You won’t find a looser locker room as the 49ers prepare
SANTA CLARA — The star tight end wore a shirt featuring a picture of his topless quarterback Sunday during his postgame news conference, and perhaps even on the drive home, because it’s a George Kittle thing to do.
San Francisco 49ers players say coach Kyle Shanahan is more than a coach. The elder statesman, 35-year old tackle Joe Staley, flexes behind teammates during live TV time while trying to maintain a game face, though he is in stitches inside.
The home locker room includes a basketball post, rim and net, where the action can be lively after practice. There is loud music as players dress and end zone dances after touchdowns where guards and tackles spike the ball.
“This locker room,” San Francisco receiver Emmanuel Sanders said, “is so relaxed and loose.”
Said another receiver, Kendrick Bourne, “We can be goofballs. You see a lot of joy and smiles.”
Said Staley, “It’s a fun place to come to work. There are no egos. Everybody genuinely pulls for each other. No one cares about what credit they got. Jimmy (Garopplo) doesn’t care if he throws for 300 yards. Kittle is a superstar and could care less about stats. Top to bottom, everybody just wants to pull for each other and win. It’s just a special group.”
49ers are a giddy, focused group
All of this good will seeps regularly throughout Levi’s Stadium. With the NFL in its 100th season, it’s hard to imagine a more giddy group. The cheer is fostered by Shanahan and it is nurtured by players young and older. It is routine that after Shanahan addresses his team after a win, and it’s been a season of triumph, that he says, “OK, turn on the music!”
The 49ers are a likable lot.
They genuinely care about each other. Shanahan lets players be themselves, as long as the practice and game effort is there. It has been. The mood and vibe has bonded this group as the underlining theme of how San Francisco advanced to its seventh Super Bowl, this one Feb. 2 in Miami against Kansas City.
And truth be told, Kittle the all-world tight end, does get on his coaches. He does care about stats -- just not his own. He pesters his bosses to run the ball more. He lives for contact. They all do in the trenches here. And then they live to cut up on each other.
Kittle on Sunday, following a thoroughly satisfying 37-20 conquest of the Packers in the NFC Championship game, wore a T-shirt of a topless Garopollo for “a special occasion.” He wanted to pay his passer back. Earlier this feel-good season, it was Kittle who signed a shirt with his own likeness on it for Garoppolo, inking it with, “To Jim Jim ...”
Said Garoppolo on Sunday in response to Kittle, “He had to get me back. But I thought it was a nice shirt he had on. Maybe we’ll get them in the team store soon.”
The 49ers had a Super Bowl team following the 2011 campaign that had some genuine good feelings in the locker room. But there was some discord, too. Coach Jim Harbaugh painted the media out to be the enemy in rallying a tired
“everyone’s against us” mantra.
All starts with Shanahan
This 49ers group harbors no such animosity. Everyone gets along. It starts with the coach, always. Shanahan invites playtime after worktime in the locker room -- hoops, card games, danceoffs.
Not all coaches do this. Upon his arrival as the new Washington Redskins coach, Ron Rivera had the locker room ping-pong table removed. Players will have to earn that perk.
Shanahan said he sensed good chemistry during the 2018 season amid a 4-12 showing. That’s rare. Losing often tears a locker room apart, and in a business of change, players get shipped out, so players are on edge.
“I thought we had some pretty good chemistry last year and we didn’t do that well,” Shanahan said earlier this postseason. “We had that (chemistry) a lot better than I expected in the first couple years (I was here) and it didn’t result in winning. That’s something we always talked about. ‘Man, we’ve got the right guys. They won’t stop working. They don’t point fingers.’ And you know when you go 4-12 every place usually does that.
“Sometimes we almost worried. Does that mean we need some worse guys? But we stuck with it. We brought in a few guys who thought the same as our other guys. ... I feel like our team has been this way since the beginning, and when you do that and you win, it only gets stronger.”