The 49ers agreed to a contract extension with head coach Kyle Shanahan that keeps him with the club through the 2025 season. Adam Schefter’s initial report was later confirmed by Chris Biderman of the Sacramento Bee and Matt Maiocco of NBC Sports Bay Area. The six-year extension puts Shanahan in a position to land in rarified air among 49ers head coaches.
If Shanahan stays with the 49ers for the duration of the deal, he’ll have coached the club for nine seasons. That would tie him for the second-longest tenured head coach in 49ers team history.
Buck Shaw lasted for nine years as the team’s first ever head coach. Bill Walsh was at the helm in San Francisco for 10 seasons. No other head coach has been with the team for more than eight years.
Just coaching next season makes Shanahan successful by recent 49ers standards. Since Steve Mariucci was fired after the 2002, only Jim Harbaugh has lasted four full seasons with the club. If he makes it to 2022, which it seems for all intents and purposes that he will, he’ll be the first coach since Mariucci to make it to the five-year mark.
It’s impossible to know what the next six years will look like, but Shanahan’s current trajectory indicates he’ll have his position for the foreseeable future. He took over in 2017 for a club that went 2-14 the previous year. After tearing down the roster and dealing with injuries, Shanahan had the 49ers back in the Super Bowl in his third year on the job.
Perhaps there’s a cliff the 49ers and their head coach are hurtling toward a la Jim Harbaugh in 2014. However, the relationships in the team’s facility seem to be much healthier and the dynamic between the coaching staff and the front office is more cohesive than its been in a long time. As long as injuries aren’t a huge problem and the salary cap stays well-managed, Shanahan shouldn’t have a problem landing himself among the 49ers’ longest-tenured head coaches.
