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Kyle Shanahan is on the Verge of Setting the 49ers' Record for Losses

Shanahan and Bill Walsh currently are tied with 59 career losses.

Grant Cohn

Dec 8, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan walks on the field before the start of the game against the Chicago Bears at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Cary Edmondson-Imagn Images
Dec 8, 2024; Santa Clara, California, USA; San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan walks on the field before the start of the game against the Chicago Bears at Levi's Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Cary Edmondson-Imagn Images / Cary Edmondson-Imagn Images
In this story:

This might surprise you.

Despite leading the 49ers to four NFC Championship Games and two Super Bowl appearances, Kyle Shanahan is one loss away from becoming the head coach with the most losses in 49ers franchise history.

Shanahan and Bill Walsh currently are tied with 59 career losses. But Walsh coached 152 regular season games while Shanahan has coached just 129. Which means it took Walsh 10 seasons to lose 59 games while Shanahan most likely will accomplish the feat in just eight seasons.

The winningest coach in 49ers history is George Seifert. He coached 128 games, won 98 of them and lost just 30. So Shanahan would have to win 30 more games to become the 49ers' all-time winningest coach.

To be fair, Seifert inherited a team that had just won a Super Bowl, and Shanahan inherited a team that was coming off a 2-14 season, which explains some of his early struggles. He was building his team. But now he's one loss away from having his fourth losing season in eight years. Seifert never had a losing season, and Walsh had just three in 10 years.

Some NFL coaches have the ability to salvage down seasons and win games despite injuries. Pittsburgh's Mike Tomlin comes to mind. He never has had a losing season in 18 years. Even when the Steelers are a mess, he finds a way to win more games than he loses.

When the 49ers are a mess, Shanahan can't seem to fix them on the fly. They tend to fall apart.

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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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