San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
WEIGHT OF EXPECTATION
LAS VEGAS — Two Sundays ago, Kyle Shanahan walked briskly through the bowels of Levi’s Stadium and entered the home locker room with a scowl on his face and a pit in his stomach.
The San Francisco 49ers faced a daunting, 17-point halftime deficit to the Detroit Lions and were staring at a third consecutive NFC Championship Game defeat, but that wasn’t even the worst of it. Shanahan, the team’s seventhyear head coach, wasn’t searching for answers. He knew the score — and the painful truth that it underscored.
The 49ers’ season was on the verge of ending not because of ill-timed injuries or injustice or ineptitude; they were simply getting beaten into submission on both sides of the ball. For Shanahan, one of the sport’s most brilliant strategists, this made things simpler. The situation couldn’t be rectified simply by making schematic adjustments or correcting mistakes. This was a matter of will.
On some level, steamed as he was about the situation, Shanahan felt bad for the players in his midst. They were down. They were mystified. They knew what was coming if they didn’t somehow flip the script, and it wouldn’t be pretty: the collective reckoning that they simply weren’t good enough.
Yet, in those minutes between halves, Shanahan noticed something else — defiant faith. As he told me after an escalator ride at the team’s Lake Las Vegas hotel on Thursday, “I watched the guys not waver. There wasn’t one guy who looked at all like we weren’t gonna turn it around. You could see that in their eyes. It gave us a chance.”
He loved that resolve, but he loathed the possibility that it wouldn’t matter. Shanahan’s past 49ers teams could ascribe cataclysmic playoff defeats to a blown coverage or an ill-timed overthrow; to a dropped interception or a double-quarterback knockout.
This one, the coach knew, would require only a four-word autopsy report.
Whether Shanahan deserves it or not, the 44-year-old coach carries a stigma into the 49ers’ Super Bowl LVIII showdown with the Kansas City Chiefs that he can’t win the sport’s ultimate prize. For the second time in four years, he’ll confront a Chiefs team with a transcendent quarterback that stands between him and his all-consuming obsession, and hundreds of millions of people will be watching and judging him without nuance or mercy. Shanahan has more on the line in this game than starting quarterbacks Patrick Mahomes or Brock Purdy, or anyone else on either sideline. If Shanahan loses, it will continue a national narrative born from his role in one of the sports world’s most conspicuous face-plants — a blown 28-3 lead by the Atlanta Falcons, for whom Shanahan was the offensive coordinator, against Tom Brady and the Patriots in Super Bowl LI seven years ago.
And if Shanahan wins? Well, his image will immediately be transformed from that of brainy, exacting coach with a tragic flaw to a titan of his profession. It would be the same type of sudden and dramatic metamorphosis experienced by Steve Young in the 49ers’ fifth and most recent Lombardi Trophy-hoisting effort 29 years ago — a 49-26 victory over the San Diego Chargers in Super Bowl XXIX.
The schematic architect behind Young’s record-setting six touchdown passes in that game, offensive coordinator Mike Shanahan, used that triumph as a springboard to completing his own extreme legacy makeover. A few hours after the game Shanahan agreed to become the head coach of the Denver Broncos, the franchise with whom he had been on the wrong end of three lopsided Super Bowl defeats as an assistant. Before the end of the decade Shanahan would guide the Broncos to back-to-back championships.
Now his son is on the precipice of becoming the NFL’s version of a made man.
“He’s a big-time coach,” Shanahan’s Chiefs counterpart, Andy Reid, said of Kyle Shanahan on Thursday morning when we spoke at the Chiefs’ hotel. “I really like the way he does things. He’s really good.”
Reid, as much as anyone, can relate to the weight this game carries when it comes to perception. Four years ago, when his Chiefs trailed the Niners by 10 points midway through the fourth quarter, Reid was on his way to reinforcing a label he had long held: most accomplished NFL coach without a Super Bowl ring.
That all changed in a 21-point flurry that saddled Shanahan with a second squandered-lead saga on the grandest stage and launched Reid into another realm. He won his second championship a year ago in dramatic fashion and can capture a third at Shanahan’s expense.
Reid, 65, isn’t sure how long he wants to keep coaching, but given that Mahomes is just 28, it’s not hard to imagine him joining Bill Belichick and Chuck Noll as the only coach to win more than three Super Bowls. Shanahan, in theory, could do that, too — but getting that first one has proved to be a harrowing endeavor.
As he prepares for yet another judgment day, Shanahan isn’t especially eager to play along with the story line.
“Narrative, good or bad, is just a narrative,” he said Thursday. “No matter how hard something is or good something is, you always keep perspective of what it really is. If you want your perspective to be someone else’s narrative, good luck being happy in life. Or successful.”
Two days before Mike Shanahan’s narrative changed dramatically, back in January 1998, Kyle and I sat in the lounge area of his father’s hotel suite in San Diego and spent nearly an hour discussing many subjects — none of which included the Broncos’ impending Super Bowl XXXII matchup with the Green Bay Packers, which I was covering for Sports Illustrated. As Mike showered following the Broncos’ practice at UC San Diego, Kyle, a high school senior, talked about his social life, college plans and favorite comedies. He was a polite and confident and semi-awkward teenager who seemed excited about what lay ahead. It was cool to see a kid I’d first met 5 years earlier — when he was a ballboy at 49ers training camp in Rocklin (Placer County) — coming into his own.
A decade later, Shanahan was the NFL’s youngest offensive coordinator, having been promoted to that role by Houston Texans coach Gary Kubiak after two years as a position coach. He and I got to talk about football, and he already understood the game on a profound level. I watched him do many bold and innovative things during subsequent stints as a coordinator for Washington, the Browns and the Falcons, all as he was catching strays from inside and outside the football world. There were whispers of entitlement and nepotism; there was talk that he couldn’t get along with players such as Donovan McNabb, Robert Griffin III, Johnny Manziel, Roddy White and (during his first year in Atlanta) Matt Ryan. He was said to be demanding and brusque and intractable, accused of wanting his players to be robots who simply did exactly as they were told.
Some of it was fair, some wasn’t, but through it all, he knew the deal. Become a head coach, win a Super Bowl and the rest would take care of itself. He and the 49ers already had a deal in place when his cutting-edge game plan helped fuel the Falcons’ incredible first 2 quarters in Super Bowl LI. Belichick, one of the game’s greatest defensive coaches, was getting humiliated in a way no one had witnessed. You all know what happened next.
Four days later, the 49ers introduced Shanahan as their head coach in Santa Clara, and I interviewed him live on NFL Network. He was in a weird space, having realized one of his lifelong dreams while reeling from a heartbreaking defeat. Shanahan had made some aggressive calls that backfired late in the game and received a
Stephen Lam/The Chronicle disproportionate share of the blame, and many of the questions he fielded in that introductory news conference at Levi’s Stadium concerned the Falcons’ collapse. He was obviously intent on moving on, but the wound was still raw.
Three years later I was back in South Florida — at the same stadium where Mike Shanahan and Steve Young had worked their magic in January 1995 — preparing to write about Shanahan’s coronation when the Chiefs gave him another gut punch. He handled it as well as one could; I still remember the text that Mike McDaniel, then the 49ers’ run-game coordinator and now the Dolphins’ head coach, sent from the team’s not-so-festive gathering late that night: “He is being an incredible leader right now, supporting all the broken hearts.”
It didn’t break him, nor did the disappointments that followed. In the 2021 NFC Championship Game, Shanahan’s Niners held a 10-point, fourthquarter lead over the Rams before it all went bad, with Jaquiski Tartt’s failure to collect an airmailed package from Matthew Stafford serving as the signature moment. A year later the 49ers arrived in Philadelphia brimming with confidence and riding a 12-game winning streak only to see their dreams derailed when Haason Reddick swooped in early in the game and tore a ligament in Purdy’s throwing elbow.
This season, with Purdy blossoming into unlikely stardom on a roster rich with talented performers, the 49ers seized the NFC’s No. 1 seed and looked poised to make another run.
Then the postseason began, and it was a struggle. Purdy looked discombobulated for most of San Francisco’s divisional-round game against the Green Bay Packers before launching a late, game-winning rally.
Eight days later the underdog Lions rolled into Levi’s, racked up 280 yards of offense in the first half while taking a 24-7 lead and sent Shanahan into halftime wondering whether he’d overestimated his team’s place in the NFL pantheon.
As he entered the locker room at halftime of the NFC Championship Game, Shanahan was mostly mad. He and general manager John Lynch had carefully and masterfully assembled a roster that not only featured many of the NFL’s best players, but also created a culture of accountability, dedication and resilience. When situations got tough and players needed to stick together and display their mettle, the 49ers, in Shanahan’s view, had the foundational mentality to separate themselves.
Why wasn’t it happening, with the season on the line and a trip to the Super Bowl in the balance? He wasn’t sure, and it angered him.
“I was pissed,” Shanahan told me later. “We all were pissed — which made it easier.” When we spoke on Thursday, I asked Shanahan to elaborate. Does he coach better when he’s mad?
After considering the question, he said, “Um … I mean … probably? You’ve got to be careful. You want to be alert. You want to be aggressive. But you can never be stupid. Getting a little pissed is all right, but I’ve done it long enough to where you better check yourself as soon as you’re getting too mad or you’ll start doing too much stuff, and that can get away fast. You’ve got to always still be strategic.”
For Shanahan, in those moments, the clarity was helpful. He knew that the 49ers weren’t in that position because of a fluke, or because they’d choked. Halfway through the game, they were the inferior team, and there was no avoiding that conclusion.
“If you get beat that bad,” he said, “and you don’t deserve it, that is easier to deal with than you feeling like, ‘Man, we could’ve done that, but we were just unfortunate on a couple of things.’ That, I think, is what’s easier.”
And then it happened: The 49ers staged a furious rally, caught up to and passed the Lions, and Shanahan stood on a podium as confetti rained down, celebrating an improbable victory while leaving another coach (Detroit’s Dan Campbell) to deal with the wreckage of an epic collapse.
In the process, another Shanahan rap — that he only wins when the game is played on his terms, that his 49ers teams can’t come from behind — was denied for a second consecutive week.
As Purdy said Thursday, “Obviously there have been times this year when we were down and we haven’t been able to come through in the end, and so for us to be able to do that for two playoff games when the season’s on the line, the last one we’re down 17 … when things aren’t going our way, how can we dig deep, how can we make something happen when our backs are against the wall?”
While overcoming that adversity, with no margin for error, Purdy and his teammates learned something about themselves that they hope will help them on Super Sunday and beyond. Shanahan discovered something about his players, too: As bad as things looked at halftime of that game against the Lions, as much as they dreaded the fallout that awaited, they refused to let someone else’s narrative define them.
In the end, the 49ers got what they deserved.
On Super Sunday, with his legacy on the line, Shanahan and his players will find out whether they’re good enough to be champions.
If it turns out they aren’t, the coach will have to live with that. By now, he knows the deal. This is the path he chose. It’s not as though he has a choice.