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I.
Here is a newspaper headline from the year 1969…
This appeared soon after the Dallas Cowboys were defeated by the Cleveland Browns, 38-14, in the NFL playoffs. By then, a man named Tom Landry had been head coach of the Cowboys for 10 years; over the previous four seasons, he’d lost twice to the Green Bay Packers in the NFL Championship game, and then lost twice to the Browns in the NFL playoffs. The article describes Landry as “gaunt”and “balding”; it chronicles the Cowboys’ vexation over their continued inability to win a consequential game. It discusses how the Cowboys had been labeled as “choke-ups.”
This is a recurring narrative, both in sports and in American life: There has been and will always be interest in how and/or why certain entities can come ever so close, but cannot win the big game. And I agree, it’s a compelling storyline.
But the truth is that sometimes it is not really anyone’s fault. Sometimes, as it is with coach Kyle Shanahan and the modern iteration of the San Francisco 49ers, the breaks are bad and the timing is wrong and luck is not on their side. And all you can do is come back the next year and try again.
II.
Consider that Shanahan’s big-game losses include:
A.) A Super Bowl in which he served as offensive coordinator of the Atlanta Falcons, who squandered a 28-3 lead to perhaps the greatest quarterback of all-time, Tom Brady. (It is odd to place this loss squarely on Shanahan, because while he may have made certain decisions worthy of second-guessing, he did not coach the defense that blew the lead in the first place.)
B.) A 2020 Super Bowl loss to Kansas City in which Patrick Mahomes, perhaps the greatest quarterback of all-time, led a late comeback in a tight game.
C.) A 2021 loss to the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC Championship game, in which the Rams had a future Hall of Fame quarterback who led a late comeback in a tight game. And the 49ers…did not have a future Hall of Fame quarterback.
C.) A 2023 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles in the NFC Championship game, in which the 49ers, due to injuries, did not have a viable starting quarterback who could throw a football.
D.) A 2024 Super Bowl loss to Kansas City in which Patrick Mahomes, perhaps the greatest quarterback of all-time, led a late comeback in a tight game.
If there is a pattern here, it is mostly that Shanahan has a knack for facing the wrong quarterbacks at the wrong time. (And perhaps that he did not draft Patrick Mahomes with the third pick of the NFL draft in 2017.)
III.
Here, courtesy of the writer Neil Paine’s Substack, is the simplest explanation for the result of this year’s Super Bowl:
No quarterback in NFL history has ever delivered in clutch situations quite like Mahomes has, and this shaped every decision that the 49ers made in opposition to that threat. That threat of a Mahomes comeback was palpable at every moment, whether the 49ers led or whether they were trailing, and in the end, in an overtime that was engineered to reward a Montana-esque drive…
…it was a psychological cudgel that altered the structure of the entire game.
IV.
If there is a valid critique of Shanahan as a coach, it’s that he’s embodied a fundamental contradiction: He is an innovative offensive mind who sometimes abandons that sense of novelty in key moments. The argument is that he is a brilliant artist who he can’t think on his feet. (He is also not the most telegenic of personalities, which earns him little benefit of the doubt.)
But during Sunday night’s Super Bowl, he called a wide receiver throwback that led to a touchdown, and he went for it on 4th down in a crucial situation that kept a drive going. The overarching critique of his play-calling during this Super Bowl was that he somehow abandoned running the ball in the middle of the game, but if he had done the opposite and it had failed, he would have been critiqued for his conservatism.
Consider this—two of the most crucial moments in this game were:
A.) An injury to a key 49ers defensive player who was literally jogging out from the sideline, entirely untouched, and
B.) A fumbled punt that was literally nobody’s fault.
In fact, the most crucial “mistake” that people seemed eager to pin on Shanahan was literally over the result of a coin toss, which just shows that people are always going to search for patterns to quantify something that ultimately comes down to bad luck and extraordinary oppositional forces.
V.
It was an odd year for Mahomes. It was an odd year for the Chiefs, who did not look particularly formidable for much of the year, and who forced Mahomes to strip himself off many of the flashy elements that had come to define him in the early part of his career. That itself was a clever plot twist: As a relationship between a pop singer and a tight end came to embody an era of celebrity1…
…Mahomes was able to slip quietly into a role as a more mature and less flamboyant quarterback than in the past. The thing is, there is no getting around Mahomes, any more than Landry could get around the Packers and the Browns in those early years.
But Tom Landry had no choice. He kept going. The Cowboys made the Super Bowl the next year, won the Super Bowl in 1971—when Landry 47 years old—and again in 1977, and made the playoffs every year until 1983. There was disappointment between those victories, but in this era, one win redefines the narrative.
“Talent is luck,” a filmmaker who shall go unnamed here once said, and the older I get, the more I tend to agree. I presume Chiefs coach Andy Reid would, as well.
Kyle Shanahan is 44 years old. He has coached the 49ers for seven seasons; Landry did not have a winning record until his seventh year as coach. Times have changed, of course, and narratives have become compressed, but sometimes, all you can do is keep trying and hope you get lucky eventually.
I would argue that as the Super Bowl game itself has gotten more competitive, the commercials have actually sunk further into irrelevance—the only lasting memory of this year’s ads will be the gratuitous number of celebrity cameos that served absolutely no purpose.
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