49ers HC Kyle Shanahan: "We've Never Fully Sold Out" to Win a Super Bowl

Maybe next time the 49ers have a chance to win a Super Bowl, they should fully sell out.

Jan 5, 2025; Glendale, Arizona, USA; San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan reacts after losing to the Arizona Cardinals at State Farm Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images / Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images

The 49ers' Super Bowl window may have just closed for a while.

They were one of the most dominant teams in the NFL from 2019 to 2023. But now they're old, expensive and broken down, they have lots of dead cap space and they're on the verge of making their starting quarterback one of the highest-paid players in the NFL even though he's coming off an alarmingly poor season. Not ideal.

In retrospect, it's incredible how close the 49ers came to winning those Super Bowls they lost. If only they had made one more move to put themselves over the top.

On Wednesday, Kyle Shanahan discussed the Super Bowl window.

"I think when you do come up short like we did on February 11th last year, I do think in the offseason when you know how close that could have been and it just comes down to a couple plays and everything you want to think about is how to make that up because you do believe this," he said. "You do believe you can do that again. And I think that's when people talk about windows and stuff like that, and I think that's how we did spend our offseason trying to look at how we could come back and make that game up and get to that point this year and pull it off. And we took our best shot at that, and it didn't go right. And now we're going to do it again. Does that mean every thought is to try to get to that right now? I think whenever you think that way, you're selling your organization short, you’ve got to always think right now, but you got to think big picture too, which to me in football is always on like a two-to-three-year timeframe. And I think we've been doing that really since we've been here. We've never fully sold out for that year. But we always want to be competitive and feel like we have a chance to do that. And we felt that way about five years in a row and we've gone to it twice. I feel like we had very good opportunities to win both of those games and that's the thought process we're going to have every year."

It's incredible that Shanahan freely admits that he and the 49ers "never fully sold out" to win a Super Bowl despite how close they were to winning. The Rams fully sold out to win a Super Bowl in 2021 -- I doubt they regret their decision. And since then, they've rebuilt their team and just won the NFC West. Meanwhile, the 49ers are holding onto the same aging core of players and just missed the playoffs.

Maybe next time the 49ers have a chance to win a Super Bowl, they should fully sell out.

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