Losing a Super Bowl always stings. For the San Francisco 49ers, losing 25-22 to the Kansas City Chiefs in overtime on Sunday will hurt more than most. It will leave a lifetime of ‘ifs’.
If not for Jake Moody’s missed extra point.
If not for Harrison Butker’s 57-yard field goal.
If not for a punt ricocheting off the heel of Darrell Luter Jr.
If not for Dre Greenlaw’s injury.
If not for the bounce of a fumble.
If not for abandoning the run in the third-quarter.
If not for a bizarre fourth-quarter plan on defense.
If not for electing to receive the ball first in overtime.
If not for Patrick Mahomes.
Most Super Bowls are decided by fine margins. Lady luck always plays a role. But even by the typical standards, Sunday’s game was something different. Squint hard enough, and the Niners are champions today, mapping out their parade route. Instead, they’re the NFL’s almost team; a secondary character in the Chiefs’ dynastic story.
“There’s no right words right now,” Niners coach Kyle Shanahan said after the game. “It hurts.”
This should have been their time, that’s what will hurt most of all. The Chiefs were flawed contenders, with a rickety offense propped up by one of the league’s best defenses. Jump out to an early lead, and the game was there for the taking.
And jump out they did. In the first quarter, a San Francisco defense that had tailed off over the course of the season was at its suffocating best. When they needed big plays to get the Chiefs offense off the field, San Francisco’s pass-rush came crashing home. They held the Chiefs’ to three points before Usher had time to rollerskate across the stage for the half-time show.
More than anything, the 49ers got the game they hoped for from Brock Purdy. Poised, accurate and playing his part as creator, Purdy looked comfortable on his sport’s biggest stage. For prolonged stretches, the second-year starter was the calmest person on the field. He was dynamite in the game’s opening quarter, completing eight of his 10 passes to six different receivers. And he held his nerve as the game tightened in the fourth quarter and overtime. He executed on must-have-it downs, including a crucial fourth-down completion to George Kittle and a touchdown pass to Jauan Jennings with pressure arriving in his face. If you had told the Niners before Sunday that they would get a mistake-free game from Purdy, they’d have started measuring their fingers for rings.
It wasn’t enough. Yes, the Chiefs were handed their dose of luck – they recovered six of the game’s seven fumbles; they remained healthy as Niners players wandered in and out of the injury tent. Guess who else got lucky: every team to ever win the championship. But when the game was on the line, talent and scheme and championship knowhow took over. Kansas City turned to their core four: Mahomes, Travis Kelce, head coach Andy Reid and defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo. All four delivered game-defining moments. On the other side of the field, when they needed it most, the Niners froze.
When Shanahan looks back on this game, his mind will be drawn to the third quarter as much as its climactic end. With a chance to pound Christian McCaffrey into the line of scrimmage and control the flow of the game, Shanahan instead turned to Purdy. The Chiefs loaded up the line, and dared Shanahan to put the Super Bowl in Purdy’s hand.
Shanahan took the bet. On the opening 11 plays of the third-quarter, the Niners threw the ball 10 times to a solo rushing attempt. They eked out three yards, coughed the ball away once and didn’t gain a single first down. Purdy played well overall, but that third-quarter stretch allowed the Chiefs to adjust and claw back into the game.
Mahomes is indeed inevitable. But the Niners had a chance to be out of sight before the Chiefs quarterback and his receivers had a chance to establish a rhythm late in the game. In a sport that traffics in hope and unpredictability, Mahomes is a brilliant constant. At some point, from somewhere, he was going to find the plays to put points on the board.
Once Mahomes started to rev up, the Niners defense blinked. They had been able to pressure Mahomes with four pass-rushers in the first-half, but pivoted to a blitz-oriented strategy in the second when cheeks started to tighten and Steve Wilks, the team’s defensive coordinator, opted to don his comfort blanket. Mahomes ate it up.
Whereas the Chiefs’ staff rose to the moment, the Niners staff spent the early portion of the second-half blinking, and allowing Mahomes and co. to climb back into the game.
You will begin hearing it, and reading it, all over the place: Shanahan is a fraud. He’s a choker. The storylines write themselves: Shanahan has now overseen three Super Bowl offenses that have blown double-digit leads; he’s the only coach to lose two Super Bowls in overtime. He’s now firmly entrenched in the Marv Levy Zone, the innovative coach who racks up wins in the regular season and playoffs but cannot get over the hump in the big one.
Legacies, careers, lives rest on the bounce of a fumble or the swing of a kicker’s leg. “You want to win it for that kind of guy,” Brock Purdy said of Shanahan after the game. “It sucks for Coach. That’s who I hurt for.”
What’s worse: it was all so utterly predictable. Shanahan is an outstanding coach, one of the pre-eminent architects of the modern game. But he does have a tendency to overthink things in big spots. His game-management can be sloppy. For all of his schematic wizardry, games start to roll away from him at the most important times. He’s looking, at all times, for the perfect, technical answer, rather than the right one.
When games get tight, the best coaches think about players, not plays. After a slow first half, the Chiefs handed their offense over to Mahomes’ artistry and Kelce. The Niners, by contrast, took the ball away from Christian McCaffrey – George Kittle, the team’s all-world tight end, had only one target in the first three-quarters. Purdy completed just four of 12 pass attempts in the second and third quarters combined, a period when the Niners should have been ramming McCaffrey down KC’s throats.
By the time the Niners’ offense rediscovered its mojo, Mahomes and Co had found their own rhythm. And even then the Niners had a chance. They put up three points in overtime after opting to receive the kick. But down three needing a touchdown to win it all is Mahomes, Kelce and Reid in their happy place. Leave the door ajar, and they’re going to find a way to go barrelling through.
MAHOMES TO MECOLE HARDMAN FOR THE LOMBARDI 😱🤯
— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) February 12, 2024
(via @NFL)
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Where the Niners go from here is a tricky question. In Purdy, they have the best value contract at the most important position in the sport. But a salary cap crunch is looming, and a number of their key contributors are about to be on the fringes of their prime. Bouncing back from one nauseating Super Bowl defeat is one thing; there hasn’t been a team that has risen off the mat after two.
Measuring a team by rings alone is a broken way of evaluating success. Shanahan and the Niners are a handful of plays away from being two-time champs, sparking talk of their dynasty. But they’ve run head-first into the Mahomes buzzsaw, first in Miami in Super Bowl LIV and then in Vegas on Sunday, and have carved out a place as Karl Malone’s Jazz to Michael Jordan’s Bulls.
History tells us that even the strongest cores get only one or two chances – max – to lift a title, unless they’re happen to have the greatest quarterback of all time in their backfield. This Niners’ core has had two shots and come up short. This was their best chance yet. A third may be asking too much.
