COLLAPSE SCOTT OSTLER
Unhappy ending: Don’t judge the 49ers’ season on one bad quarter
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — If you take a great book and slap a sloppy ending onto it, you’re going to drop off the bestseller list like someone clipped your elevator cable. If the final chapter of “MobyDick” had the great white whale splashing the tourists at Sea World for laughs and sardines, you’re headed for Clunker City, Herman Melville.
And so it was in Super Bowl LIV on Sunday for the 49ers, and for the author of San Francisco’s wouldbe miracle season, coach Kyle Shanahan.
The 49ers’ dreams, and Shanahan’s coronation as king of football masterminds, came crashing down in nine lightningfast minutes that seemed to take forever, as the Kansas Chiefs turned a 2010 deficit into a 3120 win.
The Chiefs and Missouri are ecstatic. The 49ers are devastated. They’ll never get this one back, and Shanahan, who earned every glowing adjective typed next to his name this season, saw all that gold tarnished in a heartbeat.
Three years ago, Shanahan, as offensive coordinator of the Atlanta Falcons, put his fingerprints on a crushing Super
Bowl loss. Combining that game’s fourth quarter and overtime with Sunday night’s fourth quarter, Shanahan’s two Super Bowl teams were outscored 460.
Does that make the 49ers’ season a failure? It appeared to feel that way to Joe Staley, Richard Sherman, Emmanuel Sanders and other 49ers in postgame interviews. The pain was evident and raw. Losing the biggest game is the biggest hurt.
Now questions will be asked. Can Shanahan win the big one? Does he have the football playcalling equivalent of a baseball hitter with warningtrack power? Can this be considered a great season, or a book ruined by its ending?
Of the players I heard, Kyle Juszczyk sounded the most positive note.
“It definitely hurts,” Juszczyk said, “but at the end of the day, that’s exactly the position we wanted to be in, so I think that makes it hurt a little bit more, but you couldn’t have asked to be in a better situation.”
He called this 49ers team “incredibly special. This team is a team that I wouldn’t trade for any (other). Without a doubt, (this season was) the most fun I’ve had in the NFL. I absolutely love my teammates, I love our coaching staff — what we were able to do this year was still very special, regardless of the result of this game. I think we really established something. I see a bright future from here.”
In making a case for Shanahan, Juszczyk is Exhibit A. He’s a fullback, a dinosaur position that was out of vogue in the NFL until this season, when Shanahan got his hands on the Ivy Leaguer and turned him into an incredible weapon.
Sunday, after not touching the ball in two playoff games,
Juszczyk, always the lead blocker in the running game, caught three passes for 39 yards.
But losers will always be secondguessed, and in the case of Shanahan in Sunday’s game, firstguessed.
When he elected to play it safe just before halftime and go into the locker room tied 1010, eyebrows were raised. Instead of having close to two minutes (and three timeouts) to try to eke out another score, Shanahan declined to call a timeout, took the ball with just under a minute left, and sat on it.
That looked like it might become irrelevant when the 49ers came out in the third quarter and scored a touchdown and kicked a field goal for that 2010 lead.
But the 49ers were playing the Chiefs, who in three games have carved out a reputation as maybe the greatest comeback team in NFL playoff history, digging themselves out of three Grand Canyon holes to emerge as Super Bowl champs.
And the 49ers have powered to a rep as the bestrunning team in football, behind Shanahan’s dazzling playcalling, but when they needed the run to keep the ball out of the Chiefs’ hands at the end, the magic was gone.
“They played better situational football,” Juszczyk said. “That’s kind of what it boiled down to.”
Did Shanahan blow it? Is Jimmy Garoppolo the guy to take this team to the next step? Those questions might go down easier if one harks back to the questions being asked at the beginning of the season, like: Who should be fired first, Shanahan or general manager John Lynch? The clear consensus: Fire Lynch now, wait ’til the end of the season to fire Shanahan, then cut Garoppolo.
On Shanahan’s side of the ledger is the first 75 quarters of this season, and even more remarkable, the previous two seasons. As the 49ers under the rookie (and then sophomore) head coach were going 1022 those first two seasons, the players never lost faith.
They saw something a lot of outsiders didn’t — Shanahan’s faith in them, and his plan, and his heart.
“Kyle’s our guy, no matter what,” Juszczyk said. “He’s a major, major reason we’re here, and he’ll be a major reason we end up getting back.”
Shanahan has done enough to establish his chops as a bestselling author, but now he has to overcome those lastchapter blues.
Scott Ostler is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: sostler@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @scottostler