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49ers Players Describe their Relationship with Kyle Shanahan

He might not be the classic leader, but his best players feel an extremely close bond with him.
Grant Cohn|
49ers Players Describe their Relationship with Kyle Shanahan
49ers Players Describe their Relationship with Kyle Shanahan

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San Francisco 49ers

LAKE LAS VEGAS -- Call him Kyle.

You'd never hear a player call him Coach Shanahan. That's far too formal for the 49ers head coach, who relates better to 20-something-year-old players than most head coaches. It's one of Shanahan's best qualities. He might not be the classic leader, but his best players feel an extremely close bond with him.

Here's how a few of the 49ers' stars described their relationship with Shanahan on Wednesday during the team's media session.

DEEBO SAMUEL: "I put Kyle in the category of my high school. Me and my high school coach are still tight to this day. He was at the recent NFC Championship Game. It's just a bond that you create with somebody that can't be broken. Whenever I'm done, I feel like I can still reach out to Kyle and still have the simple conversations that we have."

TRENT WILLIAMS: "I've just known him for a decade and a half at this point. Really, really close. It goes deeper than football. It's more like family."

BRANDON AIYUK: "Very different. That's my dawg. We have a different relationship but I enjoy it.

Q: Closer?

AIYUK: "Yeah, you could say that."

BOSA: "I'd say more like a friend, because once you're in the NFL, you're all adults. Coach Meyer, you were kind of afraid of him. I'm still a little afraid of Kyle. Coach Meyer is kind of intimidating.

ME: He's Coach Meyer. Kyle is Kyle.

BOSA: "Right, exactly. He has been an amazing coach."

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Grant Cohn
GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.

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