Nick Sirianni wouldn’t have made Kyle Shanahan’s biggest Super Bowl mistake

One of the biggest blunders during the 2023 season happened during the Super Bowl: Kyle Shanahan neglected to prepare his team for overtime in the post-season. It came to a head in the last game of the season, but it turns out that mistake was something that other teams had prepared for throughout the year. 

We already heard from the Kansas City Chiefs that players had been discussing and kicking around ideas about the new OT rules since training camp, and that the 49ers players were blindsided.

Kyle Shanahan might be the sole inhabitant of ‘Unprepared Island’

"We talked about it in training camp about how the rules were different in regular season versus the playoffs. Every week of the playoffs we talked about the overtime rule"

- Andy Reid

If you’re the Chiefs, that makes sense. You’re inevitably going to end up in the playoffs, and your quarterback is the clutchest human being on the planet, so why not prepare specifically for that scenario? It'd be ridiculous not to.

Then you hear from other coaches and other players from other teams, and that new rules are something they’ve been going over for a while too. 

Jason and Travis Kelce discussed the 49ers' decision to receive the overtime kickoff on the podcast New Heights, and Jason brought up that he was texting his (former?) head coach, Nick Sirianni.

This is probably worth taking with a grain of salt, and that’s for two reasons. 

The first is, duh, of course, a coach is going to say that they wouldn’t have messed up. That’s like when Jerry Jones said he really liked Jalen Hurts as a draft prospect. If you have the chance to say that you’re smart with absolutely zero accountability, you’re probably going to say that you’re smart.

The second thing is that while Sirianni does spend a lot of his time focusing on situational football, he’s not the best at implementing what he practices. 

So keep those two things in mind, but on that episode of New Heights, Jason does talk about the overtime rules in pretty good detail. During the Super Bowl broadcast, we heard Tony Romo, who had multiple weeks to prepare to call the biggest game publicly, teach himself the rules on air. If Kelce is as well-versed in the rules as it sounds, then Sirianni probably had a hand to play in that. 

The point here is that Shanahan’s mistake was not single-faceted. The choice after he won the coinflip was baffling, but his choice to not prepare his team was a downright mind-boggling mistake; a mistake that at least one other coach didn’t make.