SANTA CLARA — Maybe — just maybe — this is the next evolution of Kyle Shanahan.
Perhaps this is the form the ninth-year and now beleaguered 49ers head coach — who sat at the dais at Levi’s Stadium, unshaven and gaunt after a Super Bowl-or-bust season turned into a six-win, never-sniffed-the-playoffs nightmare — has always needed to take.
It could be wishful thinking or embarrassing gullibility, but at some point, you have to take the man at his word.
And it sure sounded like Shanahan plans to make the 2025 season year one of his full Andy Reid turn.
If that’s the case, it would be an excellent move for the 49ers and Shanahan. It might even be a title-winning move.
Allow me to explain what all that means:
Shanahan has long been compared to the now-Chiefs head coach, who has beaten the 49ers in the Super Bowl twice and will try for a third consecutive Super Bowl title in the coming month.
But there’s clearly no comparison between the current Reid — a three-time Super Bowl champion — and Shanahan.
No, Shanahan has been compared to the old Andy Reid — the younger version, the Reid who coached the Eagles for 14 years and had many of the same successes and failures Shanahan is facing now.
Both Shanahan and Reid are offensive geniuses, coming from assistant jobs where they coached quarterbacks to improbable MVP awards. As head coaches, they could do more with less on offense, year after year, but both were marred by clock-management issues, poor personnel decisions (both held full front-office power at times), and a perceived incapability to win the big games. Reid’s Eagles went to four NFC Championship Games, only winning one. The Niners just went to three straight and four in five seasons. Neither the Niners nor the Eagles have won their Super Bowl appearances.
Oh, and here’s a weird one: both coaches followed up Super Bowl losses with six-win seasons. Shanahan has done it twice now.
But it wasn’t until Reid was fired by the Eagles that he became the coach who, when all is said and done, can claim to be the greatest of all time.
At 55, Reid loosened his grip on the wheel as he drove into Kansas City. He no longer controlled personnel with the Chiefs (though his influence as the head coach outpaced most of his “powerless” peers around the league), and he embraced delegation, letting his assistants handle more responsibility, including, at times, offensive playcalling, his calling card.
In short, he went from being an ideologue in Philadelphia — his way or no way — to a pragmatist in Kansas City, flexible with staff and scheme but maintaining a positive culture.
The Chiefs had success with the “new” Reid — he’s yet to have a losing record with the Chiefs.
Then Patrick Mahomes arrived. The young quarterback, whose Air Raid-offensive background was nearly antithetical to Reid’s West Coast Offense tenets, turned playoff seasons into titles for Reid. The Chiefs have made the AFC Championship Game every year since Mahomes took over as the team’s starting quarterback in 2018, Reid’s fifth year in Kansas City.
In all likelihood, Shanahan will not land a once-in-a-century quarterback like Mahomes. But that shift from ideologue to pragmatist, omnipotent ruler to master delegator, must be emulated.
And I think it’s in the works this long, vital offseason.
“You want to dig deeper, and you want to look at everything,” general manager John Lynch said Wednesday. “That’s what we’ll do. That’s part of our process. That will always be part of our process. We can go more in depth this year… I think we can focus a little bit more on where we want to go, where we want to evolve in both personnel scheme and all these things.”
The skids are already greased for this metamorphosis. When Shanahan took over as the head coach of the Niners after the 2016 season, he had two key demands: a six-year contract, which would afford him the ability to spend his first season in charge tearing down the existing infrastructure, and full control of the roster. Shanahan was allowed to hire a general manager, as such the head coach had all the power, but Lynch did all the dirty (and political) work that goes into the personnel side of a team.
That has shifted in recent years. There wasn’t a press release telling the world about this, but Shanahan’s power has not been as absolute in recent years, particularly over the last calendar year. Shanahan and Lynch still work collaboratively — all good organizations have that kind of relationship between head coach and general manager — but Shanahan has put more trust in Lynch to make the right calls for the Niners’ roster, often giving him the final say. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Niners had their best NFL Draft in a half-decade this past April.
Now, Shanahan needs to put the same trust in his assistant coaches, allowing him to be a more well-rounded head coach and not just an offensive coordinator with full-team responsibility—which you can see takes a physical toll on him throughout a season. This could nip some of his front-running and clock-management-botching tendencies, just like Reid had in Philadelphia and exorcised in Kansas City.
That, of course, is easier said than done. Shanahan will have three new coordinators in 2025. Yes, staff turnover has been an issue with the 49ers’ past success, but this shift is not because teams are trying to poach the Niners’ talent.
No, Shanahan fired his second defensive coordinator in as many years because he’s had to spend too much time monitoring them — Steve Wilks because he was too aggressive, Nick Sorensen because he wasn’t aggressive enough.
But in firing Sorensen this week, Shanahan spoke of an openness to deviate from running the Cover-3 scheme that he held as a requirement in previous hirings.
Shanahan also promoted Klay Kubiak to offensive coordinator this week. He even let Kubiak call plays in the preseason and Week 18 — something Shanahan has never done before as a head coach.
While Shanahan will still be the team’s primary offensive play caller in 2025 and beyond—he’s outstanding at it, after all—his willingness to let someone else do the job, even in meaningless games, shows serious growth and should project optimism for the future.
“I’m open to anything,” Shanahan said Wednesday.
I believed him.
And I can’t imagine him saying that — much less possibly meaning it — in years past.
