This 49ers Team Can Rewrite Kyle Shanahan’s Playoff Legacy

San Francisco clinched the NFC West on Thursday night, and this is the type of team built to grab a lead and hold onto it in the postseason.

Life is always more complex than we make it out to be. And while current 49ers coach and then Falcons OC Kyle Shanahan was not (even close to) the sole reason Atlanta surrendered a 25-point lead to the Patriots in Super Bowl LI, and was not (even close to) the sole reason why San Francisco surrendered a 10-point lead to the Chiefs in Super Bowl LIV, those are the kinds of moments that tend to stick to a person.

You become the guy who gets to the game and almost wins it before something goes wrong. Just like Andy Reid was the guy who couldn’t manage the clock, and Pete Carroll was the guy who couldn’t hack it in the NFL and Tom Coughlin was the guy who was too cantankerous to have any meaningful success. There’s only one way to stop being that guy, which is why coaches wake up at absurd hours and live wildly unhealthy lifestyles locked away in NFL facilities for hours at a time.

While Shanahan’s system is built on smart principles, the whole thing is also built to take any semblance of a lead and hold onto it like Kane during a chokeslam :: Sergio Estrada/USA TODAY Sports

And it’s hard not to think of a past like that when we see the 49ers in their current iteration, clinching the NFC West on Thursday. They handily topped the Seahawks 21–13 (after a late Seattle score) with third-string, seventh-round rookie Brock Purdy at quarterback, and will walk into the playoffs as one of the most-favored teams in the league to win the Super Bowl. For those of us who are lucky to make mistakes and continue in that profession for long enough to correct them, we don’t just want to write a wrong, we want to smash the past into little pieces and wipe the remnants off our desk like Tony Montana in Scarface. Sure, the losses are part of life's journey and blah, blah, blah, but they can also be incessant and maddening. I remember watching a close circle of confidants (John Lynch and Kyle’s father, Mike) in Shanahan’s office guarding the door, Coronas in hand, after the 49ers lost Super Bowl LIV and thinking we were all going to look silly one day for typecasting him as some kind of coaching blockhead.

That day might come in early 2023.

While Shanahan’s system is built on smart principles, which you can read about here, the whole thing is also built to take any semblance of a lead and hold onto it like Kane during a chokeslam. Maybe it’s a bit Freudian on our part, searching into the deep recesses of someone’s soul for the reason why someone does what they do, but If the 49ers went up 28–3 in the Super Bowl this year, we could throw a sleep mask on for the second half and wake up to the Shanahan family reconstructing its joint vacation home to accommodate a fourth Lombardi Trophy (Mike won two as a head coach and one as an assistant).

This running game is an absolute cudgel, with the trade for Christian McCaffrey paying immediate dividends. Purdy spent Thursday night grooving third-and-long slant passes into his receivers’ stomachs on critical late-game downs in front of the loudest road crowd he’ll face all year. DeMeco Ryans’s defense has simply decided to more or less disallow second-half scoring, permitting just 3.4 points per game after the break during their seven-game winning streak, which began with four straight second-half shutouts. On Thursday, facing four-man pressure with a little schematic twist from time to time (three players lined up on one side, for example), Geno Smith walked into every snap better off lying down to save the trouble. The entire experience of playing the 49ers is meant to make you wince, make you throw your headset, make you double the length of the postgame ice bath. We couldn’t say that about the Falcons six few years ago. We could almost say that about the last Niners who played in the Super Bowl, especially with the punishing complementary nature of Robert Saleh’s defense, but this team has evolved on those principles of physicality to a doctorate level.

How it will all end, we can’t know right now. But we can guess what might happen if Shanahan ever gets a lead in a big game again. It won’t be history and reputation repeating itself.