I’m on record as saying I believe Kyle Shanahan will win a Super Bowl. That faith has been shaken to the extent that it’s no longer faith. Sunday marked the third time in seven years that Shanahan’s team has, for long stretches of the game that matters most, seemed the better side. It marked the third time the apparently better side has lost.
Two Super Bowls have gone to overtime. Shanahan’s teams – first with him as offensive coordinator, now as head coach – have lost both. Six Super Bowls have seen teams lose after leading by 10-plus points. Shanahan’s teams have lost half of them.
In “Goldfinger” – the Ian Fleming book, not the best-of-all-Bond movies – you’ll find this line: “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and the third time is enemy action.” Shanahan has met the enemy, and his name is Shanahan.
He’s the best play-caller in the sport except when the sport’s biggest prize is there to be won. Nothing in Sunday’s third quarter was as egregious as what happened in the fourth quarter on Feb. 5, 2017 – staring at a clinching field goal inside the final five minutes, the Falcons managed to go so far backward Matt Bryant wasn’t summoned – but conceptually it was worse.
Shanahan’s 49ers had the ball and the lead three times. They ran nine plays. Eight were meant to be passes. (One saw Brock Purdy scramble.) By the time they – meaning he – remembered that running the ball was an option, the Chiefs had nosed ahead. When not in the Super Bowl, Shanahan mixes runs and passes better than anyone ever. In the Super Bowl, he forgets who he is.
The Chiefs were there to be beaten Sunday. They spent half the game fussing with each other. Travis Kelce’s sideline shove of his head coach is without Super Bowl precedent. The Niners have the NFL’s best player at a half-dozen positions. Had this Shanahan team taken a two-score lead at any time in the second half, even Patrick Mahomes mightn’t have overcome it. This third quarter ended with the Chiefs ahead.
Some of what happened – the muffed punt, the blocked PAT – was beyond a coach’s control, but the end of regulation and the start of overtime saw the same thing happen. Promising drives wound up with field goals. Field goals weren’t enough.
One more first down after the two-minute warning would have allowed the Niners to kick the winner with little time remaining. A touchdown on the first OT possession – the 49ers had second-and-4 at the KC 9 – would have meant that, barring the Chiefs answering with a TD and a 2-point conversion, Shanahan’s team would, at worst, have had the ball in what was then sudden death. Neither thing happened.
(I know some feel the Niners erred by taking the ball first in overtime. I’d rather have gotten ahead, though preferably, duh, with a touchdown. But I’d have taken a timeout after Kelce bulled to the 3. The addled 49ers played no defense on the winning flip to Mecole Hardman.)
It’s weird. The knock – well, a knock – on Shanahan earlier in these playoffs was that his team couldn’t come from behind. (They did against both the Packers and Lions.) Come the Super Bowl, his team can’t stay ahead. He’s obviously a good coach. Bad coaches aren’t still coaching in February. But when something happens this often, you wonder if it will ever not-happen.
As the Niners’ Nick Bosa told reporters afterward: “We’ve been close so many times that there’s only so many more opportunities that we have.”
True. This star-spangled roster can’t, for cap reasons, stay together much longer. And if you don’t have these runners and receivers as facilitators, can you ride with Purdy as your QB? And there’s an even bigger question, a cruel one: Can a team reliant on Shanahan win a Super Bowl?
We know his teams can get there. We also know what comes next.
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