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How Much do the 49ers Pay Kyle Shanahan?

My, how times have changed.

Grant Cohn

We know Kyle Shanahan’s contract extension with the 49ers makes him one of the five-highest-paid head coaches in the NFL. ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported that.

We don’t know how much money Shanahan actually makes.

NFL teams don’t have to report the value of their head coaches’ contracts, because they don’t count against the salary cap. They mostly are a mystery.

But Sports Illustrated’s Albert Breer is connected, and believes the 49ers made Shanahan one of roughly eight head coaches who earn at least $10 million per season.

“I’d guess he’s in the NFL coaches’ eight-figure club," Breer wrote, “which is occupied by New England’s Bill Belichick, New Orleans’s Sean Payton, Kansas City’s Andy Reid, Baltimore’s John Harbaugh, Seattle's Pete Carroll and Las Vegas’s Jon Gruden. And I don't know for sure, but I'd venture a strong guess that Rams coach Sean McVay is in the club too, with a deal right around Shanahan's.”

Meaning Shanahan could make as much as $10 million, $11, maybe even $12 million per season.

Here are the credentials of the coaches most likely in the eight-figure club:

Bill Belichick: Six Super Bowls, 400 wins, 273 losses and a career winning percentage of .683.

Sean Payton: One Super Bowl, 208 wins, 131 losses and a career winning percentage of .630.

Andy Reid: One Super Bowl, 336 wins, 207 losses and a career winning percentage of .618.

John Harbaugh: One Super Bowl, 192 wins, 118 losses and a career winning percentage of .615.

Pete Carroll: One Super Bowl, 224 wins, 133 losses and a career winning percentage of .596.

Jon Gruden: One Super Bowl, 106 wins, 102 losses and a career winning percentage of .510. Yikes. What a fraud. He won his Super Bowl with Tony Dungy’s players in 2002, has a losing record since that season and still lives off a reputation Gruden built 20 years ago. Poor Raiders.

Sean McVay: Zero Super Bowls, 33 wins, 15 losses and a career winning percentage of .688.

Kyle Shanahan: Zero Super Bowls, 23 wins, 25 losses and a career winning percentage of .479.

Shanahan is the only one of those eight coaches who has no rings and a winning percentage below .500. Remarkable.

Not so long ago, a coach had to win a Super Bowl before a team would give him a huge contract. In 2012, Jim Harbaugh asked the 49ers for an extension after he lost the Super Bowl. And at the time, his record as a head coach was 24-7-1. And the 49erss still turned him down. They felt he hadn’t accomplished enough. Team CEO Jed York said the 49ers hang only Super Bowl banners, not NFC Championship banners.

Now, a coach doesn’t need to win a Super Bowl to get a huge contract extension in the NFL. He has to have a high-scoring offense. Shanahan and McVay proved that the past couple years. Shanahan is set for life with a career record of 23-25. He makes more than Eagles head coach Doug Pederson, who won the Super Bowl.

My, how times have changed.

Published
Grant Cohn
GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.

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