Will Kyle Shanahan Win a Super Bowl Before DeMeco Ryans?

Both have quarterbacks who are still on rookie contracts, although C.J. Stroud is better than Brock Purdy and will be on a rookie contract for at least one more season than Purdy.

Grant Cohn | Apr 4, 2024

Feb 7, 2024; Las Vegas, NV, USA; San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan speaks during a press / Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports

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Houston Texans

Kyle Shanahan is entering his eighth season as a head coach, and DeMeco Ryans is entering his second. Which head coach will win a Super Bowl first?

Both have teams that went to the playoffs last season, although the 49ers went to the Super Bowl and the Texans lost in the first round.

Both have quarterbacks who are still on rookie contracts, although C.J. Stroud is better than Brock Purdy and will be on a rookie contract for at least one more season than Purdy.

Both have excellent rosters, although the 49ers are getting old and will have 39 unrestricted free agents next season, while the Texans are young and keep adding star players such as Stefon Diggs, Joe Mixon, Danielle Hunter and Azeez Al-Shaair. Which means the 49ers' Super Bowl window with this particular roster could close after next season, while the Texans' Super Bowl window is just now opening.

So if either head coach ever will in a Super Bowl, it seems likely that Ryans will win one first. It might be tougher for him to actually get to the Super Bowl, because the Texans are in the AFC which is a much, much tougher conference than the NFC.

But if Ryans reaches the Super Bowl with the Texans, he might actually win it, as opposed to Shanahan who has come from ahead to lose two Super Bowls in the past four seasons as the 49ers head coach.

Who knows, maybe Shanahan and Ryans will face each other in the Super Bowl next season. Wouldn't that be something?

Published Apr 4, 2024

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.