Niners coach Shanahan is satisfied with his first year.
The interview with Kyle Shanahan was not going well.
It wasn’t his fault, though. The 49ers’ head coach was polite, engaging and thoughtful during a 40-minute sitdown in his office at the team headquarters in Santa Clara.
But the purpose of the interview was to answer this question: What did Shanahan learn as a rookie head coach? His answers suggested this wouldn’t be much of a story.
For example, Shanahan couldn’t come up with any examples when asked a variety of questions: Was there anything he implemented last year that he wouldn’t have expected before he became a head coach? Anything he decided to scrap that he’d planned to do before he was hired? Anything he planned to tweak in his second year as a head coach? Nope, nope and nope. At one point, Shanahan, 38, the NFL’s second-youngest head coach, addressed exactly why he “felt real comfortable with how everything went last year.” His explanation: His background is why a story about what he learned in 2017 isn’t much of a story.
“I feel like I was a little
different,” Shanahan said, “because I’ve been waiting to be a head coach my whole life.”
It would be inaccurate to say Shanahan was born to be a head coach, but his ability to do so was born out of his circumstances.
He is the son of Mike Shanahan, who won two Super Bowls as the Broncos’ head coach and has more regular-season wins (170) than all but 13 coaches in NFL history. The elder Shanahan’s all-consuming job didn’t pull him away from his son years ago. It brought them so close that Kyle counted his dad as his “best friend” growing up.
It was often bring-your-kid-to-work day, and, at a young age, Kyle received a Ph.D. in the NFL. He absorbed the conversations among coaches, before the football talk went from meeting rooms to the Shanahans’ family room.
“Everything I asked at dinner was football,” Shanahan said. “When I was in eighth grade, I was drilling my dad about what free agents they should go for, or what draft picks made sense. So I’ve just always thought this way — it’s what I enjoy about football.
“And so when I got into a head coach role, I thought it was neat. I didn’t have a whole book, like, ‘I’m going to be like this. I’m going to say this on this day. I’m going to say this on that day.’ I didn’t have anything. I’ve just been the same way I’ve always been. I feel like I had prepared a lot for it.”
His preparation paid off in 2017, when he guided the 2-14 team he inherited to a 6-10 record while serving as head coach and offensive coordinator.
His performance in his latter role earned high marks. Despite starting Brian Hoyer or rookie C.J. Beathard at quarterback for 11 games before Jimmy Garoppolo took the job, the 49ers went from 31st to 12th in the NFL in total offense, their second-highest ranking since 2003.
Players credit Shanahan, whose people skills were questioned when he was hired, for keeping the locker room intact through the first 0-9 start in franchise history.
Shanahan wasn’t big on stirring speeches, but practical talk. When the 49ers became the first NFL team to lose five straight games by three points or fewer, he detailed the earlygame mistakes that magnified their late-game failures. His point? Everything matters, starting well before kickoff with the way they practiced.
“I had an idea what to do when situations came up, so I usually felt good about what I said to the team during the season,” Shanahan said. “Of course, you go back and think, ‘Could I have done that better?’ But a lot of situations came up in the year, and it was nice to know that I felt prepared for all of them.”
Shanahan felt prepared when he was hired in February 2017, but he sought advice from several experienced head coaches, most notably New England’s Bill Belichick.
After Belichick sent Shanahan a congratulatory text when he was hired by the 49ers, they arranged to meet at the NFL combine. Their get-together was in the aftermath of the Patriots’ win over the Falcons in Super Bowl 51, a game in which Shanahan was heavily criticized for his late-game play-calling as Atlanta’s offensive coordinator.
It was reported that Shanahan met Belichick to learn from the defeat, but Shanahan said that is inaccurate and the game was rarely discussed. Rather, he had a wide-ranging conversation with a five-time Super Bowl champ.
“We’d played against each other a number of times over the years, and there were things we really respect about each other,” Shanahan said. “And we talked a little X’s and O’s. And he was great because he knew I was a first-year head coach, and he gave me a lot of stuff that’s helped him and hurt him also, through trial and error.”
Eight months later, Belichick and Shanahan had a conversation that changed the course of Shanahan’s first season. In the offseason, Belichick had told the 49ers that Garoppolo wouldn’t be traded, but then Belichick contacted Shanahan just before the Oct. 31 trade deadline with a different message.
“I called (Belichick) back and he told me (Garoppolo) was available,” Shanahan said. “… So now he was available when he wasn’t earlier in the year. There really wasn’t much talk. It was just that: He wasn’t available and now he is. And that was intriguing.”
The call led to the 49ers giving up a second-round pick for Garoppolo, who led a 1-10 team to a 5-0 finish after he became the starter.
The trade was made two days after what Shanahan called his “lowest point” in the season. On Oct. 29, the 49ers had absorbed their second straight blowout loss, a 33-10 defeat in Philadelphia in which seven players didn’t finish because of injuries.
At the time, Shanahan didn’t see the addition of Garoppolo as a watershed moment. Last week, general manager John Lynch said on ESPN Radio, perhaps half-jokingly, that Shanahan was in “mourning” after the trade because it likely meant he couldn’t carry out his “master plan”: signing quarterback Kirk Cousins, whom he coached in Washington.
Shanahan, speaking before Lynch’s comments, said Garoppolo’s inexperience (two career starts) and pending free-agent status were reasons why he didn’t view the trade as a certain franchise-changer.
“It wasn’t in the moment,” Shanahan said. “We got a guy who is in the last year of his contract and there are only (eight) more games left. And we’re at a very low moment in terms of how good of an opportunity do we have to win these games? ... It was stressful to a degree.”
Shanahan said Garoppolo exceeded his expectations and “puts us in a better situation.”
It puts the 49ers in this situation: It’s no longer laughable to envision them soon contending for their first Super Bowl title since Mike Shanahan won his first championship as their offensive coordinator in January 1995.
Kyle Shanahan was close to winning his first title, but he ended up serving as a scapegoat after the Falcons squandered a 28-3 second-half lead to the Patriots nearly 14 months ago.
Asked about that loss, Shanahan provided a lengthy answer in which he talked extensively about working with his dad in Washington from 2010 through 2013, a tenure that ended with both being fired after a 3-13 season.
He termed the situation “toxic” and said he made it worse by focusing only on results, which he believes were destined to be poor in such a dysfunctional climate.
His takeaway: He needed to focus on the process and accept some things beyond his control, an outlook that helped him navigate a Super Bowl loss and an 0-9 start.
“I think it’s helped me become a better coach, it’s helped me become a better man, and it’s helped me live my life more consistently,” Shanahan said. “You realize you just work hard and do as well as you can, and that’s what you should be happy with.”
Shanahan also discussed the folly of tying self-worth to the approval of others, and his thoughtful and philosophical answer was in some ways surprising.
He remains, after all, a kid in headcoaching circles.
But when it comes to his job, Shanahan has long been an old soul.