Now that Super Bowl LVIII is in the books, and the Kansas City Chiefs are the first team to repeat as champs since the 2003-2004 New England Patriots, it’s time for Doug Farrar of Touchdown Wire, and Kyle Madson of Niners Wire, to review the biggest game of the season in “4-Down Territory.”
This week, the guys have some serious questions to answer:
- What does this loss do to Kyle Shanahan, as we have to add it to the other Super Bowl losses?
- How might we look at Andy Reid differently now that he has three Lombardi Trophies in five years?
- Is Patrick Mahomes the greatest quarterback ever? And if not, what’s the argument against it?
- Finally, where do the Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers go from here?
You can watch this week’s “4-Down Territory” right here:
You can also listen and subscribe to the “4-Down Territory” podcast on Spotify…
1. What is Kyle Shanahan's legacy now?
Kyle Shanahan had more at stake – more to lose – than anybody else in this Super Bowl. And he lost. In the biggest game of the season. And once again, he had a huge lead that he and his team ultimately squandered. What does this say about Shanahan in an overall sense? Where are we with him historically at this point?
Doug: I think that right now, Kyle is the modern-day Don Coryell. And it underlines just how cruel these biggest games and biggest moments can be. Shanahan has now been the offensive play-caller in three Super Bowls in which his team had at least a 10-point lead, and blew it. Well, that happened against the two greatest organizations of his era – the Bill Belichick Patriots and the Andy Reid Chiefs. That’s the first part. Sometimes, the bear eats you, and every time Kyle goes into the darkest parts of the woods, there’s always been the biggest bear staring back at him.
As for Coryell, he was very much like Shanahan is now in that he was directly responsible for how at least half the teams in the NFL played offense, because if you didn’t want the Bill Walsh offense back then, you surely wanted your own version of what Coryell was doing. And sometimes, it’s just the one thing. Maybe you have a team owner who’s too cheap to pay Fred Dean, who defines your entire defense. Maybe you have to go to Cincinnati to play an AFC Championship game in 60-below wind chill, which neuters your entire offense. Coryell could never get over that hump. Sometimes, it was his fault. Sometimes, it wasn’t. But the bear always ate Coryell in those crucial moments.
And he’s not the first great coach to suffer through this. Tom Landry couldn’t get past the Packers and Browns in the late 1960s. John Madden’s Raiders once lost three straight AFC Championship games in a row – all to the eventual Super Bowl winner – either the Don Shula Dolphins, or Chuck Noll’s Steelers. Think about all the legacies that have been hindered by Tom Brady and Bill Belichick over the last 25 years. That’s where Shanahan is. As to whether he ever gets out of that box… I have no idea. But these moments define you, whether you like it or not.
Kyle: “Huge lead” feels like a stretch. 10 points in the first half vs. Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes might as well be a tie.
Ultimately he’s going to wear the “can’t win the big one” label until he does. There are things he and the 49ers could have done differently in Sunday’s game to change the outcome. Surely there are some play calls he’d like back, and there’s definitely an overtime coin toss he’d want back. But also, the Christian McCaffrey fumble in the first quarter isn’t on the coach. Rookie cornerback Darrell Luter Jr. having a punt land on his foot isn’t on the coach, and then veteran punt returner Ray-Ray McCloud not just falling on the muffed punt by Luter isn’t on the coach.
Now, the four runs to 10 passes in the third quarter are certainly something worth inspecting on a granular level as a possible explanation for another Shanahan offense falling short in a huge game. We could also discuss some of the poor execution with blitz pickups that allowed free runners at the quarterback.
Ultimately there’s some nuance here that requires us to exist in two headspaces at once. In the small picture Shanahan didn’t win the big one. He’s now 0-2 in Super Bowls as a head coach and that means he has not achieved the No. 1 goal of the sport. That is, by definition, failure. However, the big picture says maybe 25 teams would fire their head coach tomorrow if Shanahan was on the market. The 49ers have been to 57.1 percent of the NFC championship games and 28.6 percent of the Super Bowls since Shanahan took over as their head coach. That’s not bad for a team that won a combined 15 games in the three years prior to his arrival. And he’s done that largely with Jimmy Garoppolo and Brock Purdy under center. He’s a good coach whose teams haven’t been able to make the couple of plays needed to win a Super Bowl. For now it’s just unlucky. If his teams ever begin to look unprepared or overmatched, then we can have a different conversation.
2. What does this Super Bowl win do for Andy Reid's legacy?
Conversely, where are we with Andy Reid? All of a sudden, he’s not just a first-ballot Hall of Famer; he’s now the engineer of one of the true dynasties in pro football history?
Doug: The thing about Reid to me is his humility. He knows how hard it is to do this at the highest possible level, because for a very long time, he was the guy who couldn’t win the big one. But he had been studying spread game concepts for a decade before he got Patrick Mahomes. He had the perfect system just waiting for the perfect quarterback. He didn’t just luck into it. Before Mahomes, he had consulted with Chris Ault, who basically invented the pistol formation with Colin Kaepernick at Nevada. He made Brad Childress his spread game coordinator, and everybody laughed. He had Alex Smith in his Chiefs offense, and Smith had run a lot of spread stuff under Urban Meyer at Utah. Luck is the residue of design, and the Reid-Mahomes partnership is a perfect example of that old saying.
When Bob Sutton’s defense fell apart against the Patriots in the 2018 AFC Championship game, Reid had seen enough. He stole Steve Spagnuolo off the street, and this season, it was Spags’ defense that got the Chiefs where they ultimately were. He’s now one of the greatest head coaches of all time, and I think the common thread among those all-timers is the understanding that there’s always a way to get better at what you do. If you prefer to think that it’s “My way or the highway,” you are ultimately hosed, because someone somewhere is building a better highway. So for me, it’s that Andy has never lost the ability and the willingness to learn. That’s what makes you great.
Kyle: I think that last bit is spot on, Doug. I didn’t think anyone would ever get into the Bill Belichick conversation in my lifetime. That was a pretty ridiculous standard he and the Patriots set. Reid isn’t in that conversation just yet, but he’s trending that direction and it’s hard to envision a year in any of the next 10 or 12 where the Chiefs aren’t at least contending for Super Bowls. There’ll be hiccups here and there where they don’t win a title since winning one in the NFL is exceedingly difficult, but if the Chiefs and Reid won six or seven championships it wouldn’t be the wildest outcome. They’re halfway to six already and Mahomes isn’t even 30 yet. Reid is already one of the greatest coaches we’ve ever seen, and if he starts stacking up the Lombardi trophies he would have a really strong argument to be the greatest.
3. Is Patrick Mahomes now the greatest quarterback in pro football history?
The other greatness discussion we have to have at this point relates to one Patrick Lavon Mahomes II. Are we now talking about the greatest quarterback we’ve ever seen? And if not, what’s the argument against it?
Doug: What I saw with Mahomes this season that was so remarkable – and it was obstructed by his receivers lining up wrong and running bad routes and dropping the ball a lot – is how he saw defenses at another level. This season, he wasn’t just the guy with all the physical gifts – the ability to run out of anything and make those bizarre off-platform throws. Now, it’s mostly above the neck, and that has to be a terrifying thought for the rest of the NFL. Great quarterbacks aren’t always great’ they’re just great when they need to be. Well, after 49ers rookie Darrell Luter muffed that punt with 2:42 left in the third quarter, here were Mahomes’ numbers from then on (from Daniel Valenti of The Score): 17 of 23 for 170 yards, two touchdowns, no interceptions, and 33 rushing yards on four carries. Three of those carries went for first downs. :
By the way, the 49ers fumbled twice, and lost both of them. The Chiefs fumbled FIVE TIMES, and lost just one. Brutal.
But Mahomes has the right now to put his name up with any quarterback in pro football history, and I have no reason to argue with any of it. But when we talk about the future of Mahomes and the Chiefs, it’s now the ways in which he dissects defenses before the snap that will secure him in – and quite possibly atop – the Quarterback Pantheon.
Kyle: Yeah he’s not there right now. However, he takes the clutch factor that made Tom Brady great and the physical tools that made Dan Marino great and turns them into an inevitable buzzsaw that can overcome even what the Chiefs receiving corps was this season. He might be the most talented QB we’ve ever seen, and now he has three titles in his first six years.
Ultimately greatness is defined by winning and there’s a volume factor here thanks to Brady’s years and years of postseason success. That’s what the next step is for Mahomes. He just has to sustain this for the next 10 or so years. If he does that he could very easily wind up with a resume that eclipses Brady’s, and at that point it would be hard to argue that anyone other than Mahomes is the greatest QB to ever lace them up.
4. Where do the Chiefs and 49ers go from here?
Where do both of these teams go from here?
Doug: If you’re tired of the Chiefs at this point, I have some bad news for you: They’re not going away. They have $15,751,488 in Effective Cap Space going into the 2024 league year, and they’ll be able to free up a lot more by messing with Mahomes’ guaranteed money. They have a couple of major free-agent decisions to make with Chris Jones and L’Jarius Sneed, but they’ll get at least one of those done, if not both. They desperately need at least one downfield receiver, and they’re heading into a draft class where no matter what kind of receiver you need, there are two or three of them. Plus, Steve Spagnuolo isn’t going to get hired away, and they might be able to get Eric Bieniemy back. It’s just hit after hit.
The 49ers are up against it cap-wise – they’re about $11.8 million over the cap right now, and the problem is that their biggest cap hits all go to their most important players – Trent Williams, Deebo Samuel, Arik Armstead, Fred Warner, Nick Bosa, Christian McCaffrey, Charvarius Ward, and on and on. Even if they wanted to punt someone like Armstead, there isn’t a lot of cap relief there. They loaded up for the 2023 season, and this is what you get when that happens. The good news is that they’re finally out of the draft purgatory from the Trey Lance trade, and they have the big brains in the room to rebuild that way. You would like to see them be able to take advantage of the biggest roster win you can possibly have – a franchise quarterback on a ridiculously cheap contract – but for now, it’ll be a challenge to bring the band back together.
The other thing we don’t yet know is how or if these premium losses will start to affect the team’s overall mentality. I watched the Seahawks fall apart pretty quickly after Malcolm Butler’s interception in Super Bowl XLIX. That was a very mentally strong team, but they were never the same. I’m not saying that’s sure to happen for the 49ers, but you have to wonder how much of that they can take before it starts to show.
Kyle: The Chiefs apparently don’t need to do anything. This is probably the worst Kansas City team we’ll see any time in the near future and they still won a Super Bowl. It’s ridiculous. They need to figure out the Chris Jones stuff because I’m not totally sure they can have their same defense without him. They’ll also need to provide some better pass-catching weapons for Mahomes. Beyond that it’s just a matter of letting the Reid-Mahomes-Spagnuolo train roll forward until one of the trio wants to get off.
For the 49ers it’s more precarious. They’ll have a bunch of rollover cap space thanks to a slew of restructures of their bigger contracts last offseason. However, they’re quietly getting old and they won’t have QB Brock Purdy under contract for $14 an hour for much longer. Not only is it clear they need to upgrade on both lines and in the secondary, but they’ll also need to start figuring out contingency plans for some of their superstars. Trent Williams turns 36 before next season. George Kittle turns 31 next season. So does Arik Armstead. Javon Hargrave turned 31 just before the Super Bowl. Deebo Samuel turned 28 in January. Christian McCaffrey will be 28 in June. That’s a group of players that doesn’t have another five-year window.
They’ll also need to decide just how much Purdy can elevate a roster. He’s extension eligible after next season and a free agent after 2025. Do they pay him and sacrifice elsewhere on the roster, or do they move on and try to find another inexpensive QB while loading the roster up around him. If Shanahan is right about Purdy and he’s a franchise signal caller, the 49ers will be fine as they jettison some of their stars. If the head coach is wrong about the QB, the 49ers could be in for a disaster over the next few years.
