In ’95, Rice, Young led seemingly inevitable rout.
‘We knew it’: S.F. met Chargers in ’95 knowing it would be a rout
MIAMI — It’s known as Super Bowl XXIX, but many of the winners from that game might call it a fourquarter victory lap.
Ask the 1994 49ers. Head coach George Seifert’s team won the NFL title when it beat the twotime defending champion Cowboys two weeks earlier in the NFC Championship Game.
The Dallas Cowboys were their equals. And the San Diego Chargers, they knew, would be eviscerated.
The final score: 49ers 49, Chargers 26.
“The Super Bowl had already been played,” former 49ers cornerback Eric Davis said in a phone interview. “We knew it. You knew it. Everyone knew it. Man, the Chargers knew it.”
The confidence wasn’t contained to players.
Steve Young remembers that offensive coordinator Mike Shanahan concluded their reviewthegameplan session in the locker room and forecast the crushing to come.
“We finished,” Young recalled, “and he turned to me and said, ‘We are going to thrash these guys. You’re going to throw eight touchdowns.’ ”
For a competitive standpoint, there was nothing dramatic about the 49ers’ romp over the Chargers on Jan. 29, 1995: The 49ers scored their first touchdown on the game’s third play, went ahead 140 on their seventh snap and Young set a Super Bowl record with six passing scores.
Chargers defensive end Leslie O’Neal, in the aftermath, termed it an “execution.” Last week, 49ers middle linebacker Gary Plummer likened it to a “cat toying with a mouse.”
However, the blowout is
being remembered this week, partly because of its historical ties to this year’s team. Wednesday is the 25year anniversary of that game in Miami, which marked the 49ers’ fifth and last Super Bowl victory. And it comes four days before the 49ers have a chance to end the franchise’s title drought against Kansas City in Super Bowl LIV in Miami.
The locale, Hard Rock Stadium, then known as Joe Robbie Stadium, is the same. And there’s a strong connection between the 49ers’ offensive playcallers: On Sunday, head coach Kyle Shanahan hopes to be screaming at Jimmy Garoppolo to pad his recordbreaking numbers in his first Super Bowl win as a starter, just as his dad, Mike, did with Young.
“When George pulled me out, I was elated and celebrating,” Young said. “I talk on the phone to Mike and he’s like, ‘Get back in the game. We’ve got to score two more.’ I’ve always said, ‘If you want to score six, target for eight.’ Kyle learned that.”
And Young had learned everything, a few times over, before the game. Based on their exhaustive preparation, Young said he called his former coordinator Mike “Let’s Go Over It Again” Shanahan.
“I kept going over it again, to the point where he’d say, ‘Please keep away from me,’ ” Shanahan said, laughing. “… I can still see him sitting at his locker, staring at the game plan.”
Sunday’s game is expected to be competitive: The Chiefs are onepoint favorites, which would be the fourthsmallest point spread in Super Bowl history.
The largest spread: The 49ers were 181⁄2point favorites over the Chargers in January 1995. That topped the 18point spread from the Super Bowl III when the Colts were upset by the Jets and quarterback Joe Namath, who had guaranteed the victory.
Before Super Bowl XXIX, however, the 49ers were the only team with such swagger.
The AFC had lost 10 straight Super Bowls and the Chargers were unlikely candidates to snap that streak: They arrived as the only team in Super Bowl history not ranked in the NFL’s top 10 in total offense or defense.
The game was played during a fourseason stretch during which either the Cowboys or 49ers won the Super Bowl, with Dallas winning three titles. The 49ers and Cowboys met in the NFC title game for three straight seasons.
“The NFC Championship Game from 1992 to (1994) — that was the Super Bowl,” Davis said. “We were far superior to every other team in the league. It wasn’t a disrespect thing. It was the dudes we had were just better than everyone else’s.”
The Chargers’ quarterback was Stan Humphries, their No. 1 wideout was Tony Martin and their running back was Natrone Means. The 49ers countered with two Hall of Famers, Young and Jerry Rice, and running back Ricky Watters, a Hall of Fame semifinalist.
The Chargers had lost to the 49ers in the preseason (3024) and regular season (3815). In the regularseason meeting, played seven weeks earlier, Young had thrown for 304 yards and two touchdowns.
In the Super Bowl, Young matched that touchdown total before the smoke had cleared from the pregame pyrotechnics. He tossed a 44yard touchdown pass to Rice and a 51yard touchdown pass to Watters to cap the first two drives. It was 140 after less than five minutes.
“Going to the sideline, we had said, ‘These guys can’t cover us,’ ” tight end Brent Jones said. “We thought they would have something spectacularly different than they showed us during the regular season, but they showed the exact same defense. Are you kidding me?”
Said Young: “They shot off fireworks and the smoke never left. With Jerry’s first touchdown, I couldn’t see. I had to ask (tackle) Harris (Barton) if he scored.”
On defense, the 49ers had stocked their roster that season by signing a group of decorated players headlined by Hall of Fame cornerback Deion Sanders and linebacker Ken Norton Jr. The additions also included defensive end Rickey Jackson, another future Hall of Famer, and Plummer.
They didn’t need insider knowledge to handle San Diego, but Plummer still provided it.
Plummer had signed with the 49ers after spending his first eight seasons with the Chargers. Before kickoff, he sat down separately with Shanahan and offensive line coach Bobb McKittrick to discuss San Diego’s defensive tendencies and provide a playerbyplayer scouting report. Plummer says his talk with Shanahan set up Watters’ 51yard TD catch in which he ran by linebacker Junior Seau.
Meanwhile, on the field, Plummer was barking out San Diego’s plays. He specifically recalls recognizing wide receiver Mark Seay would be the primary receiver on a deep curl route and began screaming “Dig!” before the snap.
Humphries “still threw the ball and Seay cut his route short by about 5 yards short because at the snap, I just turned and ran right at him,” Plummer said. “And he was so frustrated. And you could see it so early.”
The postgame commentary reflected that San Diego wasn’t in the same league.
Barton was “pissed off ” the 49ers had only 28 points at halftime. And offensive tackle Steve Wallace regretted that San Diego’s defense didn’t provide more resistance.
“We had three or four plays we didn’t get a chance to call,” Wallace said. “We scored too fast.”
The Chargers were in awe of a team that had become the third in NFL history to score 500 points in a season.
“You stop the deep passes and they throw it to the backs,” safety Stanley Richard said. “You stop that and Young scrambles 10 or 15 yards. Then once that’s over, they start all over again.”
Said cornerback Darrien Gordon: “They’re probably one of the best teams that ever played. We felt embarrassed, but they embarrassed a lot of people.”
The 49ers’ pregame confidence wasn’t shared by every player and coach.
Plummer, who was motivated to not have his exChargers teammates wave Super Bowl rings in his face, thought the 49ers were too confident. At 35, he was a nineyear veteran who believed, correctly, that the game could be his only chance to win a Super Bowl.
Early in the week, during a practice at the University of Miami, Plummer — a Cal alum born in Fremont — exploded because he thought the 49ers’ scout team was lackadaisically running the Chargers’ plays.
“Someone told me to calm down and I went berserk,” Plummer said. “I was telling coaches to f— off. I was like ‘You don’t what the f— you’re talking about. I practiced against this offense. … I know exactly how they’re doing it and it’s not like this.’ Seifert tried to get me pulled off the practice field and I wouldn’t leave.”
Seifert was also highly strung because he was coaching for his job. The 49ers had gone four straight seasons without winning a Super Bowl, and owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr. had made it known Seifert had to win a title that season or, as Seifert said, “move onto into the sunset.”
When had DeBartolo said that to Seifert?
“It was never a direct comment,” Seifert said, “but there are different ways to communicate something. And I think I felt the communication in many different ways.”
Seifert didn’t feel comfortable until late in the fourth quarter. At that point, Young, who had emerged from Joe Montana’s shadow, asked for some assistance on the sideline: “Somebody take the monkey off my back, please.”
Plummer pretended to pull it off Young’s jersey as the 49ers celebrated a coronation they saw coming.
“I remember a reporter from Sports Illustrated asked me at what point did we think we had control of that game,” Davis said. “And I said, ‘Right after we beat Dallas.’ There was no way the San Diego Chargers were going to beat us.” San Francisco Chronicle staff writers Ann Killion and Ron Kroichick
contributed to this story.