Farewell, 2010’s
Reid-Mahomes v. Shanahan-Garoppolo a Fitting End
This post originally published on February 18, 2020.
This is the first time I will have published any of my freelance football writing on the internet so I’m glad I have something pretty easy to talk about as the topic of this introductory piece: the insane, revolutionary, legend-making greatness of Patrick Mahomes.
It’s been fifteen days now since the Chiefs defeated the San Francisco 49ers 31-20 in Super Bowl LIV. Maybe you’ve forgotten some of the key details, the principal actors, or the crucial moments, but we’ll go back over them one by one. Many will remember that Damien Williams, the Chiefs running back, was the most consistent player, scoring two touchdowns and acting as a guaranteed yards machine when the deep passing game was held in check. The Chiefs front seven and opportunistic secondary worked in beautiful unison to deny the San Fran passing game any sustained fluidity. But from us here at Personal Vowels, there is but one übermanne who carried the day for his team, and that is #15 for KC.
By winning the Super Bowl on February 2 Patrick Mahomes moved firmly ahead of Dan Marino in the category of “Best Young Quarterback of All Time.” It was pretty close to that point, but that narrative shifted momentously in the fourth quarter and propelled Patrick Mahomes from meteoric youngster to pro football legend. And not to douse Dan the Man’s legacy too, but when you’re as good as he is and have had to watch as far inferior quarterbacks win Super Bowls, someone has to be known as the greatest quarterback without a ring. We know now that we will never talk about Patrick Mahomes that way.
It’s hard to think of a game, a Super Bowl, and a postseason that saw the stories surrounding the two teams in question change more on a single play. That play was the third and fifteen rainbow rocket from Patrick Mahomes to evolutionary Devin Hester-Anquan Boldin hybrid Tyreek Hill, who ran a very long-developing route to the deep corner on the offense’s left side and lost all of the 49ers’ defensive secondary on his way there. He could have almost fair caught the ball, that’s how open he was (and how long the ball hung up in the air – if Mahomes could have managed to zip it in faster to Tyreek the touchdown might have come on that play, not four plays later. Not that it mattered).
From then on, it was a different game. Just as they have all season long the Chiefs caught fire when they needed to, going supernova in the final 7 minutes and change and putting up 21 unanswered points on a defense that was allowing a threadbare 3.6 points per quarter in the playoffs to that point. That’s not much. But the monstrous Bay Area ground-attack powerhouse that was the 49ers capsized under the unbearable weight of Patrick Mahomes, Andy Reid, Chris Jones and plain and simple history. In a year whose Super Bowl was (thankfully, for many of us) free of a New England Patriots team who seemed destined to have a clear path for victory laid before them in the fourth quarter, it was nothing short of glorious to see San Francisco’s script flipped on its head and Kansas City complete the greatest run of comebacks in one postseason we’ve ever seen. Let’s talk about it.
Quarter 1: Advantage Chiefs
After a now customary three-and-out from Kansas City on their opening drive, San Francisco blended run and pass skillfully, coming away with three points before kicking the ball back to Kansas City. From there, though, the Chiefs looked like they might just have enough gas in the offensive tank to not have to open up a game finding themselves in a big hole on the scoreboard.
The point of Andy Reid’s famous practice of scripting the first fifteen plays of a game is multipurpose: one, it allows the offense to start off a game with plays they know and like, which helps build confidence quickly. Two, it ideally allows a lot of yardage and hopefully a good number of points to appear on KC’s portion of the boxscore before too much time has elapsed. Third, if the script is written well, it puts the defense in a range of different looks and forces them to show their hand a bit. And if you watched the first fifteen plays, just about all of those things happened. Sure, they had yet to score by the time the sixteenth play of the game – one that will probably be one of the major talking points over the offseason – was snapped, but they’d gotten to the San Francisco 5 yard line and would score two plays later. But it wasn’t necessarily play design and outwitting the defense that did the trick in the first quarter; rather, as was the case much later in the game, the Chiefs jumped to an early 4-point lead because of the improvisational stylings of Patrick Mahomes and the in-your-face nastiness of Damien Williams.
1. Mahomespun Fabrics
By the time Patrick Mahomes plunged into the endzone after forcing helpless defender Jaquiski Tartt into a lose-lose spin session on a deceptively-drawn-up option the Chiefs looked like they’d felt out the Niners’ defense pretty soundly. The usual suspects were getting open: Hill was finding separation against a woefully overmatched Richard Sherman, and when the defense was keying in on him with multiple defenders the Mahomes-Kelce mind-meld reared its arrowhead-emblazoned head again as it had throughout the playoffs, especially on an ultrafast over-the-middle dart to the tight end on a 2nd and 6 that whistled right through a jungle of both Chiefs and 49ers. But as we’ve already alluded to, one of the key plays in the entire game came on the first play after the initial scripted fifteen plays. On 4th and 1 on the threshold of the San Francisco goalline Eric Bienemy went shoulder-deep into the bag of tricks and pulled out one of the most aesthetically pleasing plays in recent postseason memory. If you haven’t seen it you have to just look it up, but it’s a play cribbed from the 1948 Rose Bowl which pitted Michigan against USC and involved no wideouts and a bulky mass of skill players crowded into the backfield. But forget college football for the moment: in the culminating moment of the NFL’s hundredth season, the play, which was in basic Madden nomenclature a direct snap halfback dive, conjured fond images of Red Grange running the single-wing, the 1950 Rams running a Cretaceous-era version of the modern play-action-based offense, and the 2008 Miami Dolphins introducing the world to the Wildcat. The fact that two plays later the Chiefs scored on a speed option that involved a fake to the left and a spin back to the right equated to a three-play-sequence that essentially encapsulated the history of the ground game in the NFL.
II. Fast Start for the Niners
The Niners weren’t done, of course, and they’d shown promise on the first drive of the Super Bowl. One of the deadliest plays all postseason was the end-around/jet sweep/reverse to Deebo Samuel, who picked up 32 yards on just such a play on their third play from scrimmage. Spoiler: this was one of the only times the San Francisco wideouts would have much of an impact after the ball got into their hands. Shanahan proved early on that, just as he did in Cleveland and Atlanta, he has a perhaps unmatched ability to find what his skill position players are good at and dilute their skills into one or two almost unstoppable plays that he can run again and again when the opportunity presents itself. In Atlanta, it was shot plays to Taylor Gabriel; with these Niners it was the sweep to Samuel. Speaking of the Falcons (and, sadly, we’ll have to harken back to them again), Tevin Coleman, the erstwhile darling of the Shanahan zone run attack, showed a flash of formidableness on the opening drive, striding through an open lane for 7 yards and into the secondary on the play after Samuel’s downfield jaunt. His two other carries on the opening possession went for -1 and 1 yard respectively, though, which may have planted seeds of doubt in Shanahan’s mind as to who the most opportune back to utilize in the game might be.
Quarter II: Neck and Neck
Things began going in San Francisco’s favor late in the first half, with big play opportunities and a likely scoring march only barely derailed by extremely untimely penalties, miscues, and baffling clock management choices.
It’s nice to be Patrick Mahomes. There are a number of reasons this is true. He has incredible weapons around him (Hill, Tyreek; Kelce, Travis). He has well-kempt curly hair, the envy of everyone except, apparently, his commercial buddy Troy Polamalu. And he has a unique knack for a word that idea-strapped sports commentators love to throw around: escapability. What does that mean, exactly? For the purposes of this article, we’ll call it the combined ability to avoid notching a negative play (i.e., sacks and interceptions) by either running away from front-seven defenders or throwing the ball somewhere it positively cannot be intercepted. Just look back through some of Mahomes’ highlights in his first two seasons as a starter. We’ve touched on how he’s like Dan Marino already, what with the jet-propulsion arm strength and penchant for avoiding sacks, but you know who else he’s like? Fran Tarkenton. (People just love to compare Mahomes to Brett Favre but he throws far fewer interceptions than the third-best Packers quarterback to make the reason that people like to compare the two – their risk-taking – worth repeating). Fran and Patrick had escapability in droves, but they were able to keep the play alive, too, and combine both an innate ability to elude bloodthirsty pass rushers with an eagle-eyed keenness to throw the ball where defenders aren’t. In quarter 2, it was better to be Patrick Mahomes than Jimmy Garoppolo.
III. Jimmy’s Famous Bree-food
Jimmy G simply did not have a good game. We’ll explore in depth why that was, but one of his very worst individual plays irregardless of the ultimate effect it had on the landscape of the game was his up-for-grabs quacker that he threw to a quick-thinking Bashaud Breeland on the second play of the second quarter. One thing seemed clear as that play unfolded: Breeland was on track for a potential Super Bowl MVP nod if he kept playing as well as he had. He’d already made two sure-armed tackles on quick Niner screens and was demonstrating the sort of aggressive tackling whose absence had allowed the Chiefs defense to crumble in the clutch in the last two postseasons. Up 7-3, with the Chiefs set up at midfield, this looked like it might be the play that wound up being remembered as the one that marked for death Jimmy’s potential first ring as a starter. It didn’t really happen that way, though; sure, the Chiefs did that thing that Smart Teams like to do where they took a deep shot after a takeaway (I’m told this is called the “Sudden Change” scenario) and came away with 28 yards to Sammy Watkins. As he would further down the road, Mahomes correctly guessed that the one real area of weakness for this 49ers’ team was in the intermediate sideline area, between the safety and corner – the Turkey Hole, as Jon Gruden dubbed it – and threw a jump ball to Watkins on the near side of the field for a big gain. This looked like it might break open the floodgates for a moment, but a false start on Laurent Duvernay-Tardif squelched the immediate momentum they’d fomented, and a few plays later the Chiefs settled for a field goal to go up 10-3.
IV. Kyle Shanahan, The Fullback Whisperer
Jimmy Garoppolo had matched his pass attempt total from the NFC Championship by the 14:15 mark in the second quarter, and disaster had struck immediately. (This was not a one-off circumstance – many of his passes, even though he at one point looked like he might be closing in on Phil Simms’ immortal Super Bowl completion percentage, were of treacherous flight, and he was lucky he only ended with two interceptions). But ask anyone who watched mid-career Tony Romo or Ben Roethlisberger and they’ll tell you that sometimes it’s better for a risk-taking quarterback to get their signature head-scratching interception out of the way early to “settle them down.” I’m not sure if any scientific evidence can substantiate this adage but nonetheless we repeat it and content ourselves by feeling smart. And in the second quarter this proved true for Jimmy G. After the Breeland interception led to a Chiefs field goal the Niners started to look like the Niners again. Combining the ground game and downfield passing in effective concert, they moved right down the field, with Mostert getting three carries and Coleman and Samuel one each (as mentioned before, the Samuel sweep play was just about the best play in the 49ers’ arsenal the entire night). Then Jimmy found Journeyman 49er Backfield Contributor No. 56 Kyle Juszczyk for a 15 yard touchdown.
It’s kind of incredible to think about just how many hitherto anonymous running backs caught fire for the 49ers at one point or another this year. Kyle Juszczyk, amazingly, might be the best known of this entire bunch, and he showed rare catching skills and incredible balance on a well-thrown pass from Jimmy Garoppolo that looked pretty familiar to a similarly athletic run Juszczyk notched against the Steelers in 2016. It looked like this play might go down as the single most glorious moment in Super Bowl history for fullbacks since Refrigerator Perry stumbled thunderously into the Superdome endzone in 1986, and the most athletic display of yards-after-the-catch by a blocking back since Pat DiMarco beat the entire Green Bay defense on a fullback wheel route in the opening moments of the 2016 NFC Championship. Say what you will about Kyle Shanahan but damn if he doesn’t know how to scheme up deep pass patterns to utility lead-blockers.
V. Kyle Shanahan, The Clock Mismanager
The score now tied, and Jimmy G having “settled down” as per the bylaws of stale sports commentary, it seemed like this would be the opportune time for the Niners to re-enter the game mode that had won them the last two postseason games with such relative ease. The first order of business would be getting the Chiefs off the field, which looked like it might be a tall order for a moment. All season long the 49ers’ defense had done one thing noticeably better than just about every other team, and that was make open field tackles without getting shaken by ballcarriers. Well, in this game, they got shook. Sherman especially, but also stalwarts like Tartt and free agent godsend Kwon Alexander who got thrown for a loop by a shifty Damien Williams on the ensuing Chiefs possession after Juszczyk’s touchdown. A few plays later, Hill made about three different 49ers miss, but in so doing retreated about 4 yards from where he caught the ball. This was a theme that contagiously transferred to Travis Kelce, whose signature ballcarrying move, the immediate stop-and-start to shake the nearest tackler, cost him a couple yards and at least one surefire first down. Thankfully for the 49ers, however, the Chiefs elected to try something different and take a page out of Shanahan’s playbook by running an end around with Mecole Hardman. This went disastrously and lost 6 yards, putting KC in an almost impossible 3rd and 14 that they did not convert.
Here is where things get interesting. With under two minutes remaining and the clock running, the 49ers declined to take a timeout. Sure, they’d thrived by playing with gameplans that kept the clock running and shortened games throughout the playoffs but with the game knotted at 10 in the Super Bowl – the crucial moment of the season, you could argue – would it really hurt to set aside the multivolume run concept & defensively-minded head coach handbook and try for some aerial derring-do? What’s the very worst that could happen? Skeptics or historians might point out a relatively infamous play from Super Bowl XVIII called “Rocket Screen” that resulted in a pick-six moments before halftime, but that was ultimately the difference between a game that ended 38-9 and a game that could have ended 31-9. Different situation. Plus, this is Kyle Shanahan, a coach that had been praised for his aggressiveness as an offensive coordinator pre-49ers hiring. Just think back to the 2016 NFC Championship, Falcons vs. Packers. Up 17-0, he kept attacking, and Matt Ryan threw a touchdown to Julio Jones with seconds remaining in the half to go up 24-0. That was the difference between a 23-point- and 16-point victory – “wasted” points, as Analytics Twitter potentate Football Perspective has dubbed them. This team could have seriously used some points before halftime. Don’t we always praise Bill Belichick for opting to stay aggressive before halftime, scoring, and then coming out of the locker room and scoring again? We do, and as Chris Berman has often said on NFL Primetime, “What do the great ones do? They score before halftime.” With that in mind, here’s how Shanahan played his final first-half possession: Tackle Williams inbounds with 1:45 and change remaining. Don’t call a timeout (they still had all three). Then call two runs to Mostert without using either timeout, leaving 21 seconds left as the ball is snapped on third down.
Those who’ve seen the game already will note that I haven’t mentioned the tenuous call on George Kittle in any of this yet. There is some understandable umbrage coming from a lot of people, 49ers fans and otherwise, regarding what looked like it might be offensive pass interference on the last pass of the half for Jimmy Garropolo. If upheld, a long reception by Kittle down the sideline would have put the Niners right around the Chiefs’ 20 yard line – easy pickings for kicker Robbie Gould, who was returning to a Miami Super Bowl for the first time in 13 years. But Bill Vinovich’s crew, one that is notoriously standoffish when it comes to throwing flags, decided to punitively whistle Kittle’s extended-arm catch and call it no good. Maybe it was a bad call, sure. But the question I have is this – in a season that has been defined by the murkiness of what does and what does not constitute legitimate pass interference (offensive or defensive), why give yourself only one attempt at a deep shot? My only thought would be that Shanahan got one good look at the early-2nd-quarter interception thrown by Garoppolo and decided he didn’t have his good stuff that night. His reasoning in the postgame presser was that he “felt good at 10-10” and “didn’t want to give the ball back to the Chiefs.” It’s a fine answer, and everyone knows what happened to the Texans and Titans when they gave Kansas City too much time before the half in earlier playoff games, but you’re the 49ers, for God’s sake, the premier defense in the land. Shanahan’s inability to commit to aggressive playcalling in one of the season’s most vital tests of team character would cost him and his team dearly.
Quarter III: Gold Rush
It was almost inevitable that the 49ers would get their preferred style of play going. After all, they’d gotten that sort of thing going throughout the playoffs.
San Francisco had squandered their chances at scoring right before and immediately after the half, but the next best thing is doing one of those two things. And that is what they did. Remember, Shanahan, for all his faults, is as good as any coach at keeping an observant pulse on the strengths of his team, and it was the Niners’ best players who showed up with the hearts of champions on the first drive of the second half. Emmanuel Sanders, 5 yards. Sanders, 15 yards. Samuel, 14 yards. Coleman, 4 yards. Juszczyk, 14 yards. Kittle, 5 yards. And so forth. It ended in a field goal, but it certainly seemed like Shanahan had realized that Playmakers Make Plays and Players Win Games.
VI. The Pendulum Swings
You’ll notice we didn’t mention Jimmy Garoppolo in that “Best Players” list. And maybe he is one of San Francisco’s best players, but to be included in that catalogue, you can’t miss a wide open number one receiver like Kittle deep down the middle of the field on the third down before Gould’s three-pointer. Think about this: Jimmy did something Patrick Mahomes would never do – he found the easier completion on third down short of the sticks. Regardless, they went up 13-10 and put the Chiefs down on the scoreboard. With a defense like San Francisco’s, it’s better to just put them on the field and see if they can’t get a turnover.
One of the great things about having a defense like the one the Niners have as opposed to, say, one like the Bills is the probability the Niners’ playmakers give their team of changing the timbre of the game in a very short sequence. It’s great to limit your opponent to 3 or so yards per play, but what’s the trouble with giving up a ton of yards if you don’t let the other team score? The only way to win a football game is by outscoring your opponent. Consider the box score play-by-play of the first second-half Chiefs drive: Watkins for 19. Kelce for 4. Williams for no gain. Watkins for 9. Williams for 5. And then: Mahomes, -7 on a Bosa sack; Mahomes, intercepted by Fred Warner. Like magic, those yards the Niners surrendered melt away. And it wasn’t like these were some fluke plays or anything either: Bosa beat his blocker clean and actually forced a fumble that Mahomes deftly fell on to retain possession. Then, on the next play, the Niners defense utterly outwitted the Chiefs offense, calling a defense that allowed zero open receivers while necessitating a quick pass from Mahomes on a very inauspicious roll out. It was zone defense at its finest, and Robert Saleh should be lauded for the job he did in calling defensive plays; no one was ever in a truly terrible position, at least schematically speaking, as most of the big plays notched by KC were due to User Error by the Niners (we – us and Darrelle Revis – are still staring at you, Richard). But on this interception there was no error possible: Fred Warner was in as good a position to pick off the ball as possible, and that’s just what he did. S**t was tense for the Chiefs at this point, and you’re lying if you thought it wasn’t.
If 10-10 wasn’t a favorable time to start playing Niner Ball, then right after intercepting a Mahomes pass and taking over near midfield up 3 definitely was. But still Shanahan didn’t choose to commit to the ground game. Instead, he immediately schemed up concepts for his speedsters. Nothing wrong with this on its face – we’ve already heaped roses at the feet of the Chiefs for being ultra-agro after a turnover, and the Niners did the same with success. They netted 42 yards off of two passes to Deebo Samuel and Kendrick Bourne and were set up nicely at the Kansas City 11 yard line.
This is when things began to seem increasingly dire for the Chiefs. All postseason, one of the surest bets was the Niners offense inside the redzone, and they didn’t disappoint here. But did they run the ball at the 11? Of course not! This is Kyle Shanahan, Mr. Air Attack. They went back to the most feared receiving option in the NFL, Kyle Juszczyk. He almost scored again – God, could you imagine a receiving fullback getting Super Bowl MVP? – but got stopped just short of the promised land. From there the Niners did run the ball, and Mostert got his. 19-10 quickly became 20-10 after a Gould extra point. Ten point lead. In the Super Bowl.
VII. All Appears Lost
I’m going to give some attribution to NFL Films’ epic line of deep-dive cinematic explorations of legendary games, “Game Of The Week,” here, and repurpose one of their memorable lines from the Music City Miracle Special: At 13-10 with Mahomes just having thrown an interception, the Chiefs were in trouble. When the 49ers went up 10 points with 17:35 left, the Chiefs were in deep trouble. No one doubts Patrick Mahomes, but even his staunchest supporters had to be giving their lips the four-finger rat-a-tap treatment – the clinical precursor to the Surrender Cobra which involves hands placed palm-down on the scalp of the head – and wondering whether he had enough voltage to shock his team into life in what time remained after the Mostert score. With the third quarter coming to a close, things looked decidedly grim on that front: he only completed a single pass to Kelce on their ensuing drive before the quarter break. They even ran the seldom-seen Kelce wildcat package (which resulted in a first down, but still – seems gimmicky for the biggest possible stage). Once the fourth quarter commenced the Chiefs had completely abandoned the run – the rest of the drive were all passes or Mahomes scrambles. Mahomes actually did pretty well on this drive for a few plays – he hit big plays that both resulted in first downs to Tyreek Hill and Sammy Watkins after an incompletion on the first play of the quarter, and rectified a -9 yard sack by DeForest Buckner with a 13 yard run up the middle where he broke “a couple of tackles” by Joe Buck’s reckoning. But that was the high water mark for this drive – on the next play, the guy he’d targeted on his initial incompletion of the quarter, Tyreek Hill, allowed a pass to bounce off of his arm and be intercepted by Tarvarius Moore.
Before we go any further, we must acknowledge a source of grievous confusion. The 49ers have a DB named Tarvarius Moore, and the Chiefs have a DB named Charvarius Ward. Say both of their names 10 times fast and tell me they don’t sound infuriatingly similar. What gives, Football Gods?
Anyway. This looked like it might be it for the Chiefs. They’d come back from long odds in their last two games, but in those games they were playing the Texans (to whom a 24 point lead isn’t as awful as it may seem) and the Titans (I mean, c’mon.). In those games they weren’t playing the team that had given up the fewest first downs on third down attempts, which is what the 49ers were. Missouri citizens had a right to be worried. Of course, those who weren’t worried knew what the rest of us only suspected: they had Patrick Mahomes, and sometimes he’s all you need.
Quarter IV: Greatness
Teams who overcome 24-point and 10-point deficits in the same postseason have reason to believe that they are a Team Of Destiny.
VII. Drawing the Bow
You’d think this was the end for the Chiefs. A lot of things had gone their way during the postseason, and one could have easily dismissed their favor from the Football Gods as fluke-y – that fake punt in the Divisional round versus Houston stimulated them immensely, and the Titans’ inability to make Ryan Tannehill the centerpiece of their offense doomed Tennessee in the conference championship. But those games were versus Bill O’Brien and Mike Vrabel. Good coaches, certainly, but not ones without lingering foibles: BoB’s in-game decision-making style and hostile takeover-style commandeering of his team’s front office over the last offseason had garnered significant criticism, and Mike Vrabel’s team’s identity as a ground-based, pass-rarely offense with a defense that had gotten relatively lucky against New England and Baltimore looked, with the Chiefs down ten, like they might have been a paper lion but onfield lamb, ripe for slaughter in Arrowhead. Now, the Chiefs faced a “proven” coach, Kyle Shanahan, who’d unlocked the magic of Robert Griffin III, steered Cleveland’s offense to its most promising season in years and molded an offensive season for the ages in Atlanta in 2016. This same coach had the punishing air-tight defense to go along with his well-oiled-machine of an offense now, and if things held, we would instead be talking about the 2019 San Francisco 49ers in the same way we talk about the 1999 Rams, as perhaps the greatest single-season turnaround in league history. There were many things going San Francisco’s way, including win probability, which peaked at a nigh insurmountable 95.3% in the 49ers’ favor. But like the Dow Industrial Average in 1929 this prosperous zenith only served to dramatize the eventual plummet into football’s deepest doldrums.
Down 10, the Chiefs had them right where they wanted them. It isn’t a typo. There were several promising plays, but ultimately the game came down to 3rd and 15 from their own 35 yard line. This was the utter test: Down 10, in the Super Bowl, versus the best defense in the league, with Nick Bosa screaming in your face. Think Peyton versus the 2006 Patriots, or Joe Montana versus the 1988 Bengals. Only two things could happen on this play: ineffectiveness or glory. Patrick chose the latter. He found his weapon Tyreek Hill downfield and from there the comeback was on. He threw three straight incompletions after this play but, in the clutch, his badass tight end got the defensive pass interference call that they needed. In the endzone. To set them up at the 1 yard line.
It’s easy to underappreciate just how momentous certain plays that don’t involve a ball being caught or carried are – i.e., penalties – but this one was just enormous, especially considering how close the 49ers had gotten to forcing a 4th and 15 on the previous set of downs. There’s truly no play in sports as disproportionately punitive as the pass interference in the endzone call (as per NFL rules, at least), and in addition to Travis Kelce’s unguardability, the 50/50 heave on third and ten from Mahomes to his mind-meld tight end displayed irrefutable evidence of how you can go from ballhawk to blackguard in an instant when you play cornerback. Had the Niners defense held up, Tarvarius Moore could have been known as the man who put the fifty-fourth Super Bowl on ice for the Niners and placed the treetopper Christmas ornament on a win that would have tied San Francisco with New England and Pittsburgh at six victories in the big game. Instead, his off-limits faceguarding let the Chiefs continue firing on all cylinders and go for the touchdown instead of the field goal. Hill’s catch changed the landscape of the game, but the Kelce pass interference sent things swerving even more favorably for KC. From there, Mahomes had a good idea what to do next. A one yard laser – a pass that seemed to teleport over the heads of the linebackers – to Kelce put the Chiefs down 3.
VIII. The Bay’s Faultlines Quiver
Kyle Shanahan has proved himself a true leader of men. He’d taken his team, which was in totally horrid straits when he took over after the 2016 season, to the Summit of Pro Football. He’d hired a good staff. He’d drafted good players. He’d changed the culture. But none of that matters in the important moments of pro football. 28-3 hung over him like the sabre of Damocles, and when it came time to get insurance points, his team folded like printer paper in origami class. The blade, dangling, began to slip from its hanging.
But forget, for a moment, the 49ers. A ton of credit has to go to Kansas City’s defense. They absolutely balled out. They stiffened, forcing a punt after a first down on KC’s first scoring drive in the fourth quarter. And consider this: Jimmy G had four passes batted down in this game. Prior to this, he’d had six all season. No Fly Zone! Sorry, Broncos. No one questions Kyle Shanahan’s ability to design good plays, but 49er fans, like fans of the 2016 Atlanta Falcons, will be left with What If?s after this game: What if Shanahan hadn’t called a pass on 2nd and 5 up 3? That pass was batted by Chris Jones, who made his case for best free agent available in the 2020 offseason in this game. That meant the clock was stopped, and on 3rd and 5, you have to throw the ball. Incomplete. From here it seemed destined.
I recall quite vividly a moment where Michael Irvin said, after the end of the Falcons-Patriots Super Bowl, “I dpn’t care what your identity is. In the Super Bowl, you play to win.” Let’s assume that Kyle Shanahan, impervious to criticism though he was before this game despite several disturbingly languid teams fielded in 2017 and 2018, subscribes to this philosophy. Didn’t he psych himself out on this one? You’re up 7. You have the ball. The momentum is yours. (We at Personal Vowels believe, at least for the present moment, in momentum, in the shape a game takes and the wisdom in following the often apparent course of events when said momentum belongs to you). All these things working in concert to aid the 49ers’ chances of wringing out a victorious result from the contentious Miami night And what, exactly does he do? He PASSES THE BALL!
As one with sympathies and enthusiasms for the Atlanta Falcons, as this article will no doubt have indicated, I can identify the signs of a team losing its grip on a game that seemed to be in hand. Most of us know the feeling of grabbing too many groceries from the car at once to try and save time, only to feel an unsecure item held tenuously by a single finger begin to give way, fall from our grasp, and cause an avalanche of spilled foodstuffs mere feet from the threshold of the front door. The source of this misfortune is simple: you were too daring, and in so doing you doomed your shot at pulling off the neat feat you attempted.
Is that analogy in any way instructive to the final minutes of Super Bowl LIV? Probably not, but the point is this: the identifiable signs of victory dissolving in real time are incremental, cause-and-effect-driven, and impossible to miss when you’ve already seen it once. Many, myself included, felt a swelling unpleasantness as the Falcons declined to run the ball with any sort of higher frequency once they’d built a large lead on New England in SB LI. Did we feel good when we were vindicated because they lost and hadn’t taken our advice? No. We still felt like detritus. And in the moment when the Niners forewent a run-run-pass sequence to instead go run-pass-pass, it struck a chord to onlookers that checked every aforementioned box: it went against their team’s identity, it painted them into a corner on third down where passing was the only option, and it broke the hermetic seal on victory that they’d had to that point, allowing arrowhead-shapes contagions to seep cataclysmically in to their half-finished coronation chamber. The punt, which put Kansas City back in the driver’s seat at their own 35, served only to determine how many offensive yards Mahomes would add to his team’s totals.
IX. Loosing the Arrowheads
Perhaps it was at this junction that the confetti-cannon artillerymen stationed in the rafters switched out their ammunition from Niners colors to Chiefs ones. Anyone who had the shortsightedness to claim that the 49ers still had an advantage after the punting the ball back to Mahomes was either lying or drunk. Nothing was stopping the juggernaut that is the Chiefs offense from taking the lead. Now, they could have theoretically tied the game, but they weren’t going to do that. Not how they were playing. The box score reads accordingly: Mahomes, 5/5 for 60 yards and a touchdown. There was a rush for 6 yards in there too. He punked the Niners defense and laughed as he did it. He had broken them, and he smirked in their face as he threw the game-winning touchdown. It was an utterly unbelievable comeback but Mahomes played like it was a preseason game in his rookie year: no pressure, no consequences, whatever. Just go out and throw it, man. It worked.
It seems in retrospect that to call the go-ahead drive “utterly unbelievable” would be only to consider their opponent, the 49ers, and not to consider the momentous potencies of the team that effected the comeback. There were two ways of looking at what had just happened, with metaphysical arrowheads flying all over the Miami sky and forlorn Californians turning up not a modicum of gold dust in their sifters. If you’d watched the 49ers defense, it seemed unbelievable that they’d surrender two straight touchdown drives to throw away a 10-point lead. If you’d watch the Chiefs offense, it seemed unbelievable that they wouldn’t do just that after they got rolling. Every successive team the Chiefs played in the postseason posed a stiffer challenge for the arrowheaded avengers, whose signature move was the big comeback: Houston, down 24, on the wrong side of a whole lot of points, they came back. The next week, against the Titans, down 10, not as many points, but against a hotter defense, they came back. In the Super Bowl, down 10, against the best front seven in football, and they. came. back. Only one style could prevail, and the team with superior firepower and a more adept field commander came out on top. It wasn’t even close if you want to compare quarterbacks: Mahomes versus Garoppolo looked like a West Point valedictorian against a casual Risk player. And what would a well-trained strategist do against a staggering enemy? Take advantage of their weakness. Amazingly that weakness in the fourth quarter was, even more visibly than earlier, Richard Sherman: on the most important drive of the season he let Sammy Watkins, a castoff former first rounder, take advantage of Sherman’s diminishing speed and seemingly dulled instincts, blowing past the veteran cornerback on a ruthless inside move for a devastating 38-yard completion. Then on 3rd and goal the field general exploited the reeling Sherman again on a throw out the backfield to narrow MVP runner-up Damien Williams. Superb.
There was yet time left, though, and the 49ers won thirteen games. They hadn’t lost a game by more than seven points all season. If there were enough diesel fumes left in the tank to motor over the finish line with a winning result, they would need to harness them now.
X. Apocalypse
We’ve touched on the Chiefs defense and how its vital late-game effectiveness helped irreversibly cement the Chiefs’ championship efforts. But the hearts of Chiefs fans were probably still aflutter with anxiety when the 49ers took the field once more, attempting to salvage their evaporated stranglehold on the contest. This nervousness was a well-grounded one; hell, they’d given up 24 and 31 points in their last two games to worse offenses. And this was still largely the same defense from a year ago, genetically speaking – many of the starters onfield for Super Bowl LIV had been there last year as part of the 2018 Chiefs, a team with a defense so porous that it managed only 12 wins despite scoring over 28 points in every single game. What’s more, they allowed back-to-back touchdown drives to a Patriots offense that was hardly marvelous, at least by their high standards. Not to mention, the debatable protégé of that Patriots team’s quarterback now stood at the helm of an offense that threatened to pull a Tom Brady and leave the Chiefs defense smoldering on the field with no time left, as old Tommy had done twice in 2018-19.
That, at least, was what many Chiefs fans probably though. In reality, the 49ers were in deep trouble. Down 4 with an offensive scheme that emphasized ball control and ground game, they had to rely on their quarterback, who was, somehow, still unproven. That didn’t go well. After a couple fortuitous completions to George Kittle and Kendrick Bourne – and they were undoubtedly fortuitous, with Jimmy padding his stats via some run-after-catch production from Kittle and then a genuinely well-placed ball to Bourne in the Gruden-beloved Turkey hole – the offense went into neutral around midfield: three straight incompletions to Samuel, Bourne, and a desperate heave to Sanders. That brought up 4th and 10. Don’t ask Jimmy to convert that. He got sacked.
There were only so many choices for Jimmy to make. And there were no good ones. The play that will haunt 49ers fans to the end of their days, though, was this: on 3rd and 10, Emmanuel Sanders, a criminally underrated player that does nothing but run Exacto-knife-sharp routes and catch wobbly floaters from all manner of different quarterbacks, found his way inexplicably behind the defense, a matter of yards from the goal line. It would have been hard for most quarterbacks to even see a receiver that deep downfield behind double coverage, but Jimmy spotted him and let the last best chance for a 49ers miracle score fly. That ball hung in the air for two and a half hours. Chiefs and 49ers backers alike must have harkened back in their visual memories to flawlessly-positioned deep balls to Kittle and lost opportunities by the Kansas City secondary stretching from 2017 to the present moment. Slowly, gravitationally, inexorably, the spheroid fell like a catapulted projectile from the tropical firmament…just out of Sanders’ reach. The collective exhalation was one of utterly enormous relief, on the one hand, and utterly enormous dismay, on the other.
It’s no use debating who is at fault for this very, very near miss by San Francisco. Cretins who claim that more skillful throwers could have made that throw aren’t wrong, but to act like the throw was one that a competent signal-caller should complete 10 out of 10 times is absurd. On their best days, Tom Brady, Peyton Manning and Drew Brees would, I contend, execute that throw successfully maybe 50% of the time. Jimmy should get some sort of pass for this; it would have been one of the greatest throws in Super Bowl history if he’d converted it, and that fact should itself nullify the idea that it was a throw that he “had” to make if he was a starting QB.
If we’re not going to pile on to Jimmy for failing to complete 3rd and 10, though, we do have to participate in some mudslinging for the symphony of silliness he conducted on the ensuing down. It was about as uncoordinated-looking a play as you’re likely to find in the Super Bowl: a klutzy two-handed heave to Raheem Mostert on the final meaningful play of the game. It went as you’d expect it to. There’s an obscure but extant history of such ambidextrous doings in the annals of the NFL’s aerial history, so while this gesture of desperation was probably an impromptu one on Jimmy’s part, we cannot rule out the possibility that he was making a big-stage homage to the likes of Charlie Conerly and Jaguars 2019 preseason phenom Tanner Lee. Granted, it would be strange to do that on the last down of offensive football your team has in the last game of the season, but the chance is there.
The 49ers still had three timeouts. The Chiefs intended to sweat them clean out of the Niners. But they didn’t even have to. After a 4-yard gain by Damien Williams on the first play of the Chiefs’ possession, the Niners called their first timeout. You would think they probably had a conversation along the lines of “Now, when he runs the ball on this next play, do that thing you just did – tackle him – again.” Which would have been good advice. The only problem was that the 49ers did not do this. Damien Williams blasted straight down the right right of the flattened 49ers for a 38-yard touchdown on the second play of the drive, giving the Chiefs an 11-point lead after the extra point. All hope had now been extinguished for San Francisco. For Kansas City, the tailgate awaited. Jimmy threw a Let’s Just Go Home INT on the Niners’ last meaningless drive to write an end to their offensive operations, and then some nimble knee-taking by Mahomes let the remaining seconds tick away. For the first time in fifty years the Chiefs were champions of the football universe.
Quarter V: Extra Analysis
The 2019-20 Chiefs were the rare team whose offense proved truly peerless in every single game of the playoffs. Just how incredible they were – and how unforeseeably torturous the loss was for the 49ers – is worth investigating.
At one point or another throughout the playoffs the Kansas City Chiefs trailed by a combined 44 points. 24-0 versus Houston, 17-7 versus Tennessee, 20-10 versus San Francisco. They won every game by double digits. After falling to their deepest deficit in each game, they went on to score, respectively, 41 unanswered, 28 unanswered, and 21 unanswered. After their opponents’ largest lead had been built they outscored Houston, Tennessee and San Francisco 51-7, 28-7, and 21-0, a defensive effort that ought not to be forgotten. These are numerically dizzying figures in the punishingly difficult and uncompromising world of NFL playoff history, all of them, but the most prestigious and rarefied territory that the Chiefs ushered themselves into might be the 100-Point Playoff club.
If you score 100 points in a single postseason that usually means you’re one of two things: one, you are a hot-as-lava wild card team that snuck in to the playoffs and reached the Super Bowl, or two, you are on the very short list of the greatest offenses of all time. Only 27 teams have ever cleared the 100-point hurdle in the playoffs, exactly half as many teams as there are current Super Bowl champions. But this year’s Chiefs, even among this truly special group of glorious scoring machines, are distinguished even further: they are one of only 8 teams to score over 114 points in a single postseason, and of those 8, one of a mere 5 to accomplish the extraordinary achievement in only 3 games. But why is that number, 114 points, important, exactly? This is why: That is the average points-per-game total (well, 38.8, to be exact, but the Chiefs’ total of 117 puts them at a round 39 per game in the playoffs, anyway) of the 1950 Los Angeles Rams, the highest-scoring team in NFL history on a per-game basis. Basically what we’re saying is this: there are a mere 4 other teams in the whole corpus of NFL playoff history to score as well and as often as these Chiefs, and to accomplish that stunning feat, those teams needed to play as well as the most potent offense in NFL history against playoff-caliber opponents. That list of 5, by the way, also includes the 1990 Buffalo Bills, the 1989 and ’94 San Francisco 49ers, and the 1992 Dallas Cowboys, teams who are routinely ranked among the greatest in the Super Bowl era if not all time. It might do well to get used to talking about the 2019 Chiefs that way.
On the other end of the spectrum of distinction, the 49ers acted as architects of their own heartbreak in a way that is seldom seen in pro football. To have a 10 point lead with 6 and a half minutes left in the 4th quarter and lose by double digits positively boggles the mind. I’ve endeavored in vain to find the correct combination of criteria to punch in to Pro Football Reference to find the exact number of times that has happened, but you can rest assured that it is a very infrequent occurrence. It certainly almost never happens without one of those wild last-play-lateral-gone-wrong defensive touchdowns, and it may have never happened to a defense as good as the 49ers. But even worse is this simple condemnation: they surrendered 21 unanswered points in the final quarter of their season to utterly sabotage their prospects of a championship. Hurricane Mahomes was simply too much.
And yet there are moments that, if their outcomes had been just a bit different, could have forestalled the torrential scoreboard gourmandizing that the Chiefs foisted on the Niners in the fourth quarter. Did the failure to find Kittle on the last pass of the first second-half drive cost San Francisco? Well, consider the ramifications of extending the drive, and assume the Niners score a touchdown coming out of halftime. That makes it 17-10, and all other things equal, that means the game is tied at 24 later. Would the game have been different if the Niners were driving for a field goal instead of a touchdown on what became their last-ditch drive? Maybe, maybe not – they certainly looked like they’d been shellshocked into defeat by the time they crossed the fifty later in the evening when they were down 4. But maybe Shanahan would not have abandoned the run so quickly if there were no instantaneous consequences for having to punt the ball back to Patrick Mahomes. After all, the run was working pretty damn well on the first play of their first drive after going down 20-24. Mostert, the Boilermaker Bully of the 2019-20 Playoffs, rattled off a cool 17 yards against a dramatically inconsistent Chiefs defense. From there it was all passes, and none of them netted returns as valuable as Mostert’s first run.
Mostert had the hot hand, but Kittle’s lack of a role in this game may just be what causes Kyle Shanahan to awaken from spine-chilling gridiron nightmares more than anything else. The coach gave his turbulent-armed quarterback only one chance to find the behemoth blocking-catching dual threat on the last first-half drive, only to see that opportunity crumble in ashen uselessness due to a controversial push-off call. Then, when Shanahan had begun the descent into identity-forsaking shapelessness on the playcalling front, he gunned for newcomers like Kendrick Bourne and Deebo Samuel rather than cooking up the time-tested long-developing play-action shots to the All-Pro tight end. Four catches for 36 yards is decidedly un-Gronk and un-Kelce like. But perhaps it is unfair at this moment in his career to compare him to other generational TE’s whose quarterbacks threw to them early, threw to them often, and threw to them with eagerness approaching favoritism.
Shanahan pivoting away from emphasis on his star offensive weapons can be extended even further. After a defined role in the Divisional round beatdown versus Minnesota Tevin Coleman only had a limited role on this offense. That should have never been the case for a running back Shanahan clearly sees the potential for greatness in, considering he personally selected him from his former team in Atlanta to head up the running back rotation in San Francisco. In the biggest games Shanahan has coached with both of those organizations, though, lingering (or in-game) injuries and a vague unwillingness to trust the Indiana product led to puzzling personnel packages and an absence of agility in the running game that makes those who figured Coleman was one of Shanahan’s “Guys” wonder whether he’s really as key a chesspiece as we’ve been led to believe.
And that might just be the biggest, most telling difference between these two teams: Andy Reid empowered his best players to play their best and seize every possible opportunity on the biggest stage, and Kyle Shanahan, perhaps unintentionally, neglected his, leading to an amorphous late-game offensive malaise that cost him the crown jewel of head coaching.
But keep your heads up, fellas. There’s always next season.