Super Bowl 2024: Chiefs Star Patrick Mahomes Goes Up Against the 49ers’ Galaxy
All week, you’re going to hear about this year being a rematch of Super Bowl LIV between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs, and how LVIII in Las Vegas might be impacted by the events of that night four years ago in Miami.
Yes, coaches Andy Reid and Kyle Shanahan are still here. So are general managers Brett Veach and John Lynch. And there are still plenty of stars, including Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, undefined, Deebo Samuel, George Kittle, Nick Bosa and Fred Warner. Which is why so much of the window dressing on places such as the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas is the same as it was in places such as the Fontainebleau in Miami.
Many of the stars from Super Bowl LIV remain the same.
Mark J. Rebilas/USA TODAY Sports
Other than that? Super Bowl LVIII is as much about the strength of these organizations to adjust, adapt and replenish as it is about continuity and the foundation they have in place. The 49ers have a different quarterback than four years ago. None of San Francisco’s 10 starting offensive linemen remain from LIV. Just 18 players, including injured players, specialists and everything, are still around. Both teams’ offensive coordinators are gone, and one team has changed defensive coordinators twice.
Bottom line: This is a very different game than the one played 48 months ago when COVID-19 was just a mild concern for Americans and the world was weeks from shutting down.
So the dynamics, the matchups, all of it has to be reexamined. And we’ll do that.
But, first, there is one thing to look back on from the first championship of the Mahomes era that could foreshadow next Sunday’s game—and that’s the quarterback’s ability to erase. Through 51 minutes of Super Bowl LIV, it looked like the arrival of Shanahan’s 49ers as the NFL’s next great dynasty. They were leading 20–10. Bosa, then a rookie, was probably the game’s MVP. San Francisco had controlled the game throughout, taking control in the third quarter and picking off Mahomes to start the fourth.
Then, No. 15 changed everything. There were 83- and 65-yard drives, the 44-yard throw to Tyreek Hill on third-and-15 and the 38-yard bomb to Sammy Watkins. There was also the avalanche of bad vibes for a San Francisco team that came undone under the pressure he was applying. Three years later, a similar story was told, with an Eagles team seemingly in control folding late to a rallying Mahomes.
In both cases, Mahomes took everything about how those games were going and erased it completely, writing his own story to take the place of what you thought you knew. And here we are again, with a supremely talented 49ers team built for the here and now, set to try and surmount the challenge of vanquishing the NFL’s championship vampire.
“It feels like David vs. Goliath at quarterback, but vice versa everywhere else,” an AFC executive told me Sunday. “This 49ers team is better, but Kansas City has the better quarterback.”
In a Super Bowl full of plots and storylines, that one gives us all a good starting point.
Thanks to a slower-moving coaching carousel, we’ve got a lot to get to. So in this week’s takeaways, you’ll find …
• Our tick-tock of how the Washington Commanders landed Dan Quinn as their next head coach.
• The story behind the Los Angeles Chargers’ pursuit of Jim Harbaugh.
• What Liam Coen’s hire could tell us about the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ plans at quarterback.
And a whole lot more. Also, in the next few days, we’re going to have something pretty cool on how the Niners have developed people—it was actually going to be the lead for this week, but we wanted to give it a couple more days of work. So we’re starting with what we’ll be looking for in Super Bowl LVIII instead.
So, indeed, we can start this one with the Chiefs’ shining star vs. the 49ers’ galaxy of them.
Mahomes’s place in history. It’s wild that we’re already here, with Mahomes at just 28 years old. But it’s OK. We can discuss it. With a win, he’ll break a five-way tie with Peyton Manning, Steve Young, John Elway and Terry Bradshaw on the all-time playoff wins list, and stand alone behind only Tom Brady and Joe Montana. We discuss it because that’ll make him 15–3 in the postseason. We can discuss it because then he’ll have a third ring, tying him with Troy Aikman, behind only Brady, Montana and Bradshaw on that list.
The seventh-year pro’s pace has been breakneck. That’s not to say that he’ll be able to keep it up for 24 years like Brady. But if he can? There could be a challenger to Brady’s throne much sooner than anyone would’ve anticipated.
The Niners place in today’s NFL. Two weeks ago I did my annual roster analysis of the NFL’s four conference finalists, and this piece of information jumped off the page—the biggest cap number on the Niners’ books for 2023 is $12.58 million. That’s despite having eight players on their roster making $15 million per year or more. And that, of course, only happens with a team being leveraged to the hilt.
Indeed, next season, the Niners have 10 players with cap figures topping $14 million, and the sum of their charges is over $210 million. The cap for 2024 is projected to be a few ticks over $240 million. The Niners also have eight players scheduled to have cap figures topping $14 million in ’25. Of course, you can move stuff around, and push money out a few years, but eventually, the piper must be paid.
The winning won’t be forever.
[Super Bowl 2024: Latest news and analysis]
Is this Steve Spagnuolo’s moment? That was the operative question that one AFC scouting director said to me when I asked what the one thing he was looking foward to in this one: “I would say the play-calling matchup, with Spagnuolo vs. Shanahan.”
Spagnuolo was new with the Chiefs in 2019. Veach and his staff have now had a half-decade’s worth of offseasons to pick players for his scheme—and the result this season has been a versatile, smart, young defense with a wizard of a coordinator pulling the strings better than he ever has, enabled by all the movable pieces he has on that side of the ball. Ask him, and Spagnuolo will tell you himself about what he believes he has in that unit.
“I’ve been trying to explain to people what we have,” he said. “This is the highest number of defensive players with a high cerebral intelligence with football I’ve had—that and they’re really passionate. I’ve had really smart players before. Tyrann Mathieu and Anthony Hitchens. We’ve had a lot of smart people, but the amount of them now is unbelievable. Trent [McDuffie], LJ [Sneed], Nick [Bolton], Dru [Tranquill], Leo [Chanel].
“And they all love to play. Everybody has a guy that doesn’t get it, that makes all the mistakes. We don’t have hardly any of those guys. That makes all the difference in the world so you can do what you’re talking about.”
Along those lines, can the Chiefs take the Niners out of their comfort zone the way they did the Baltimore Ravens? It can be cliché to say one football team is forcing another to play the game on its “terms.” But that’s exactly what Kansas City’s defense did to the Baltimore Ravens’ offense last week. Whether they do the same to San Francisco might be the swing factor in this game—that’ll mean, like it did last week, forcing the Niners to play from behind, and creating less favorable down-and-distance situations on a regular basis.
“The 49ers can’t abandon the run like the Ravens did, even if they’re down early like Ravens were,” an NFC exec said. “The Chiefs pass defense and pressure packages are so good, so it can’t be a third-and-6-plus game for [Brock] Purdy and the offense. Obviously, on the flip side, the Chiefs cannot allow the 49ers to run it on them—it’s their one weakness—and limit the number of possessions for Mahomes.”
Indeed, the Ravens averaged 31.8 rushing attempts and 156.5 yards per game during the regular season. They exploded for 229 yards on 42 carries against the Houston Texans in the divisional round. Against the Chiefs, they ran it just 16 times for 81 yards. They ran the ball just seven times after the break. Kansas City sent run blitzes after them, and created negative plays, and turned the top seeds into fish out of water. The Niners can’t let that happen.
Which defense will rise to the occasion? The sum of the parts actually might show there’s more talent, between these teams, on defense than there is on offense. The numbers actually back it up, too. “One thing that stands out—if you look every year at the Super Bowl teams, the QBs and offenses get headlines, but once again, two of the top 10 defenses in the NFL are in this game,” an AFC assistant GM said. “Defense still matters in January.”
The exec then pointed out that the two teams rank second and eighth in total defense, and second and third in scoring defense. So one or the other certainly could carry the day when it matters most.
We’ve already detailed how that might happen if Kansas City’s defense steps up (one scouting director also reminded me of how important fundamental tackling will be for the Chiefs, faced with a strong, rugged group of San Francisco skill guys). As for the Niners, it’ll be interesting to see what sort of night they get from a defensive line group that is probably the NFL’s most talented but hasn’t always played to its potential, and actually just got called to the carpet by coordinator Steve Wilks for its effort issues.
The Travis Kelce factor. The nine-time Pro Bowler wasn’t quite himself during the regular season. Yes, he still had 93 catches and 984 yards, but his yards-per-catch average and touchdowns were way down, and, by the eye test, it sure looked like age and injuries were catching up to him.
Kelce had a record-breaking performance in the AFC title game.
Geoff Burke/USA TODAY Sports
Then, the playoffs began, and Kelce’s been, well, himself again. He’s done better by recognizing his own limitations, and the limitations of those around him. As such, he’s working to get open earlier in the route, giving Mahomes ways to get him the ball quicker. Now the old problem in dealing with the Chiefs offense is once again the new problem in dealing with the Chiefs offense.
“Can San Francisco find a way to take away Kelce? No one really has yet in the playoffs,” a second AFC scouting director said. “If I’m playing them, I’m doing everything physically possible to make any other skill player beat me. Scramble drills are where Mahomes excels, and where Kelce always squirts free, but I’m finding a way to double him every rep and make the rest of their offense beat you. Call it playing nine-man football everywhere else.”
Which could, in turn, make rookie Rashee Rice a pivotal figure.
Then, there’s the ancillary stuff. Does Taylor Swift make it to the game? How many times does CBS show her? How’s the halftime show? (I can’t even remember who’s playing.) And how will this being in Las Vegas play into how the week plays out, both when it comes to the 180 the league’s done on sports gambling, and with all the trouble NFL people can find here. (Don’t forget what happened at NBA All-Star weekend here, or even the Pro Bowl?)
Add all of it together, and there’s a lot to look forward to. But so much of it comes back to this monster roster against this monster quarterback.
“Much like it was with Brady, if Mahomes is playing well, it’s just hard,” another AFC exec said. “There’s a better-than-good chance he’s gonna outplay your quarterback, and when that happens, that team usually wins.”
The challenge for the Niners next Sunday is pretty clear.
