What Kyle Shanahan Has Not Said

It happened at Alma Street and Hamilton Avenue, in downtown Palo Alto, at about 6:13 in the evening on a Tuesday in the middle of July. Two vehicles. One of them an SUV. It was close to his house.

The other driver was not injured and was not taken to a hospital. Palo Alto police and fire responded, no citations were issued, and there was no indication that anyone involved had been impaired. Those are the facts the city has released, and they are the only facts about the collision itself that anyone outside it has.

Paramedics took Kyle Shanahan to a hospital. He spent most of that night there and was released.

Then nothing happened for eleven days.

The list#

The crash was July 14. The 49ers said nothing about it publicly until Saturday, July 25, which was report day, the afternoon players arrive and the general manager stands in front of a room and tells everyone what shape the football team is in.

John Lynch stood in front of that room and read out a different kind of list.

A broken nose. Three broken ribs. A broken hand. More than forty stitches in his coach's face. And a severe concussion.

The team's written statement, released the same day, called the injuries non-life-threatening, thanked the first responders, and said that Chris Foerster and the coordinators would handle head coaching responsibilities "during this period." It did not say how long that period would be, because nobody knows.

"He did break his nose, and some black eyes are getting better," Lynch told reporters. "He broke some ribs, that's painful, but that's not what's keeping him away. It's the concussion."

The clearance#

Here is the sentence Lynch said next, and it is the reason this is a story about something other than a car.

"Kyle basically is going to be like in the protocol. And we're going to let the doctors dictate how he comes back, when he comes back."

Shanahan was hired on February 6, 2017, the twentieth head coach in the history of the franchise. For nine and a half years, some part of nearly every week of his working life has involved standing at a podium and answering the question of who is available. Whether a man's hamstring has responded. Whether the shoulder is ready. Whether somebody has cleared the protocol, which is a process he has explained in public more times than anyone has counted, usually briefly, sometimes impatiently, always as a thing that was happening to somebody else.

He is now in it. A doctor decides when he goes back to work, and until that doctor decides, the answer to the question of whether Kyle Shanahan is available is the same answer he has given about other people a thousand times, which is that it is not up to him.

The room he is not in#

The team he handed over is not a healthy one either.

George Kittle tore his Achilles tendon on January 11, in a wild-card win over Philadelphia. He described the moment afterward as feeling like someone had put a shotgun against his calf and pulled the trigger. He opened this camp on the physically-unable-to-perform list, aiming to be back well before November.

Fred Warner fractured and dislocated his right ankle on October 12 last year and had it surgically repaired two days later. He is cleared now. Lynch, on Saturday, described him as basically a healthy player.

It was Warner who called Shanahan after the crash. Lynch recounted the call at that same news conference, and Tim Kawakami reported it in the Standard the same day.

"We got this, Coach," Warner told him. "We got this. Trust us."

Nine months earlier Warner had been the one on the table.

Nick Bosa is off the PUP list. Christian McCaffrey is coming off a season in which he touched the ball 413 times. Trent Williams turned up at 38 years old for a season he did not have to play, and Kyle Juszczyk, who is 35 and has been to ten Pro Bowls, did the same, and said he still feels great and is still having fun. Lynch listed those names on Saturday when he was asked how the team would hold together.

"We're not going to blink," he said. "We feel that we're well-equipped for something like this."

Foerster#

The man now running the practices lost his own job to a video.

Chris Foerster resigned as the Miami Dolphins' offensive line coach on October 9, 2017, after a recording surfaced of him snorting cocaine. He entered a treatment program the same day, sixty days inpatient and ninety more outpatient, and he did not coach in the NFL again for two years. San Francisco hired him back in 2019. He has been here ever since, coaching the offensive line, and this week the franchise's statement named him first among the people holding it together.

The two facts sit next to each other and do not need to be argued into a shape.

The number#

In Week 4, if things go the ordinary way, Shanahan will coach his 167th game for this franchise and pass Bill Walsh, whose 166 is the record, and become the longest-tenured head coach in the history of the San Francisco 49ers.

This is the eightieth season. The team announced the anniversary in April, and there is a commemorative patch on the jersey all year, and the video they made to launch it is narrated by Jerry Rice.

It is a strange way to arrive at a number like that. Shanahan has spent his entire tenure being measured against Walsh, which is the condition of the job and was always going to be, and he will pass him in the fourth week of a season he began in a concussion protocol, in the anniversary year, wearing the patch, with Rice's voice on the video.

Fifty-eight days#

The 49ers open the season against the Rams on Thursday, September 10, at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. It is the first regular-season NFL game ever played in Melbourne. From the intersection of Alma and Hamilton to the opening kickoff in Australia is fifty-eight days, and somewhere in there is a flight of about seventeen hours.

The last time this team played a game that counted, it lost 41-6 at Seattle in the divisional round. Rashid Shaheed returned the opening kickoff 95 yards, thirteen seconds in. Brock Purdy finished 15 of 27 for 140 yards with no touchdowns, an interception and a fumble. It was the second-worst playoff defeat in franchise history. The worst was 49-3 to the Giants at Giants Stadium, on January 4, 1987, in Walsh's eighth season.

Camp opened Sunday morning without Shanahan at the front of it.

Sean McVay, who was asked about him in Los Angeles, said he had talked to him, and that he was thinking of him and his family, and that he was grateful the other person in the crash was all right.

That is how it has gone for eleven days and counting. Everything anyone knows about how Kyle Shanahan is, they know because somebody else said it: his general manager at a podium, a rival head coach two states away, a statement with the club's name across the top of it.

The 49ers say they do not anticipate that he will miss the opener.

Shanahan has not said anything at all.