It is very, very difficult to make the playoffs. It’s very difficult to get to a championship. It’s very difficult to win a championship game. It’s more difficult to get to this game. And I think Kyle’s results more than speak for themselves.”
Just two weeks ago, Purdy couldn’t hold the ball in the rain against the Packers. “I thought that was as big of a mental challenge and a character game as any game I’ve been a part of,” Shanahan said. “When things aren’t going how you want on offense, defense, special teams, the rain, guys slipping a lot, losing Deebo early, having to change some things with that. Just some of the mistakes we had to overcome, it was a gut check for everybody.” Here’s another: When the 49ers trail by at least eight points in the fourth quarter, his record is 0-38.
The players will gather for more team meetings all week. They love working for him. “Phenomenal,” Kittle said. “The way he describes football, the way that he teaches football to offense, defense and special teams guys. He’s been such a great teacher. It’s really fun to be around a person like that because I’ve been playing football since I was 5 years old. But I’ve learned more in the seven years — specifically, those last three or four years — than I probably did my first 26.”
They know. They perform. The Super Bowl will be close with his schematics. On defense, where the 49ers allowed 31 points in beating the Lions, coordinator Steve Wilks wants to excel for Shanahan after replacing gung-ho DeMeco Ryans and Robert Saleh, who became NFL head coaches. “Collectively as a team, I can tell you as a defense it's unacceptable,” Wilks said. “We talked about that. I wish I could tell these guys on play four, on play 27, this is what's going to happen. You don't know. So, we've got to make sure that we play every down as if it's the difference in the ballgame. And you could see on those particular plays, it wasn't to our standard. Those guys understand and know that and, quite honestly, it was embarrassing.”
Once again, avenues are reversed against Kyle Shanahan. He might not know it, but when Bill Belichick left the Patriots at 71 and Pete Carroll left the Seahawks at 72, he soared as one of the league’s longest-tenured coaches. Last spring, when Purdy was recovering from surgery, his coach sat him down and suggested the 49ers might chase Brady — to play at 46, older than his coach. “That meant so much to me. I remember him saying, if we can get Tom Brady, we're going to try to get him,” Purdy told ESPN. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, he's the GOAT. I get it.’ But something deep down inside me was sort of like, ‘Dude, I just showed you that I can play well in this system. And we were one game away from the Super Bowl.’ ... More than anything, I was like, ‘OK, now let's go.’ ’’
Consider it a stroke of inspiration.
Let’s see if the old man, at 44, was brilliant or nuts.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.