THEY’RE BACK
49ers ride a wave of exuberant moves all the way to the Super Bowl
You know your team is going great when its biggest worry going into the Super Bowl is that it might run out of touchdown celebrations. Anyone know a good choreographer?
So it is for the 49ers, who surfed, danced, spiked and posed their way to a stunning 3420 win over the Green Bay Packers Sunday at rockin’androllin’ Levi’s Stadium.
The 49ers won the NFC championship Sunday and will take their talents to Miami’s South Beach to play the hyperdynamic Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl on Feb. 2.
The 49ers don’t plan to change their feelgood M.O. for the Super Bowl.
“I gotta plan something good, man,” said wide receiver Kendrick Bourne, the team’s No. 1 dancer. “I can’t get into the end zone if I’m in the Super Bowl and do nothin’.”
Confident? Oh, yeah. The 49ers and their fans are forgiven if they’re starting to feel like theirs is a team of destiny. The 49ers clobbered the Packers and their future Hall of Fame quarterback Aaron Rodgers, taking a 270 lead by halftime. The Packers had come in riding a sixgame win streak.
How can the 49ers not feel like they’re soaring on a special wind? Raheem Mostert, their emerging offensive superstar, started this season as the team’s fourthstring running back, barely making the squad, and only because of his grunt work on special teams.
Mostert, a star surfer as a high schooler, has led the 49ers back to his home state of Florida. He blasted through gaping holes in the Packers’ defense for 220 yards on 29 carries. Oh, and four touchdowns.
Raheem Mostert? Seriously? Six teams cut this guy before the 49ers gave him a whirl this season, and he’s really whirling.
Now the nation’s fans get a dream matchup in Miami, featuring the NFL’s two most entertaining squads. The
plucky upstart 49ers come at you with coach Kyle Shanahan’s dazzling card tricks, and a tacklemonster defense anchored by rookie phenom Nick Bosa.
The Chiefs have their own growing sense of destiny. They will arrive in Florida with the coolest newage quarterback in the game, Patrick Mahomes, executing the trickerations of coach Andy Reid.
The 49ers last went to the Super Bowl in 2013, losing to the Baltimore Ravens. The most recent of San Francisco’s five Super Bowl wins was a century ago, in 1995. In Miami. They also won in Miami in 1989.
The Chiefs’ lone Super Bowl win, and last trip to the big time, was in 1970.
The 49ers were 412 last season — remember? Then they flipped a magical switch. They picked up some new guys, survived a rash of midseason injuries, and now have a crunch, a chemistry and a depth of talent that are the envy of the football world.
The 49ers are enjoying the heck out of the ride. Mostert celebrates his touchdowns by pantomiming a surfer catching a wave. Other team celebrations include a group photoop pose and a synchronized multiplayer spike.
For football fans who are offended by this cheeky exuberance, the 49ers don’t care. They are having a ball, and Shanahan, rather than tolerating the high jinks, rates his favorite touchdown dances.
“If you have fun with it,” Bourne said, “the results you want come easier, but if we uptight and feel like we playing under pressure, everything’s going to be tougher.”
The NFL is a passing league, the experts say, but the 49ers’ running attack has taken the world by surprise. In their pre
the Vikings, the 49ers ran a stunning 47 times for 186 yards.
Sunday the 49ers simply ran the football down the Packers’ trachea. Fortytwo rushes for 285 yards. Mostert had 160 yards by halftime and finished with 220, on 29 carries.
This is the kind of ’tude the 49ers are rocking: They scored their first touchdown by giving Mostert the ball on thirdand8, an obvious passing down. Joe Staley sealed off a linebacker on a trap play and Mostert sprinted 36 yards for a TD and a 70 lead.
Staley, the left tackle, said that play was the turning point. He said the game plan was to run early in the game on a couple of thirdandlongs, to surprise the Packers.
“It was huge for us,” Staley said of Mostert’s 36yard zip, adding, “We felt that was going to kind of take them out of their exotic passrush packages and ... create more of a vanilla defensive front for us.”
The 49ers feasted on the vanilla. In the second quarter, they ran the ball on 11 consecutive plays (they did pass once during that sequence, but the play was wiped out by a Green Bay pass interference penalty).
Quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo played the role of blackjack dealer. He threw a preposterously low total of eight passes.
The Super Bowl will be a whole different deal for the 49ers. In their two playoff wins, the 49ers’ defense teed off on dropback quarterbacks. Mahomes is a supermobile, offscript genius. After leading backtoback miracle comeback wins the last two weeks, he is everybody’s pick as the league’s most dynamic and feared offensive weapon.
Bookmakers have already made the Chiefs a slight favorite, by about two points. If the 49ers pull it off, they bring home the Bay Area’s seventh championship in the last decade — after three by the Giants and three by the Warriors.
The 49ers are rolling off two big playoff wins, but the Chiefs aren’t the Vikings or the Packers. The 49ers’ destiny will be decided in Miami. Surf ’s up.