Congratulations to the San Francisco 49ers, who have logged fourth-quarter comebacks for the first time this millenia in back-to-back weeks, calloused the roster at the most integral point of the season, and saw their still-green quarterback emerge from what looked like a month-long confidence crisis, dating back to Christmas night against the Baltimore Ravens.
The reward? More demons to vanquish. A larger stage for everyone to collectively realize just how unforgiving the wind is whipping against this superteam and its head coach. Any team that makes it to the Super Bowl feels like it has to win. But the 49ers are in a different stratosphere. It will be a minor miracle if they all arrive without the collective tightness of a violin string.
Let’s be honest. At halftime of this game, how many of us were looking up Kyle Shanahan’s previous comments about Kirk Cousins, wondering how quickly he could retool this roster for another surge in 2024 with a more experienced quarterback? How many of us were wondering if Shanahan would ever graduate from the source of modern offensive evolutions into the source of a Lombardi Trophy sitting in the team’s entryway?
The coaching platitude notebook allows for teams to celebrate their victories for 24 hours before focusing on the task ahead. But how many minds in Santa Clara have already turned to the idea that all of this work, all of this progress, all of this innovation, all of this roster turnover, and all of this giant boombox-worthy hype is for nothing if the 49ers cannot best a version of the same team that snagged the Super Bowl from them just a few years ago?
It’s one of the more memorable losing locker rooms in recent Super Bowl history. Shanahan sitting alone in an undecorated cinder block office with less free square footage than a commuter train in Tokyo. John Lynch and Mike Shanahan guarded the doors. A few Coronas were passed around to ease the pain.
In that somber annex, an All-Star team that couldn’t possibly exist together anymore was breaking apart. Joe Staley was saying his goodbyes. DeForest Buckner was being hoisted onto the trade block to generate some draft capital. Emmanuel Sanders was on his way to New Orleans.
Now, San Francisco is again looking at both a wonderful opportunity and the collective pressures of time. Trent Williams is 35. A good chunk of the team’s defensive front (albeit mostly its collection of mercenary pass rushers) is hitting free agency. Brandon Aiyuk, who saved the 49ers on Sunday night, is walking into his fifth-year option season. We’ll see how amenable his representatives will be to the prospect of playing for about $10 million per year less than Aiyuk is worth in 2024.
And then there is the idea of the 49ers as a whole. The bedrock of San Francisco is this relentless physicality. We saw Deebo Samuel hurling his injured body into every defender Sunday. George Kittle, God bless him, will not age in this league like Rob Gronkowski. Every one of his games resembles the old ECW. Christian McCaffrey, who will be 28 next season, has already brushed up against the 300-carry threshold three times in his career, which doesn’t feel like a lot until one considers that he is also catching 65 to 85 passes per season.
The 49ers have to know this. Shanahan has to know this. And while we could say mostly the same about the Chiefs—namely, how drastic the offensive complexion will change if Travis Kelce walks away, or begins a recession away from being its centralized playmaker—Kansas City has the Super Bowl trophy to show for it. They don’t bear the burden of what if?
There is such a fine line between Air Coryell’s Chargers, Dennis Green’s Vikings or the Browns of the late 1980s and the teams who ended up logging championships during their watch. This feels especially true for a series of Shanahan teams that have (as is well documented) changed professional football. People used to joke about the sheer volume of people who simply met Shanahan getting head coaching interviews. Now, it makes perfect sense. The system works.
San Francisco is exploring that space now. Dropping a game to the Chiefs when Kansas City is (relatively) vulnerable offensively offers no assurances that Shanahan will get a third crack at cementing his myriad contributions to the schematic universe. The heft of the stakes depends on how a question such as this would sit with a team, a coach, an owner, a general manager, a fan base in the decades to come: When taking the totality of the last five years into consideration—San Francisco’s thumping defense in 2019, the quarterback-less conference championship team in ’22 and now the juggernauts of ’23—what was it like to be the best team in NFL history to not win a Super Bowl?
