Kyle Shanahan has spent his 49ers tenure proving he can do just about everything except win the Super Bowl, and that’s still enough to put him in the conversation with the NFL’s best coaches. Long before he took over in San Francisco in 2017, his reputation was built on offense. Since then, he’s only strengthened the case that he’s one of the league’s sharpest play designers.
A few of his calls have stood out above the rest, and three in particular capture exactly why Shanahan is so dangerous when he’s scripting a game.
The most dazzling came in 2020 against the Green Bay Packers in the NFC Championship game. Shanahan and then-offensive coordinator Mike McDaniel leaned hard into the run game, and Raheem Mostert turned it into a demolition.
He finished with more than 200 yards and four touchdowns, as the 49ers kept feeding him and kept getting results. It was a full-on showcase of the run-first offense Shanahan loves to build, and it also made one thing pretty clear: Jimmy Garoppolo was mostly along for the ride.
Another gem came in the second Super Bowl loss to the Kansas City Chiefs, when the 49ers pulled off a play that had Jauan Jennings throwing a touchdown pass to Christian McCaffrey. It was a gutsy call on the biggest stage.
The setup looked like Brock Purdy was tossing a screen to Jennings, but the ball went behind him instead. On the other side, the Niners had another screen forming for McCaffrey.
Jennings, who played quarterback before becoming a receiver, delivered the throw, and the blocking cleared the way for McCaffrey to walk in untouched. The play was so effective that San Francisco brought Jennings back to throw again in the playoffs last season, and he connected with McCaffrey for another touchdown.
Then there was the George Kittle double-fake from 2022, one of the nastiest little deception plays Shanahan has ever cooked up. It came during one of Brock Purdy’s first starts, and Purdy was dealing with injured ribs.
He still looked sharp, and Shanahan clearly trusted him enough to call a beauty: Purdy pumped left, then pumped right, then found Kittle streaking wide open down the middle for an easy touchdown. It was classic Shanahan - misdirection, timing, and just enough trickery to leave the Seattle Seahawks stuck watching the play unfold.
Shanahan’s calling card has always been offense, and these three plays show the range. He can bully teams with the run, fool them with layered trickery, or pull out a bold throw on the sport’s biggest stage. Year after year, he keeps finding new ways to remind everyone why he’s so respected.
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Kyle Shanahans run of near-misses keeps hanging over the 49ers, even as he remains one of the NFLs most respected offensive minds. The latest reminder came in a look back at some of the best Super Bowl-less teams of the last 20 years, where Shanahans fingerprints showed up more than once through the 2016 Falcons, the 2019 49ers and the 2023 49ers. Each group had enough talent and momentum to reach the leagues biggest stage, and each one left with the same frustrating result, adding another layer to the coachs already complicated postseason reputation.
For San Francisco, the hard part is that the story is not just about one loss or one bad bounce. Shanahan has continued to guide the 49ers back into contention, but the pattern of coming up short has made every deep run feel heavier than the last. Even with the roster still built to chase a title, the lingering questions around his biggest-game decisions and how much trust he places in the people around him remain part of the backdrop as the 49ers try again to finally break through. [Read more 🡒]
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49ers Could Be Headed For Their Biggest Offensive Shakeup In Years
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There is a similar sense of change at tight end, where Jake Tonges new contract extension points to a larger role behind George Kittle and hints at a different usage pattern for the offense as a whole. If Tonges is going to be on the field more often, it could naturally squeeze the snaps available to Kyle Juszczyk, which makes this one of those offseason shifts that could quietly alter how the 49ers line up in more than one way. [Read more 🡒]