When the San Francisco 49ers meet the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday in Super Bowl LVIII, it will be the third time Niners head coach Kyle Shanahan has coached in a Super Bowl. The first of those three games saw the Atlanta Falcons – with Shanahan as offensive coordinator – take a 28-3 lead over the New England Patriots.
According to Shanahan, this loss does not haunt him.
“No,” Shanahan told NBC Sports when Peter King asked him directly if the game still haunts him today. “It hurts. It doesn’t kill you. You understand what happened. You understand that you can handle it. You can bear it. ‘Haunted’ really isn’t the right word. It really makes you more hard. But, you know, if you tell me before this game that you’re going to take a 28-3 lead and lose, I’ll be like, “Do I ever leave my room again? You realize that is sports. Any one of 20 different plays would have changed this game. But I also understand that the quarterback on the other side (Tom Brady) did the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. He operated for an entire second half.”
Of course, Shanahan said pretty much the same the last time he was in the Super Bowl was in 2020, when he was head coach of the 49ers and they played against the Chiefs. Of course, now we know how that game played out: Shanahan’s team once again blew a double-digit lead and found themselves on the losing side. And this match is more important to him than the Atlanta defeat.
“The hardest game was Kansas City, personally,” Shanahan told NBC. “As you get older and go through this experience, you just try to control everything. You realize you can’t. You also realize you can handle this. And you realize how much you love it.”
Shanahan will now have a third chance to win a Lombardi Trophy. His 49ers are narrow favorites against the Chiefs, but we’ve already seen Kansas City win back-to-back games as a road underdog, even after never playing a road playoff game in the Patrick era Mahomes. The Chiefs came from behind to win each of their two Super Bowls during the Mahomes-Andy Reid partnership (they didn’t stage a comeback in their Super Bowl loss to the Buccaneers, however), and Shanahan let a team come back from behind in each of his Super Bowls. We’ll see on Sunday if either of these streaks can be broken.
