No matter what San Francisco 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan is paying Steve Wilks, his fabulous defensive coordinator, Shanahan should double it.
If Wilks didn’t orchestrate a “pick, punt, missed field goal, pick” final four defensive possessions Saturday, Shanahan would have spent the last week roasting on a spit.
The Niners are the NFC’s best team. But had Wilks’ defense not bailed out Shanahan’s sputtering offense late against the Green Bay Packers, Shanahan — one of the NFL‘s smartest and most successful minds — would have again reminded the football world that he’s the Best Coach To Never Win It All.
And the odds remain relatively high that he still goes into the offseason with that anchor hanging around his neck. Two more potential disasters are awaiting him — beginning in Sunday’s home NFC Championship Game against the Detroit Lions.
Legacy Game for San Francisco 49ers Coach Kyle Shanahan
The Niners are, by nearly every metric, a better team than the Lions. Thus, they are more than touchdown favorites at home against Dan Campbell’s bunch.
This is well-traveled ground for Shanahan. He has his team in the mix every year.
But the ground is about to get rocky. This is the point of the NFL calendar: things always go sideways for Mike Shanahan’s son.
Sunday marks Shanahan’s 15th playoff game as either a head coach or an offensive coordinator. He’s 7-1 in the Wild Card and Divisional Rounds, with his only loss coming with Washington way back in 2012.
But in the Conference Championship round and the Super Bowl, he’s 2-4 — with some truly gutting losses.
Most recently, Shanahan lost starting quarterback Brock Purdy and then backup Josh Johnson to injury in last year’s NFC Championship Game against the Philadelphia Eagles. That brutal luck left Christian McCaffrey as their only option at quarterback. McCaffrey, as a reminder, is a running back. The Eagles beat the crippled 49ers 31-7.
That was nothing compared to the disaster six years prior, when Shanahan, then the offensive coordinator of the Atlanta Falcons, couldn’t close out a 25-point second-half lead in Super Bowl 51.
It was one of two losses Shanahan has experienced in the NFL’s title game. The other came three years later when San Francisco lost 31-20 to the Kansas Chiefs — a game that ended Andy Reid’s run as Best Coach To Never Win It All.
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Shanahan is a smart guy. He knows his place in history hinges on winning a championship. And just 44 years old, it would be borderline unthinkable if it didn’t happen at some point.
But that’s not a given. Life is about seizing opportunities. And while this is his third straight year in the NFC Championship Game and fourth in five years, the gap between Shanahan and his protégés is closing.
Four of Shanahan’s five former assistants-turned-NFL head coaches made the playoffs this year. And the only one that didn’t — New York Jets coach Robert Saleh — lost his quarterback on the first drive of the season.
“Nothing’s different,” Shanahan said this week when asked about preparing for the NFL’s final four. “The stakes and everything, and people care about it a lot more because there’s nothing guaranteed after it if you don’t handle business.
“So you understand experience is cool because you get to feel those moments, and you know you’ve been through it before. But in terms of the football game, there’s nothing different. Still the same time, still all the same rules, and that’s really all it’s about. So your experience tells you, you better not make stuff up because it’s the NFC Championship Game.
“You’ve got to do exactly what you believe in, which is how you spend every minute to give you the best chance to perform your best in those three hours when it matters.”
Detroit Lions vs. San Francisco 49ers Preview
Even with last Saturday’s scare, San Francisco has performed brilliantly for most of 2023. They won 12 games for the second straight season and locked up the No. 1 seed with a week to go.
The 49ers finished the season top three in both points scored and points allowed, had the NFL’s most efficient offense (as determined by EPA per play), and were fifth in turnover margin (+10).
MORE: NFL Injuries — Tracking Every Championship Game Injury, Including the Latest on Deebo Samuel
And yet, lingering doubts persist regarding San Francisco’s postseason prospects because of Shanahan and Purdy, the last player taken in the 2022 NFL Draft.
Purdy was marvelous in the regular season but was brutal for much of the Packers game before facilitating enough in the Niners’ game-winning touchdown drive late.
“Last year, I got thrust in, and we had a good team, we were rolling,” Purdy said this week. “Not to take away anything that happened last year, but it sort of does feel a little different because you went through so many highs and lows this year. Now, to get to where we are, it feels pretty good.
“But at the same time, this has been this organization’s and team’s mindset long before I even got here and what they’ve been building here in terms of doing what it takes to get to a championship. So I’m just another key part of that, and I’m just doing my job as best as I can week in and week out, and here we are.”
Shahanan has wisely schemed around Purdy’s limitations and accentuated his positives.
His counterpart Sunday, Campbell, fanboyed out this week when asked about the Shanahan offense, which has many imitators but no peers.
#Lions HC Dan Campbell explains Kyle Shanahan’s offense:
“He just does an unbelievable job of setting you up. He’s going to make you stop it & if you don’t stop it, you keep getting it & then once you feel like you’re about to stop it, he counters… he’s just always been great… pic.twitter.com/sHNXYk5IWa
— Coach Yac 🗣 (@Coach_Yac) January 25, 2024
“He just does an unbelievable job of setting you up,” Campbell said. “He’s going to make you stop it, and if you don’t stop it, you keep getting it, and then once you feel like you’re about to stop it, he counters …
“He’s just always been great about that and the way he sets it up. They have a mentality about the way they do it, and you can’t do what they do without the mentality, either. It’s physical — there’s nothing easy about what they do.”
“That’s why they’re hard to stop,” he continued. “They’re really good at what they do. He’s an excellent game-plan designer, also calling a game. And then they’ve got playmakers. They’ve got players.”
And — at least for a couple more weeks — they’ve got the Best Coach To Never Win It All.
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