SANTA CLARA, Calif. — A year ago Sunday, while the N.F.L. elite were competing in their conferences’ championship games, the San Francisco 49ers’ staff traveled to Mobile, Ala., to coach at the Senior Bowl. In keeping with that game’s custom, only the league’s worst teams receive that opportunity, but the 49ers were unbowed. At dinner one night, someone uttered three words that calibrated their expectations: “Mobile to Miami” — the site of Super Bowl LIV on Feb. 2.
In a far corner of the 49ers’ locker room Sunday evening, away from players climbing atop chairs and posing for photos and dancing to “The Box” by Roddy Ricch, General Manager John Lynch clutched a black T-shirt.
It read: “Mobile to Miami.”
After speaking their objective into existence, the 49ers completed their ascent to the N.F.C. championship by clubbing the Green Bay Packers, 37-20, scoring on six consecutive drives in a game they led by 27 points at halftime. For their first Super Bowl trip in seven years, the 49ers will journey to a venue about as far as possible from the embrace of Levi’s Stadium — Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Fla., for a tantalizing matchup with the Kansas City Chiefs — and one that abounds with warm memories.
In the same stadium where Joe Montana connected with John Taylor for a late winning touchdown against Cincinnati 31 years ago, and where six years later Steve Young would unbridle an explosive passing offense in thrashing the Chargers, San Francisco will seek to join New England and Pittsburgh as the only franchises to win six Super Bowl titles.
The 49ers have not won one, though, since the 1994 season, when an assistant named Mike Shanahan coached Young and coordinated their high-scoring offense. Shanahan ambled through the field-level corridors at Levi’s Stadium on Sunday after witnessing his son, Kyle, the 49ers’ third-year coach, bully the Packers with a modern, devastating spin on a power running game — the Air Raid of rushing attacks.
Kyle Shanahan amplified his father’s scheme with enough speed and misdirection and pre-snap subterfuge to feel comfortable calling a run on Sunday in a standard passing situation — 3rd-and-8 at the Packers’ 36-yard line — and then watching Raheem Mostert, an undrafted speedster playing for his seventh team, scamper just about untouched for the first of his four touchdowns. Mostert, who motivates himself by reading every date he was cut, by the six teams who discarded him before the 49ers signed him in November 2016, dashed through creases the approximate size of San Francisco Bay, running for 220 yards — the second-most in a postseason game behind Eric Dickerson (248) in 1986.
“That was honestly my favorite play of the day,” fullback Kyle Juszczyk said. “Who calls a trap on 3rd-and-8?”
Kyle Shanahan does, that’s who, reinforcing a prevailing maxim of the 2019 season: He who hesitates against San Francisco loses.
Even on a day when the 49ers rushed 42 times for 285 yards and scored 37 points while throwing just eight passes, they proved, again, that their most dangerous element is that there is not a most dangerous element.
They won their first eight games behind a snarling defense that, on Sunday, had three sacks and three takeaways. When their defense, pummeled by injuries, sagged in the final month of the season, quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo steered the 49ers to critical victories against New Orleans, Seattle and the Rams. And when Kyle Shanahan determined that San Francisco would be best served reducing Garoppolo to an automaton, handing the ball off again and again and again, the 49ers demolished both playoff opponents, Minnesota and Green Bay, on the ground.
Garoppolo threw two passes in the second half; he almost used his right arm more after the game, when Garoppolo signed tight end George Kittle’s white T-shirt featuring his shirtless image, than he did during it.
“When we have all our weapons, it’s really, really hard to beat us,” right tackle Mike McGlinchey said. “The last two weeks, it’s really hard to even stay with us.”
Even in 17-point routs, N.F.L. games hinge on tiny moments, and the Packers’ decision to punt on their opening series, facing 4th-and-1 at midfield, turbocharged their demise. The conservative call almost offended the 49ers, who all week had heard the rhetoric emanating from Green Bay that after winning six straight since losing here by 37-8 in Week 12, in a game televised nationally, the Packers were now healthier, stronger, and better.
“You weren’t ready the first time,” cornerback Richard Sherman said, “and that was in front of the whole country.”
And so however much Shanahan professed that every game is self-contained, that throttling Green Bay in November would not portend throttling Green Bay in January, his players believed otherwise. McGlinchey said he watched the film of that victory six or seven times “just to keep feeling what we felt that night.”
In reality, the 49ers have felt that way — dominant and unrelenting — for most of the season. All three of their defeats — against Seattle, Baltimore and Atlanta — came within the final 10 seconds. They tied for the most victories in the league, claimed the top seed in the N.F.C. playoffs and battered the two best teams in the N.F.C. North because they have the scariest, deepest roster in the conference, if not the league.
Before this revival, before Shanahan and Lynch started molding this team to their specifications three years ago, the 49ers hosted the N.F.L.’s grandest celebration — the 50th edition of the Super Bowl — at the apex of their dysfunction. After finishing last in their division in 2015 and firing their coach, the 49ers welcomed the league to their sparkling new home: Imagine being evicted from your house as soon as the party guests arrive.
They endured that indignity, and so many others, and now look.
Before the game, the Hall of Fame receiver Jerry Rice — the most valuable player of that Super Bowl XXII victory over the Bengals a quarter-century ago — ran the length of the field to rouse the crowd, then danced on the sideline wearing a cartoonish gold chain with the 49ers emblem.
At halftime, the 49ers ran off the field waving to the crowd and slapping hands with fans by the tunnel, as if the game were over — which it wasn’t, though it was.
And afterward, they abstained from pondering how to minimize Patrick Mahomes, to block Chris Jones, to dupe Tyrann Mathieu, to neutralize Tyreek Hill, to savor the moment. The 49ers are back in the Super Bowl, and their route to South Florida, like so many drivers heading east, was through Alabama.
Source: Football - nytimes.com
