Furor over 49ers’ OT choice is garbage
LAS VEGAS – Exceptional a head coach as Kyle Shanahan is, he’s probably never going to be the GOAT ... particularly at a time when Andy Reid always seems to have his number. Yet, unfortunately for Shanahan, he’s once again being cast as the scapeGOAT.
It’s garbage.
Pundits have been all too eager in recent days to blame him in the aftermath of the San Francisco 49ers’ 25-22 overtime loss to the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl 58. The crux of the argument against Shanahan seems to be his decision to take the ball after winning the coin toss before overtime, the second in Super Bowl history and first in postseason play since the NFL adopted new OT rules in 2022 – those modifications guaranteeing each team a possession before moving into sudden death if the game remains tied. San Francisco settled for a field goal on the opening drive of the fifth quarter, Shanahan giving no thought to going for it on fourthand-4 from the Kansas City 9-yard line, before surrendering the game-winning touchdown after the Chiefs got the ball.
With the clarity of 20-10 hindsight, analysts, columnists, former players and the like have lined up to skewer Shanahan, suggesting the obvious choice was to kick off and put the 49ers offense into a position of knowing what it needed to accomplish – field goal, touchdown, touchdown and two-point conversion – for the win.
Let’s be clear: Shanahan wasn’t flying blind and operating off the cuff. He’d sought input from the Niners analytics department prior to the game in case the overtime scenario arose – not that there was much data to parse since the current format had never been needed before Sunday.
“I take into account what they say – what they think is right – and then I go off my gut in the heat of battle,” Shanahan said Tuesday during his post-Super Bowl debrief back at team headquarters in Santa Clara, California.
“It did seem more like a field goal game. And our defense had been out there for a real long time right before that. So, I didn’t feel at all to override that at the time.”
And let’s not forget, right or wrong – and maybe neither – Shanahan was also playing four-dimensional chess going into overtime. In addition to giving his defense a blow after it had been on the field for 11 plays before the Chiefs kicked a game-tying field goal with 3 seconds to go in regulation, Shanahan’s priority wasn’t knowing what the offense had to achieve on the second possession. It was having the ball on a potential third drive – when any type of score wins the game. And that wasn’t all he was taking into account, reflecting on Kansas City’s 38-35 win in Super Bowl 57.
“(I)f it was like the Super Bowl the year before, the one that seemed more like a shootout, I think I might’ve felt a little bit differently.”
I’ve always admired Shanahan as a coach with the courage of his convictions.
He was the offensive coordinator for the 2016 Atlanta Falcons and their topranked scoring offense, which infamously surrendered a 28-3 second-half lead to the New England Patriots in Super Bowl 51. Should he have run more to milk the clock after halftime that day? Apparently. But Shanahan and quarterback Matt Ryan, who won league MVP honors while playing in the coach’s system, wanted to remain in the aggressive mode which, to that point, had gotten that franchise as close to a championship as it’s ever been.
And it was Shanahan who freely admitted to Niners owner Jed York two years ago that third-string rookie Brock Purdy was the best quarterback on the roster – despite the money that had already been poured into Jimmy Garoppolo and the goldmine of draft capital that had been invested into the draft selection of Trey Lance. And good as Purdy, an MVP finalist in 2023, has been, would he be performing at this level if he was working for the New York Jets instead of Shanahan?
In the past five seasons, without the benefit of an All-Pro passer, the 49ers have lost two Super Bowls to Patrick Mahomes’ Chiefs and two other NFC championship games. Was it Shanahan’s fault that Garoppolo overthrew Emmanuel Sanders down the middle on a fourth-quarter play that likely would have meant a game-winning touchdown for San Francisco in Super Bowl 54? Was it Shanahan’s fault that safety Jaquiski Tartt dropped an easy fourthquarter interception in the 2021 NFC championship game against the Los Angeles Rams, a takeaway that might have completely altered the outcome of that three-point loss – LA tying the game shortly after Tartt’s flub? Was it Shanahan’s fault that Purdy suffered an injured throwing elbow in the first quarter of the 2022 NFC title game in Philadelphia?
Was it his fault that Kansas City’s first touchdown Sunday was set up by a punt caroming off Niners rookie Darrell Luter? Or that rookie kicker Jake Moody missed an extra point in the fourth quarter? Neither play cost San Francisco the game outright but, once again, players failing to execute in commonplace sequences surely made the coach’s job more difficult.
Shanahan is also the guy who went for it on fourth-and-3 from the Chiefs 15yard line early in the fourth quarter in an attempt to put pressure on Mahomes, a call the 49ers converted two plays before Purdy threw the go-ahead touchdown pass for a 16-13 lead.
“That isn’t probably something normally we’d do, but thought it was the right thing in that situation,” said Shanahan.
But no one questions the gutsy decisions that work.
The hue and cry aimed at Shanahan is tantamount to ripping a batting champion or 90% free-throw shooter for a rare miss when they’re clearly doing everything in their power to come through – and after Shanahan’s wellconsidered gamble worked amid the special-teams flukes that would undermine him.
And as for some 49ers players admitting they didn’t know the playoff overtime rules? Shanahan had delegated the responsibility for dispersing that information to his assistants. And, regardless, it’s not like awareness of those rules would have changed how he called the game or the players’ ability to execute their assignments.
“Kyle is a great head football coach. The 49ers are lucky to have him. What a game. It could have gone either way. It was just one of those games. I feel fortunate to have been on the positive side of it,” Reid, Kansas City’s coach, said Sunday while also addressing Shanahan’s decision to take the ball first.
“I’m not sure there’s a right answer necessarily. Ours ended up being the right one. That easily could have gone the other way. … I’m never going to question Kyle because he’s brilliant.”
And while the offense needing to know what’s at stake by taking possession second is all good and well, there’s another side to that coin – the defense also knows what it needs to accomplish by being on the field second. In this case, the Niners were staked to a lead but could afford to surrender a field goal and get the ball back for what would have been an all-important third drive.
But – like so many teams before them – San Francisco couldn’t stop Mahomes from orchestrating a game-sealing, 13play, 75-yard touchdown march that included one fourth-down conversion and two others on third down.
“There was nothing that I thought in the moment that I did wrong,” said Shanahan, subjected anew to the perception he can’t win the big one.
“We’ve had to win a bunch of big games to get to Super Bowls. We’ve won a lot of big games here. We’ve won a lot of big games to get into playoffs. The fact that we keep getting there shows you guys how much we’ve been able to win big games.
“(B)ut the success or the failure, it comes down to one game, and I hope that I can be a part of a team that wins a game at the end of the year. But to say that the Niners can’t win a big game would be an extremely inaccurate statement.”
More accurate to say they and their coach have been brilliant for an extended period, performing sublimely while playing the percentages beautifully in a league set up to snuff protracted excellence. But sometimes you’re the 1990s New York Knicks or Utah Jazz or 2000s Indianapolis Colts and should, by all rights, have multiple championships … but just keep running into Michael Jordan or Tom Brady or, in Shanahan’s case, Mahomes.
No shame – or blame – in that, even if there are (currently) no rings.
But I’ve talked to the analytics people, Coach Shanahan, and we agree you’re doing just about everything humanly possible to get the 49ers their record-tying sixth Lombardi Trophy. Keep taking your high-percentage shots. One of these days they’ll pan out on Super Sunday as they normally do the preceding five months – nothing but net.