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Kyle Shanahan is Finally a Winner

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NFL Week 14 – The post-Jim Harbaugh 49ers were a wasteland. Both Jim Tomsula and Chip Kelly stumbled badly, with poor leadership just exacerbating the talent drain caused by years of poor Trent Baalke drafts. The 49ers joined the Browns as the only teams in football with DVOA below -20.0% in both 2015 and 2016. They were the only two teams with seven or fewer wins over those two seasons. And when you’re getting compared to the Cleveland Browns, you know something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

For their fourth coach in four years, the 49ers turned to Kyle Shanahan, hotshot coordinator of the Atlanta Falcons. Fresh off of an NFC championship and an MVP turn from his quarterback (and a 28-3 lead in the Super Bowl, if you want to consider such things), Shanahan met with 49ers owner Jed York and told him, in no uncertain terms, that his team sucked. York agreed and signed Shanahan to a longer-than-expected six-year contract, with the explicit expectation that the first two years would be just to clean up the mess, and then the remaining four years would be to actually coach a football team. And, indeed, things started terribly—a near-complete roster purge, featuring 27 of their 31 free agents leaving and 51 of the players on the 90-man roster being new to the team, led to some severe early growing pains in the form of an 0-9 start. They didn’t manage to string two wins together until new quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo got into the starting lineup in December. It was going to be a long road out of the pit.

And finally, Shanahan got there. With the win over the Miami Dolphins this week, Shanahan improved his regular season record to 47-46. After 93 games, Shanahan is above .500 for the first time in his career. And Andrew, I’m going to tell you today about how interesting that feat is, and … Andrew? Andrew?

Oh, right. It’s 2022, not 2020, and this isn’t Scramble for the Ball anymore. That entire intro, and all the data gathered for it, was going to be a September topic two full seasons ago, before crazy things happened. And so I have been sitting on this article for 810 days, in what has gone from a fun little early-season topic into a downright obsession. I have tables, people. A spreadsheet just waiting to be patiently explained, but locked behind simple things like “reality not actually corresponding to things.” I told Andrew Potter, at the time, that we’d run the article just as soon as Shanahan ticked over .500, and just because it has been an age-and-a-half since that promise was made, dang it, we’re doing it now. And, as a fun bonus, we also get to talk about Jimmy Garoppolo’s body exploding into ten thousand individual bits, an evergreen topic if there ever was one.

Cool? Cool.

Finally Crawling Over .500

93 games is a long, long time. More than three-quarters of the coaches in NFL history didn’t get 93 games, much less last that long without a career winning record. In fact, only one coach has ever taken longer to climb to .500: Tom Landry.

That’s a really impressive list of coaches! Five of them are in the Hall of Fame (well, six, but Forrest Gregg is in for his time as a lineman with the Packers). Six won a title, and nine at least reached a championship game. (Sorry, Jerry Glanville.) All but two ended with a career record over .500 as well, so in most cases it wasn’t a brief peak, but rather some sustained success after starting in some pretty rotten situations.

And if you thought Shanahan started with an empty cupboard, these gentlemen would like to raise awareness of their plights.

Tom Landry’s Cowboys weren’t just an expansion team; they were an expansion team without the benefit of an initial draft class. In those days, the drafts were held in November of the previous season, and the Cowboys weren’t granted a franchise until January of 1960, in order to directly compete with the new AFL. So Landry’s initial team was composed entirely of undrafted free agents, veterans plucked in an expansion draft, and a couple of college stars who had been signed before the team had even existed due to a personal services contract loophole. There’s no surprise that Landry started his career 0-11-1; winning any games under those circumstances would have been exceptional. In fact, Landry didn’t put together a winning season until 1966. No coach would put together five losing seasons in a row nowadays; they’d be run out of town by an angry mob wielding pitchforks and torches. And even in the 1960, this wasn’t an acceptable situation—fans and the media were calling for Landry to go, but instead, owner Clint Murchison signed him to a 10-year contract extension in 1964, the longest contract a coach had ever signed. Safe to say that one worked out pretty well for Dallas in the long term, but it took nearly the whole decade for Cowboys fans to enjoy as many wins as they had suffered losses. This is a record that will never, ever fall, though Shanahan gave it the ol’ college try.

This top-10 list is a look back at some of the worst situations in NFL history. Jeff Fisher had to deal with a hostile crowd in Houston after the Oilers had already said they were leaving, as well as nonexistent crowds in Memphis as the team waited for its Nashville stadium to be built. Greasy Neale took one of the worst teams in the 1930s and had to wait out the World War II player shortage and a temporary merger with the equally putrid Steelers before he was able to assemble a championship team. Bill Walsh picked up from the horrible reign of general manager Joe Thomas, best known in 49ers circles for one of a) trading away five early-round picks for O.J. Simpson, whose knees were long since shot; b) getting compared to Robespierre for his habit of firing anyone who dared disagree with him; c) getting into multiple physical fights with beat writers; or d) trying to cancel a Thanksgiving game because he believed he was going to be assassinated. Expansion teams, decade-long losing streaks, being the Cincinnati Bengals—it’s a collection of situations almost hand-picked to make coaches fail.

And in this era of one-and-done coaches and quick-trigger firing decisions, the thought that you might need to wait four, five, six years for success? That’s more than most owners could handle. It wouldn’t have been that wild for Shanahan to have received his walking papers after 2018, with the 49ers at 10-22 in his first two seasons; York had fired his last two head coaches after just one bad season. Heck, Brandon Staley is on the hot seat right now at 15-14! If Brian Daboll could turn the Giants into a competent team in just one year, surely, the 49ers should have been more than justified getting rid of Shanahan and getting a real coach. You know, Adam Gase was available…

Admittedly, this is more of a “look at this cool stat!” rather than anything truly deep and meaningful, but that’s why I enjoy it so—it’s the ideal overlap between randomness and skill. To rack up a huge “games before .500” number, you have to lose that first coin flip—you have to avoid going 1-0. Jeff Saturday was out of contention here before he even began, thanks to the upset over the Raiders in his first career game. Nathaniel Hackett didn’t win his first game, but rallied to win his next two, beating Shanahan’s 49ers to go to 2-1. Hue Jackson was 2-1 in Oakland. Adam Gase got to 5-4. Jim Tomsula was going to be my prime example when this article was first going to go live; he started 1-0, and I have had this tweet bookmarked for years…

There are only four active head coaches who have never been above .500: Dennis Allen (49 games coached), Arthur Smith (30), Robert Saleh (28), and Steve Wilks (23). Saleh looks like he’ll clear the bar sometime in 2023, and I still think Smith can do it sooner rather than later. Wilks is really just playing out the string as a replacement for Matt Rhule (who was 3-2!), and Allen? Well…

Allen was a retread coming into the year and a questionable choice for a repeat head coaching job to begin with. At 12-37, he’d have to coach well into 2024 to even have a chance to get over .500; he’d be guaranteed a spot on that top 10 list if he ever manages to turn things around. But surely, once you start getting into 50-plus games coached, you have to have shown something, right? It would be truly embarrassing to never get above .500 with that much experience under your belt, right guys?

Oh, Norv.

Norv Turner was who 49ers fans were afraid Shanahan would become—a highly successful offensive mind who couldn’t get it done as a head coach. Turner’s credits as a coordinator are perhaps not unimpeachable but certainly worthy of plaudit—he was the offensive mind behind the Triplet Cowboys and he has a couple of Super Bowl rings to show for it. But he was never able to fully dig himself out of the early hole he put himself in when he took over the Washington job in 1994. Oh, he came close, especially after a number of double-digit-win seasons with the mid-2000s Chargers, but he could never quite seal the deal. That’s 237 games of franchises waiting for Turner’s offensive track record to overcome his head coaching deficiencies, with just four playoff years in 15 seasons as a head coach to back them up. Maybe he wasn’t quite all hat and no saddle, but his hat-to-saddle ratio was off the charts. He remains the only NFL coach with at least 100 wins and a losing record. Many of these other names are guys who stuck around with one terrible team for aeons—John McKay and the Buccaneers, Bart Starr and the Packers, Jack Patera and the Seahawks—but Turner got three separate stints as The Guy and could never really turn it into anything meaningful. Just good enough to keep getting more chances, never good enough to do anything with them.

Also, I’d ask how on earth Romeo Crennel got a third head coaching job in 2020, but trying to make sense of anything the Texans have done since 2019 requires specialist training.

The Garoppolo Factor

Of course, the reason Shanahan got such a long leash from the 49ers is that he has been very, very successful … when he has had his pieces in place. And quarterback is the most important piece, and the most important quarterback for Shanahan has been Jimmy Garoppolo. Shanahan is 38-17 with Garoppolo as a starter (in the regular season) and 9-29 without him—both an impressively large split for a quarterback who gets a lot of flak from the world at large, and a depressingly large sample size for a starting quarterback who has been with Shanahan since Year 1, if not Day 1.

I mean, look at this graph…

Now you see why this article was being prepared in 2020. Shanahan got within one game of reaching .500, and the fateful trip to the Meadowlands happened. In two games between the Jets and Giants, the 49ers suffered injuries that would derail their 2020 season. In addition to Garoppolo spraining his ankle and missing time, Nick Bosa tore his ACL while Raheem Mostert, Tevin Coleman, and Solomon Thomas were lost as well. The 49ers kept in it, hovering around .500 while players recovered … and then Garoppolo sprained his ankle again and was lost for the rest of the year, and down the 49ers went, leading to all this research being useless. Useless! Forget the 49ers breaking records in adjusted games lost and derailing the season after their Super Bowl appearance; can’t someone think of what this does to the poor writer on a deadline? Honestly.

And this is what is has been to be a 49ers fan since Shanahan has taken over. The knowledge that, when everything’s working, they’re top-tier contenders right up there with any other team in football. That 38-17 record with Garoppolo is a very nice .691 win rate, which would be second only to the Chiefs since 2017. And that 9-29 record is just .237, which would be dead last in the league, so when things go badly, they go badly. Every team is worse without their starter in, sure, but the 49ers spend a frustratingly large time with the C.J. Beathards and Nick Mullenses of the world.

The Garoppolo injuries are why most of the fan base (and ownership, for that matter) were willing to give Shanahan a pass even through two seasons of struggling before the Super Bowl year; they had seen what happened when the Shanahan System was armed and operation. But, of course, now Garoppolo is hurt. Again. And the 49ers have to scramble to replace him. Again.

Football Outsiders Almanac 2022 said, in Brock Purdy’s player comment, that if Purdy “sees the field at all for San Francisco, something has gone horribly wrong.” Well, something has gone horribly wrong, and Mr. Irrelevant is now Mr. Exceedingly Relevant. Purdy was impressive for a seventh-round rookie in his debut—a solid -8.8% DVOA, cold off the bench, against a Dolphins D that spent the rest of the afternoon seeing what sorts of exotic blitzes they could scheme up. He looked really good in the fourth quarter of preseason games, dealing against defenders who are currently not employed by the NFL. He beat out Nate Sudfeld for the backup job even before the 49ers decided to keep Garoppolo, giving him a floor of “probably better than Nate Sudfeld.” But the 49ers are now, once again, giving an entirely untested player the controls of what has been a top-five offense since Garoppolo got up to speed after missing the entire offseason as an afterthought to the Trey Lance era.

You know, if I had a nickel for every time the 49ers lost a starting quarterback but ending up winning the game, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.

Maybe Brock Purdy is the next big thing, the beast incarnate. More likely, he’s going to be a replacement-level player at best, and Shanahan is going to have to go into overdrive to scheme up enough offense to keep the 49ers afloat. I don’t think there’s another coach or system in the league you’d rather have than Shanahan and the 49ers in this situation, but they have had just a tad bit too much experience at this in recent years!

Of course, perhaps there is a light at the end of the tunnel, as it turns out that Garoppolo’s foot won’t require surgery. Optimistic timetables suggest he could be back in seven or eight weeks, in time for the middle of a playoff run. Because nothing bad could possibly happen from Garoppolo rushing back too soon from an injury, right? I mean, he rushed back against Miami in 2020, and … well, here’s what we wrote in Quick Reads after the game:

After the game, Kyle Shanahan said he took Garoppolo out of the game “to protect” him, because the quarterback was still dealing with lingering effects of his ankle injury. Maybe coincidence, maybe not, but Garoppolo’s game (which wasn’t very good to start with) completely fell apart after his sack-fumble on San Francisco’s fifth drive. He threw seven passes after that, completing none of them, while two were intercepted by the Dolphins.

Oh. That’s less than ideal.

The 49ers’ best hope may be for Purdy to play, if not great, than at least solid. A hobbled, injured Garoppolo put up a passing DVOA of 4.4% in last year’s playoffs, and the 49ers got to the NFC Championship Game and nearly won it. And other, shall we say, less-than-exciting quarterbacks have been driven to success behind strong defenses and solid surrounding casts. The most apt comparison would be Shaun King, a rookie who had to take over for the injured Trent Dilfer and Eric Zeier for the 1999 Buccaneers. Those Buccaneers went to the NFC Championship Game and nearly knocked off the Greatest Show on Turf Rams, losing 11-6 in a defensive slugfest. In more recent times, we have seen guys such as Blake Bortles make conference championship games; Mark Sanchez got there with a -26.5% passing DVOA as a rookie. Jake Delhomme and Rex Grossman made Super Bowls despite a negative passing DVOA; Nick Foles won one. The 49ers defense does not have to shatter DVOA records to drag Purdy to the postseason as long as he’s not a total disaster. And, I suppose, with the Buccaneers having a week to prepare for him and discover that no, he can’t throw deep, we’ll find out if Purdy is a total disaster or not this week.

The other caveat of hope for 49ers fans looking for some optimism now is that the losing record without Garoppolo is also mostly without the other 49ers big stars. It’s hard to win football games without any of your key players, not just your quarterback. Shanahan is 30-14 with Nick Bosa starting, 7-10 without him since 2019. He’s 26-15 with Deebo Samuel, just 11-9 without. You can go on and down the list—most of the Garoppolo-less times, especially in recent years, have coincided with massive amounts of other star players being out. The 49ers have had serious injury and conditioning problems over the past few years, which is a problem in and of itself. But, at least at the moment, they’re doing … well, let’s just say “OK.” Purdy has more healthy talent around him on both sides of the ball than Beathard, Mullens, or Brian Hoyer did during their starts. Past is not definitively prologue, and I would be wary of writing the 49ers off just yet.

And if not, Shanahan will get to begin the long climb to .500 once again.





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