Losing any Super Bowl is painful. But losing a Super Bowl like this will be all the more difficult for San Francisco to stomach.
It’s easy after such an instant classic to race to apportion blame. A clock management miscue here, an errant play-call there. Ordinarily, those would be scapegoating tactics – sometimes the other team is just better. This championship Chiefs team is special; their quarterback may well be the new Michael Jordan. But they were ripe for the taking on Sunday, and that’s what will sting the most today and in the future.
This isn’t about blame, it’s about responsibility – a necessary but important distinction. That responsibility can be split equally among the 49ers’ young head coach, Kyle Shanahan, and their quarterback, Jimmy Garoppolo.
A coach’s actions speak louder than his words. Want to know if a coach has trust in his quarterback? Check out his two-minute offense. Shanahan showed no trust in Garoppolo in the first half, and in the fourth quarter, Garoppolo showed us why.
For three and a half quarters, the Niners had Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs on the ropes. It was Shanahan who failed to press that advantage. First, by botching the clock at the end of the first half. Then, by neglecting the rushing game down the stretch, when draining five or so minutes off the clock would have all but secured the franchise’s sixth title.
Those first three quarters had more than a whiff of the 2007 Patriots-Giants Super Bowl about them: the overpowering offense meets the formidable four-man pass-rush. The Niners crushed the Chiefs fun-n-gun offense with a dominant four-man rush, allowing them to drop the remaining seven players into coverage. They took away everything deep, limiting big plays through the air while still holding the Chiefs’ ground game in check. A couple of plays popped here and there, but everything came in front of the 49ers’ secondary, just the way they’d drawn it up.
Ask any neutral to pick out the best two players on the field with 13 minutes left in the game and the answer was clear: Nick Bosa and Arik Armstead, a pair of Niners pass-rushers. Both were flat-out unblockable.
Bosa had been the star of the show. He reached that rare state in which an elite defender manipulates offenses instead of reacting to them. Mahomes looked rattled by the third quarter. He started pressing. He forced passes into tighter windows than normal and had thrown a pair of ugly interceptions. It felt like the game was over, that the Chiefs’ electric offense had finally met its match – defense wins championships and all that. A classic five-minute close-out drive to start the fourth quarter and the Niners would have put the game to bed.
But closing out a Super Bowl is hard. Rear ends get a little tighter, and eyes a little wider. After scoring a touchdown to go up 10 points in the third quarter, the 49ers went:
- Five plays, 17 yards, punt.
- Three plays, 5 yards, punt.
- Seven plays, 27 yards, downs.
Shanahan neglected the running game that had been mauling the Chiefs defensive front all game in favor of a few choice “aren’t-I-so-smart” passing plays. It was shockingly similar to his much-derided approach in Super Bowl LI.
His biggest wobble, however, came at the end of the second quarter, when the game was still tied. Either you want to get out of the half, or you want to go for it. You can’t straddle the middle. For some reason, Shanahan got caught in two minds. With three timeouts, he opted to let the clock dwindle down to around 20 seconds before finally looking to push the ball downfield, but time expired before the Niners could do anything of significance.
Shanahan essentially conceded a possession against the most prolific offense in the sport, a clear indication that he was managing his quarterback in a particular way – hoping Garoppolo would not throw the game away.
Still: it looked like it wouldn’t matter by late in the third quarter. The Niners pass-rush was still getting home – until it wasn’t.
The thing with shortened possessions is not just that they take minimal time off the clock, they also mean your defense has minimal time to rest. And, if the opposing offense gets into any kind of rhythm, it means they bounce from series to series without having to spend an extended period on the sideline cooling down.
It took one play for the Chiefs offense to ignite:
On 3rd & 15... @PatrickMahomes to @Cheetah! 😱 #ChiefsKingdom
— NFL (@NFL) February 3, 2020
📺: #SBLIV on FOX
📱: NFL app // Yahoo Sports app pic.twitter.com/9jKaUgio82
Mahomes had to drop back almost 15 steps just to fire off a throw downfield. It was the first time the Chiefs had hit anything downfield all game. But it gave their offense the lift it needed, and the Niners had no response. Andy Reid upped the tempo. The Niners defense started wheezing. Kansas City scored 21 unanswered points to put the game out of sight.
Garoppolo couldn’t match Mahomes when given the chance. He just isn’t that kind of player. While Mahomes exuded calm as the clock wound down, Garoppolo emitted nerves. He argued with his right guard before a crucial play. He mismanaged the game clock. Even when he had time, he panicked in the pocket. He missed a wide-open George Kittle on successive third-downs. And when a chance came to win it late, he badly overthrew an open Emmanuel Sanders for what would have been a touchdown.
San Francisco will look back on this as a huge missed opportunity, and they should. A lot has to go right for you to get to a Super Bowl when your quarterback room is the least gifted in the building, even if that quarterback himself is perfectly fine. They came up against an unprecedented talent, someone who can transform his team from ho-hum to supernova in the space of a throw. They absorbed Mahomes’ best shot and were still in a position to win. But a combination of late-game angst and situational fear cost them in the end.
