How Kyle Shanahan’s superpower shaped the NFL, led 49ers back to Super Bowl

Kyle Shanahan is not just Mike Shanahan’s kid.

He’s not just some offensive wunderkind. Nor is he a guy who simply lucked into the league’s most talented roster.

He is the architect of the modern NFL.

“He's changed this era,” said Chris Foerster, the 49ers' run game coordinator/ offensive line coach. “This era of football looks a little bit different because of Kyle Shanahan.”

Many of the dark brown hairs on Shanahan’s head have given way to grays, much like before-and-after photos of a president. That is the result of his painstaking labor, most of which goes unseen.

He has rebuilt the historic franchise he once idealized as a ball boy who wanted to imitate Jerry Rice and Ronnie Lott.

The only thing separating Shanahan from a place among the all-time greats is that elusive Super Bowl win. He is on the precipice of that feat for the second time in five years.

While his reputation as a schematic innovator is well-known, what separates Shanahan is his ability to develop and replace talent, especially of his coaching staff.

Since 2017, the 49ers have had 34 coaching departures: three are NFL head coaches, six, and soon to be seven, are NFL coordinators. One of those coordinators, Texans OC Bobby Slowik, took two head coaching interviews this cycle before sticking around in Houston.

Another 16 coaches have been promoted elsewhere, and eight left for similar roles. The current staff has 25 coaches, three of whom took interviews this cycle for head coaching (Steve Wilks-Chargers) or offensive coordinator jobs (Klint Kubiak-Saints, Brian Fleury-Patriots).

Those are coaching losses which would kneecap other franchises. In fact, they have.

Consider what happened to the Philadelphia Eagles this year. They lost offensive coordinator Shane Steichen and defensive coordinator Jonathan Gannon to head coaching posts, and were exposed as being schematically flawed down the stretch.

The Eagles’ coaching malfeasance this season – which included the lowest rate of motion (10.9 percent at time of snap, 25.7 percent total) in the league and a defense that looked like it couldn't cut it in the Big 12 down the stretch – was legendary, in the worst sense possible.

It started with – as Eagles right tackle Lane Johnson admitted on The Dan Patrick Show Wednesday – the 49ers’ “dismantling” of them. They lost their last six of seven, including a Wild Card game to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Nick Sirianni barely held onto his job, and has since hired two outside coordinators in Vic Fangio and Kellen Moore.

Shanahan, despite his staffs being picked clean, has never allowed the operation to crumble.

Over the past two years, he has brought in key outsiders in defensive coordinator Steve Wilks, special teams coordinator Brian Schneider, assistant head coach/running backs coach Anthony Lynn and quarterbacks coach Brian Griese.

There have also been key retentions in linebackers coach Johnny Holland, defensive backs coach Daniel Bullocks, and running backs coach Bobby Turner.

But when something doesn’t work with a coach, regardless of the friction it may cause, Shanahan will make the change he thinks is necessary.

When the 49ers’ defense looked hapless the first half of the season, he brought Steve Wilks from the booth to the sideline. The defense, with the benefit of a bye week, immediately rebounded. While the 49ers tried to downplay the impact of the move, it was substantial.

In the words of his own coaches and general manager, Shanahan is an incredibly demanding leader. He coaches his staff with the same zeal with which he coaches his players. Regardless of turnover, he ensures knowledge is not only retained, but built upon.

What separates Shanahan

One of Shanahan’s separators in being an incubator of talent is that he cares for his coworkers at a personal level… even if he shows it by ruthlessly dissecting their work.

At his core, he is still a Yeezy-wearing lover of Lil Wayne who players admire for his ability to talk to them like adults and friends while remaining unflinching in the film room.

Earlier this year, George Kittle raved about Shanahan’s team meetings, and how earnestly he works to inform his players about the foundation of play calls.

"I remember just talking to [Javon] Hargrave, he's like, 'I've never sat in a team meeting where [the head coach] explains the purpose of this run style versus this run style and why we're trying to get D-linemen to do certain things. No one's ever talked to me about that before. I've learned 20 things in that one, 40-minute team meeting."

Kittle said he’s, “… learned more in this seven years – specifically these last three or four years – than I probably did in my first 26."

Part of being a top-tier educator is that Shanahan doesn't shy away from uncomfortable conversations... or situations (see: the second half of Jimmy Garoppolo's tenure).

When Deebo Samuel – someone Shanahan views like a son – was out of shape in 2022 after signing a monster contract extension, Shanahan sat him down for a "very real conversation," about his performance and offseason work. Samuel called his 2022 campaign "awful," and came into 2023 camp healthy.

Shanahan is not surface level. He’s the guy who shows up, who tells you what you need to hear when no one else will.

One man who appreciates that fact better than anyone, is Foerster.

The coaching veteran has known Shanahan since 2010, when he was an outsider joining Mike Shanahan’s legendary staff in Washington, D.C. which featured five current NFL coaches.

Foerster was asked Wednesday what it would mean to him to win a Super Bowl for Kyle Shanahan.

It’s a question that hit him square in the gut.

Foerster paused. He sat back in his chair. His face tightened and his bottom lip quivered. He took a moment, then another. He tried and failed to hold back tears.

“The guy stood up for me at a time that not a lot of people did,” Foerster said. “So, I’ve obviously got a lot of loyalty. He’s one of my best friends. It means a lot.”

Foerster’s road to the 49ers was one paved by life-altering mistakes and public humiliation.

On October 8, 2017, a video of Foerster snorting cocaine went viral online after the woman he sent it to, Kijuana Nige, shared it on Facebook. The following day, he resigned from his position as offensive line coach from the Miami Dolphins and checked into a rehab facility.

The first call Foerster received after the video surfaced, around 11 p.m., was from the Miami Dolphins security team.

The second call was from Kyle Shanahan.

“Kyle called me and said, 'Dude, I just heard, what can I do?' And every step of the way, Kyle was there,” Foerster said. “He was the first phone call. He was the first guy to say, 'Let me see if I can find some work for you,' because he knew financially, I had nothing. I had screwed everything up.”

Foerster did not coach in 2018, but eventually joined the 49ers behind the scenes, working as a game-planning assistant from 2019-20. The move was not announced by the team, nor posted on their website, which was by design.

It was not a highly-paid position, unlike Foerster’s previous stint with the Dolphins, when he was one of the highest-paid assistants in the NFL.

“Just getting me back on my feet, helping me resurrect my career,” Foerster said. “I mean, the 49ers got something out of it, but in the same sense, Kyle was helping me personally. But professionally, he was making sure that I did all the steps necessary to be sure I was okay.

"And he didn't expose me right away. But he was the first phone call, and then he followed up every single step of the way.”

It’s an understatement to say it would mean everything for Foerster to win the game for Shanahan.

“For me? Yeah, whatever, I’m excited,” Foerster said. “I want that more than anything for me, for my family, for the girls. But for Kyle? I want this for him… for him first and foremost.

“Because everything he does – he’s done for me personally, which is why I get emotional – but everything he does in this organization, not to discredit John [Lynch] or Jed [York], or the other people in our organization who do things.

“It’s all Kyle. Kyle drives this train. It’s all him.

“If anybody deserves the accolades or the reward of the San Francisco 49ers in 2023-24, it’s Kyle Shanahan. He deserves it.

“That’s the way it was in Washington. His drive, his passion, his desire, his creativity, the way he builds into other people, the way he helps other people be better to get other jobs.

“They don't get other jobs just because they sat there like a sponge just soaking it in. He actively builds into Bobby Slowik, he actively builds into Mike McDaniel. He demands. He pushes. He prods. He encourages all of us to be the best that we can be. So, this guy? Are you kidding? Shit.”

Foerster said he thinks about that call from Shanahan every single day.

It dictates how he works, which is with a visible passion. Left guard Aaron Banks credited Foerster for many of the same qualities Shanahan is praised for, especially his ruthless honesty, borne out of a desire to yield growth.

That, Foerster says, comes from a place of urgency to make good on Shanahan’s support.

“I love my guys, I love my job. I love this thing. I love coaching ball and I love football,” Foerster said. “But the motivation to do it right for him, to make sure that I don't let him down, to make sure that everything is the way he wants it from A to Z.

“I get mad when I can't help him more. Like, how can I help with the receivers, the quarterbacks, the defense? Where can I help more to help you have the success? Because not only has he done everything for me, it's his deal. And he needs somebody that's there to support him and to be there.”

Foerster got choked up again after that last sentence. Quickly, though, some lighter, funnier memories of his early days working with Shanahan popped up.

That cavernously deep friendship started out rocky in Washington, with a 30-year-old Kyle Shanahan tearing into Foerster, then a new face in Mike Shanahan's operation.

“It wasn't always easy,” Foerster said. “I mean, he and I, we go out to a walkthrough in 2010 and he didn't know me, I didn't know him, and he was ripping me and storming off. And I just followed him right into his office and said, 'Alright, bro, what's up? Let's talk.'

“And eventually, we forged a relationship where we see football the same way. A lot of things he's taught me, a lot of things (about offensive line protections) I've taught him. We've forged this thing together. And what I love about him is he continues to build into other coaches.”

Usually, construction is described as building “up,” rather than “into.” That distinction is an indicator of Shanahan’s style.

He digs into his coaches to get the most out of them.

Any coach you talk to will admit that Shanahan is tough. But as harsh as his honesty may be, it’s generally welcomed.

John Lynch highlighted Shanahan’s nature as part of a few qualities that make him an elite developer of coaching talent.

“He's a wealth of knowledge,” Lynch said. “I think he coaches his coaches extremely well. He's extremely demanding. He's really good at delegating a lot of different people a lot of different jobs. He gives a lot of one-on-one time with various people in the organization.”

Lynch said that Shanahan’s standards have a side-effect that have added work to his own plate. Part of Lynch’s job, he chuckled, is, “to go pick [coaches] up after they get humbled.”

Tight ends coach Brian Fleury started, as many up-and-coming 49ers coaches do, as a defensive quality control, before becoming an offensive quality control.

He told me that Shanahan’s approach to building trust, as counterintuitive as it may sound, is to find problems in what his coaches posit. It’s construction by destruction.

So, how, exactly, can you tell when Shanahan trusts you? Apparently, the jabs just become a little less frequent.

“His personality is to poke holes in stuff, and that's how he gains trust,” Fleury told me. “And you just get to a point where you have the answers. And if you have the answers continuously for a lot of times where he's trying to poke holes in your ideas, then, eventually, he gets to the point where he trusts you, and he stops poking as often. You know when it is.

“Now, it doesn't matter what level of trust he has in me or anybody else on the staff, the holes are being poked this week, I promise you, as aggressively as they ever have, to make sure that it's right, because this game means so much to him. And we've all learned to love him for that. It just makes us all better.”

As you might imagine, not everyone can deal with that environment. Foerster said it's clear almost immediately when coaches won’t work out with the 49ers.

“They can either cut it, and they'll succeed and they move up, or they can't,” Foerster told me.

The common theme with coaches who don’t work out, is that they lack the ability to “un-learn” a concept the way they’ve been taught. It’s most often an issue with former players.

“It's really hard to un-learn what you've learned,” Foerster said. “You've learned things a certain way and you think, 'OK, I understand this play.' It happens to us when coaches come to us that are former players and say, ‘I ran a choice route for 20 years, 10 years, or 5 years. I know a choice route.’

‘I know you do. But that's not the way we run a choice route.’”

Of the eight former 49ers coaches who departed for roles that were not promotions, three, in Wes Welker, Miles Austin and Katie Sowers, worked with wide receivers, and were former professional wide receivers themselves.

Welker is the Dolphins’ wide receivers coach, while Austin was the Jets’ receivers coach for 2021-22, but is not currently coaching after an receiving an indefinite gambling suspension. Sowers joined the Chiefs in 2021 in the same role as an offensive assistant before becoming the director of athletic strategic initiatives at Ottawa University, in Kansas, per Outsports.

It should also be noted that Emmanuel Sanders was largely credited in 2019 for coaching up the 49ers’ young wide receivers group. His trade acquisition was a demarcation point for an uptick in performance from Kendrick Bourne and a rookie Samuel.

That ability to "un-learn" is the deciding factor in a coach’s success with the 49ers, Foerster said. He had to do it himself when he joined Washington in 2010 – hence, the early, heated moment with Shanahan.

“You have to be flexible.”

The next wunderkinds are already on staff

But while it’s clear when coaches aren’t going to cut it, it’s also clear when they have a future worth investing in.

If you want to identify the future coach crop of up-and-coming coaches, look to the quality controls, or offensive/defensive assistants. Former quality controls/assistants include:

-        Kyle Shanahan (Tampa Bay ‘04-05)

-        Sean McVay (Tampa Bay ‘08, Washington ‘10)

-        Mike McDaniel (Houston ‘06-08, Washington ‘11-12)

-        Mike LaFleur (Atlanta ‘15-16)

-        Matt LaFleur (Houston ‘08-09)

-        DeMeco Ryans (San Francisco ‘17)

-        Bobby Slowik (Washington ‘11-13, San Francisco ‘17-20)

-        Robert Saleh (Houston ‘06-08)

Currently, Fleury (tight ends), Leonard Hankerson (wide receivers) and Klay Kubiak (assistant quarterbacks) joined the 49ers as quality controls before being promoted. Both Fleury and Kubiak were defensive quality controls first.

Shanahan absolutely loves to send promising coaches to the other side of the ball to learn it, before poaching them back on offense when he feels they’re ready.

“It helped me tremendously because I learned about a side of the ball that I didn't know a lot about,” Klay Kubiak told me. “That year I worked on defense was huge for me.”

Current quality controls and assistants include Cameron Brown, August Mangin, Asauni Rufus, Miguel Reveles, Max Molz, Jacob Webster and Deuce Schwartz. The last three all worked with Steve Wilks at the University of Missouri in 2021.

But what, exactly, does a quality control do? How does one control the quality, per se?

Fleury said the most substantial component is taking film clips and “translating it into our terminology.”

That requires hundreds of data points and man hours. While he acknowledged some outlets like Pro Football Focus and NextGen Stats do similar work, it’s crucial for the 49ers that clips and data points are immediately accessible for coaches in the language they use.

The literal part of the “quality control” title requires making sure coaches and players use the correct verbiage when describing something, whether that’s a motion, a route, a protection, etc.

On occasion, those quality controls, who are typically young coaches new to the system, won’t actually know what something is called.

“Sometimes they don't know, and they have to make something up,” Fleury said. “And then they have to bring it in and be like, 'Hey, this is what I called this.' And we're like, 'No, we called it this three years ago.'

'Well, I wasn't here.'

'Well, you should still know it. That's your job.’”

Fleury, who interviewed for the New England Patriots’ offensive coordinator job, said that those roles attract a certain type of upwardly-motivated candidate.

“There's no general job description, but you're looking for a type of person that can learn very fast, interpret data, has the attention to detail to be accurate with it," Fleury said. "Once you find those people, usually they're self-motivated, and you can tell when you've got a good one, and it happens fast.”

That Patriots interview for Fleury came before the 49ers’ Divisional Round matchup with the Packers, which he said was not ideal timing. Fleury said Shanahan told him at 6 a.m. on Thursday, before a short yardage meeting, that the Patriots had requested an interview, and wondered whether Fleury wanted to take it.

He was initially hesitant, worrying that he wouldn’t represent himself well on short notice, and with his focus squarely on the Packers.

But Lynch told Fleury that the 49ers could control the format and make it a virtual meeting, to which he then accepted. He was up front with the Patriots about where his focus was.

“I told them that going into it, I'm like, 'Listen, I'm trying to beat the Packers. I'm not gonna have any time to prepare anything.’”

While New England hired Alex Van Pelt as its offensive coordinator, Fleury said he valued that experience, and clearly has ambitions of his own.

That’s part of Shanahan’s blessing and curse.

He wants motivated coaches who he can develop, but that means that he’s going to continue to lose them to new opportunities.

Fleury said coaches are aware of what coaching – and coaching well – for San Francisco could mean in the future.

“You're very conscious of it,” Fleury told me. “I mean, this is the best place to work as an offensive football coach at any level, probably on the planet. And I think Kyle does a good job of hiring people that aspire to be coordinators and head coaches, which is part of what motivates us all to do so well. So you're aware of the culture that you're in and grateful for the opportunity to learn from somebody like him, and from the people that have come before us, and just hope the river continues to flow a little bit.”

Foerster, who expects to remain around for the long haul, told me that process can, at times, be aggravating.

“You almost want to say, why are we giving these guys – he's giving these guys all this knowledge to help them help us have success, then they run off into the wilderness, and they're off and gone,” Foerster said. “But it's great for them. He just teaches them his offense, he teaches them how he sees things, and some guys get it, some guys don't. Some guys leave and they're not successful. They think they get it, but they don't. But it's constant. It's all him.”

Where the 49ers’ evolution this season began

The funny thing about getting “it,” with the 49ers is that there is less and less of a concrete “it” to point to.

When Shanahan began this project, some folks erroneously characterized what he does as the West Coast Offense. He was asked about that in 2018 and responded in kind.

"I don't run the fucking West Coast Offense," Shanahan replied.

Eventually, it became clear that while Shanahan’s offense has elements that come from Bill Walsh, though more directly from his father, Mike, he has his own flexible philosophy.

In the early days of Shanahan’s tenure, the offense was characterized by employing substantial use of play-action, tied together with outside zone runs, and pre-snap motion. Oh, and the use of a fullback, a position you could argue Shanahan and Kyle Juszczyk may have single-handedly saved from extinction.

Most of that has remained, but the use of play-action has dropped off substantially, which means something had to take its place. While the motions the 49ers have used – especially with Christian McCaffrey – aren’t a one-for-one replacement, they have altered the offense. It’s far more often a shotgun offense than it is one operating under center.

The only thing Fleury said is consistent since 2019 is the terminology the 49ers use.

It is a constant process of evolution, which means that the other “Shanahan tree” coaches – the roots of which extend to Sean McVay’s own tree – will get further and further from what Kyle Shanahan does as the years go by.

More than anything, the impetus for the development of scheme is to maximize personnel, and secondarily, to combat defenses, especially the in-division groups that matter the most to winning a division title.

The 49ers’ greatest change this year has been the use of Christian McCaffrey, especially his funky, shuffle motion out of the backfield, which often leaves him in odd positions six or seven yards behind the line of scrimmage.

Having a full offseason with McCaffrey allowed the 49ers’ coaches to figure out how best to use him, and that’s the tact they employed.

“I think you just see a lot of unique ways to create distribution issues for the defense and unfavorable matchups,” Fleury said. “The most obvious example of that to the naked eye is just the unique motions that we use and how we move Christian just slightly out of the backfield."

It leaves teams having to assess in a moment before the snap whether they have to account for McCaffrey as a running back. Without many teams running that motion, it's difficult for opponents to get good practice looks at it. They also don't have their own Christian McCaffrey on scout team.

It’s about that talent. Talent is what dictates – or should dictate – schematic changes.

While you’ll get different answers from different coaches about what Shanahan’s best trait is, Klint Kubiak, the team’s passing game specialist, said it’s his ability to evaluate that talent from the get-go.

“It doesn't matter if you don't have the guys to carry the ball,” Kubiak told me. “[Shanahan and Lynch] are as good as anybody in bringing in players that fit their scheme.”

It's a roster that Shanahan and Lynch have built into the NFL's best. It began, as CEO Jed York recalled Shanahan telling him in their first interview in 2017, as the league's worst.

"Kyle was pretty clear," York said. "He was like, 'This is one of the worst rosters I've ever seen in the NFL.'"

Despite plenty of egregious misses, Shanahan and Lynch found the pieces to match their vision. And Shanahan's scheme evolved.

Even though they've led the league in play-action effectiveness (expected points added per play) this season, the 49ers have gone away from it, because it is innately limiting.

That shift largely began with Jimmy Garoppolo in 2022, as it became clearer that he struggled to make reads after the play-action, and that he was more effective out of the shotgun. Most quarterbacks prefer not having to turn their back to the field, and while the 49ers won’t through direct shade at Garoppolo, the 49ers no longer have a quarterback with strict limitations.

Play-action requires quarterbacks to be momentarily blind, and essentially sacrifices eligible receivers in an effort to be deceptive and ensure protection. When they do run play-action, Brock Purdy has the ability to react quickly and avoid pressure in a way Garoppolo often couldn’t.

“ Play-action accomplishes certain things against the defense when they're aggressively fitting runs, but then you're limited in how many people can get out into the route when you're doing play-action stuff,” Fleury said.

“Because in order to sell the run fake, the back is involved, the tight end's involved, usually. So part of the reason for that is we feel comfortable in our drop-back protection game with the offensive line and just being able to get some of the guys out into routes faster.”

Purdy also sees the game the same way Shanahan does. Shanahan admitted this offseason that he's never trusted a quarterback more in his tenure with the 49ers, and it's clear. They have, at times, injected plays at halftime that were not practiced during the week, based on what they're seeing.

That trust allows the 49ers to build more in the offseason, with talent and IQ at quarterback and running back.

But in order to come to those conclusions about how to best use McCaffrey, the 49ers coaching staff goes through an exhaustive offseason process of data collection and self-assessment.

Starting a week or two after the season ends, the 49ers evaluate free agents and the draft. But half their day is spent assessing every play from the season, utilizing a monstrous scheme evaluation notebook.

The notebook contains just about everything Shanahan has ever done, and how well those concepts work. It has, for example, data on the performance of their top outside zone play going back 14 years.

In the offseason, coaches review every single play the 49ers ran during the year and assess how it performed.

“We point out and take notes on, what are some recurring issues? What did we do well? What is an area that maybe we need to focus on in the offseason getting better at in order to get the play back to where it deserves to be? And then we'll do that for every single play that we called all season long,” Fleury said.

That process takes nearly all offseason, which can cause some impatience from Shanahan. But that’s where those skills of delegation that Lynch highlighted come into play.

If there’s a play Shanahan isn’t exceedingly interested in – say something that he’s been coaching for two decades – he’ll leave it up to his coaches to give him the report.

By the end of the process, the 49ers have done a holistic self-assessment that tells them what they can fundamentally improve, and what they should move away from.

That’s how those funky motions, and other minor, detailed alterations come into existence. Take, for example, the 49ers’ decision to pitch a ball directly backwards to a running back – indicating a likely outside toss – on an inside run.

It's something they started doing more of in 2021 to create the sort of split-second advantages that can be the difference in explosive plays.

Mike McDaniel had an incredible answer when I asked him about that pitch alteration during the 49ers’ 2021 playoff run.

“You do that when you feel like there’s something that the defense is keyed on, and when the quarterback reverses out and tosses the ball, that you might get overplay,” McDaniel. “You try to be sound, but also get defenses a hair off, because if they’re a hair off, that gives us an advantage. And with a lot of players that we’re very confident in, that can be the difference in three yards, or 15 yards.”

When you see something new, it is not an impulsive addition. In all likelihood, the 49ers and Shanahan have identified a highly specific reason to make that adjustment, often to dictate an advantage to a defense that is not prepared to counter it.

“I think when Kyle turns on the film reel, his mind just works in special ways, that mine doesn't and no one else does,” Klint Kubiak told me. “He's always looking for something new and creative, and at the same time, making sure it's sound.”

The weight of history

There hasn’t been much ancient history discussed here. In some ways, you could say it's irrelevant. Again, Kyle Shanahan is not his father. Still, that praise, coming from a Kubiak, makes that history difficult to avoid this week.

This could very well be the weekend that confirms Kyle Shanahan’s all-time standing, and makes him and Mike Shanahan the first father-son coaching duo to win Super Bowls as head coaches.

And as much as the son created his own NFL sea change, he learned from his father.

When Lynch credited Kyle Shanahan’s ability to reload his coaching staff year after year, and laid out his talent for getting the best out of coaches, he finished with the following:

“It's a special skill that I'm sure he's learned from a lot of people, but namely, I think from Mike.”

Kyle Shanahan brought in Brian Griese, his father’s former backup quarterback, as his quarterbacks coach, despite Griese having no coaching experience. He paired him with Klay Kubiak, who raved about Griese’s knowledge.

Turner, his running backs coach, did the same for his father. So, too, did Foerster with the offensive line. Hankerson was a wide receiver on that Washington squad.

Lynch's statement is an obvious fact that belies the weight of knowledge passed down through coaching trees. Those mycelium roots run for invisible miles to connect the past to the present.

Any NFL coach worth their salt will tell you this truth: nothing in football is new. Everything is an evolution, an adaptation, or a rediscovery of the old.

That “cheat” motion from Tyreek Hill that blew up this season, and which the 49ers copied from McDaniel’s Dolphins? It might as well have come from Oregon high school coach Mouse Davis’ “Run-and-Shoot” offense in the 1960s. Even Davis picked it up from Ohio high school coach Tiger Ellison.

The old becomes the new. The new is suddenly old. Rinse, repeat.

That bears repeating given that, if Kyle Shanahan etches his own name into NFL lore, it will be – just like his father – with help enlisted from the Kubiak family.

On Kyle Shanahan’s coaching staff are those two aforementioned Kubiaks: Klint and Klay. Yes, they often get confused for each other and yes, the NFL has a well-chronicled history of nepotism.

(There is also a third Kubiak brother, Klein, who is a national scout for the Cowboys).

They are the sons of Gary Kubiak, who was the 49ers’ quarterbacks coach in 1994 under offensive coordinator Mike Shanahan. Mike Shanahan then brought Gary Kubiak with him to Denver as his offensive coordinator, where they won two Super Bowls together.

Gary Kubiak eventually became the head coach of the Houston Texans, where Kyle Shanahan got his first offensive coordinator job. Later, Gary Kubiak went on to win a Super Bowl of his own as head coach of the Broncos.

Kubiak’s sons, and Mike Shanahan’s son, now have the chance to repeat history.

It’s a bizarrely on-the-nose lineage, thought the novelty may admittedly be short-lived, with Klint Kubiak’s expected departure for the New Orleans offensive coordinator job. Even so, it will leave an indelible imprint on both brothers.

“It's been really, really awesome,” Klay Kubiak told me. “My brother has worked in the NFL for a while, and I've always wanted to work with him. It's just been a dream come true. You don't really get a chance to work alongside your sibling in this business very often. Just to go to work every day and learn from him and him learn from me a little bit, too, it's been great. To be in this moment together is really special.”

The weight of the job ahead makes it difficult to properly relish in that history, but that doesn’t mean they’re not aware of it.

Klint Kubiak told me Monday that heading into the week, his mother, Rhonda, texted him a photo of Gary Kubiak and Mike Shanahan on the sideline together for the 49ers at the 1994 Super Bowl.

“I think in the moment, you don't think of [the history],” Klint Kubiak said. “You're just trying to do your day-to-day job. But when my mom sends me a photo of my dad and Mike on the sideline in the Super Bowl, it kind of hits you how special it is.”

It’s only that special, though, if you finish the job. On Friday, Shanahan repeated a bleak adage he’s a firm believer in, reflecting how rapidly the feel-good nature of making the Super Bowl evaporates if you lose.

“There's only one team that's happy at the end of the year.”

That’s a near-Sisyphean assessment of life in the NFL. But it’s what rattles around in Shanahan’s head constantly. And on Sunday, he has the opportunity to secure the crowning achievement of the era he has singlehandedly shaped.

But if he doesn’t, and the narrative becomes “Kyle Shanahan can’t get over the hump”? He said Thursday his perspective won’t change.

“I deal with it the same way if we win, I celebrate with our team,” Shanahan said. “I celebrate with my family, and I move on with the rest of my life, with being a father, a son, and coaching and working, doing all that.

“Narrative, good or bad, is just a narrative. And that's my biggest thing with everything. When you go into these games, what makes you prepare, I just don't want regrets.

"I just want to do everything that makes sense for myself, that makes sense for our team. And when you do that – that's what I have found – no matter how hard something is or good something is, you always keep perspective of what it really is. If you want your perspective to be someone else's narrative, good luck being happy in life, or successful.”