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Why the Coin Toss Cost the 49ers the Super Bowl

Kyle Shanahan not knowing the rule led directly to the 49ers losing.

Grant Cohn

In this story:

Kyle Shanahan hasn't taken nearly enough heat for costing the 49ers the Super Bowl because he didn't know the rules for overtime in the playoffs.

That's because my dad, Lowell Cohn, is retired. He covered the 49ers from 1979 to 2016 and knows what a championship team looks like.

Here's what my dad said about the 49ers' latest Super Bowl collapse.

"What I find very interesting is that the decisive moment in the game did not come on a football play. It happened on a thought play, on a decision. When you watch the video, it's very clear that Kyle Shanahan says he wants the ball first. And you hear Patrick Mahomes talking to Andy Reid asking which direction do they want to kick. Meaning if they win the toss, they'd defer. That's clear. Then we go down to the coin toss. They flip the coin, they call tails and the 49ers win. And Fred Warner says he wants the ball. Now you see Mahomes jogging back to their sideline saying they want the ball, meaning can you believe it? They don't know what they're doing. Kansas City knew the 49ers had blown it.

"Kyle Shanahan not knowing the rule led directly to the 49ers losing. Christian McCaffrey's fumble, Darrell Luter Jr.'s fumble -- none of that mattered. It was all subtext. What mattered was when they flipped the coin and Shanahan made the disastrous decision, giving the ball to the Chiefs second so they would know what they needed to do.

"After the game, Shanahan said he knew the rule, he had talked to the analytics people and they all agreed they should receive the ball. If that's true, he has the worst analytics department in the league. But here's what troubles me more. I am inclined not to believe Shanahan. Look, I'm not calling him a liar. I'm almost calling him a liar. But he seemed to have changed his story several times. So this is what I'm going to speculate. He didn't know the rule and he blew it, and then he pretended he knew the rule to cover his butt but he really didn't and he wasn't honest about it."

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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