Who doesn't love a good rematch? Sunday brings us a matchup of the NFL's most consistently dominant teams over the past five seasons, each of whom have something to accomplish with a victory.
A win for the Chiefs would confirm them as a dynasty. The list of teams to win three Super Bowls in five years isn't long. the mid-1970s "Steel Curtain" Steelers, the mid-1990s Cowboys built by Jimmy Johnson, the Patriots with Tom Brady and Bill Belichick managed to pull it off twice in two different decades. That's it. A victory would put the Chiefs among the greatest five-year runs in league history, full stop.
The 49ers might believe they would be the dynasty if a few things had broken their way. They led the Chiefs by 10 points with seven minutes to go in the fourth quarter of Super Bowl LIV, only for Patrick Mahomes to carry Kansas City back. In the 2021 NFC title game, the Niners had a 10-point lead on the Rams to start the fourth quarter, but Jaquiski Tartt dropped an arm punt and the offense went cold at the wrong time. In the 2022 NFC title game, down to their third-string quarterback in rookie sensation Brock Purdy, the 49ers went into Philadelphia and lost Purdy to a serious elbow injury in the first quarter, which led to a 31-7 rout.
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Purdy and coach Kyle Shanahan aren't going anywhere, but a win would dramatically impact their stories. Purdy would go from being Mr. Irrelevant and a quarterback carried by his skill-position players to the guy who beat the most talented quarterback ever in a Super Bowl. Shanahan can't go back in time and hold on to those two leads his teams blew in the Super Bowl, but winning one as a head coach would rewrite his legacy.
Oh, and Taylor Swift will be watching, too. Five months ago, the season began with a Chiefs loss. Will it end with one?
Jump to a section:
What Mahomes does better than anyone
The Chiefs' lucky number is ...
Do the 49ers have a talent advantage?
Defending San Francisco's 'death lineup'
Will Kansas City play more man or zone?
How the Chiefs might defend the 49ers
The Purdy referendum ... solved?
Which team has the special teams edge?
Which coach has the game management edge?
49ers-Chiefs final score prediction
Patrick Mahomes' secret superpower
As the 49ers get started thinking about how they'll stop the Chiefs, they will have to contend with the quarterback who broke their hearts four years ago in Miami. Mahomes wasn't perfect for four quarters against the 49ers in Super Bowl LIV, but he was nearly flawless on the final three drives. The Chiefs scored 21 unanswered points, and a game that had been dominated by the San Francisco defense turned into the ultimate example of a lesson too many teams have sadly needed to learn: Never count out Mahomes.
On that day, he made his biggest impact by hitting a pair of deep shots to Tyreek Hill and Sammy Watkins to set up touchdowns. Both of those wideouts are long gone, and the offense the Chiefs ran during the early days of the Mahomes era has been forced to evolve into something different.
During his MVP season in 2018, Mahomes' passes traveled an average of 8.8 yards in the air, which was the sixth-highest rate for any quarterback. That number has come down with each advancing season, owing both to changes in personnel and the utter fear instilled in defenses of allowing him to beat them deep. In 2023, his average pass traveled 6.2 yards in the air, the shortest mark for any full-season starter. He had a league-high 37 deep completions in 2018; that number dropped to 17 this season. Early-career Mahomes was Steph Curry; now, he's Nikola Jokic.
As the great ones do, Mahomes has evolved. He has become ruthlessly efficient at reading defenses and quickly taking what they're going to offer. The only quarterback who threw a higher percentage of his passes on target than him this season was Dak Prescott. Mahomes was let down by a group of wide receivers who posted the worst collective drop rate in a single season over the past decade, but his ability to sort through coverages and find open receivers without forcing passes is remarkable.
There's another way Mahomes has been able to thrive without the big plays, and it's one of the rare things about him that doesn't get much discussion. It was one of the biggest reasons the Chiefs beat the Eagles in the Super Bowl a year ago. While it's a skill he has had throughout his career, his mastery in this area has played an essential role in getting the Chiefs to the title game each of the past two seasons.
Mahomes' secret superpower is avoiding sacks. With fellow escape artist Josh Allen of the Buffalo Bills as his sole competition, Mahomes' ability to escape takedowns, avoid negative plays and keep the offense on schedule under pressure is unparalleled. His style invites sacks, but as he has grown, he has mastered the ability to provide all the positives that come with extending plays while avoiding many of the negatives.
Mahomes' pure sack rate is great but not extraordinary. He ranked third in sack rate behind Brady and Allen two years ago (3.8%), third behind Brady and Jared Goff last season (3.6%) and second behind Allen in 2023 (4%). If you've watched Brady or Goff, you know how different their style of play is or was relative to the other two. They get the ball out before pressure. Allen and Mahomes are entirely different quarterbacks.
Let's split up Mahomes' time with the ball after the snap to get a sense of how he erases pass rushes. The usual number we use for quick game is any time a passer throws the ball within 2.5 seconds of the snap. It's almost impossible to sack a quarterback that quickly, but Mahomes even erases pressures there. Per NFL Next Gen Stats, his 5% pressure rate on throws within 2.5 seconds in the 2023 regular season was the league's best mark for qualifying starters. The only other player under 10% was Allen. The average mark is nearly 16%, three times higher than Mahomes'.
Next Gen defines "in-rhythm" throws as passes thrown between 2.5 and 4 seconds after receiving the snap. Here, again, Mahomes is extraordinary. He was pressured at the third-lowest rate in the league in 2023 but was sacked on just 1.7% of his dropbacks in this range, the best mark in football. That's about one-third of the league average of 4.9%. His offensive line deserves some of the credit, but he is being sacked just 5.1% of the time when he's pressured in these situations. That ranks No. 1 in the league and is less than half the league-average rate.
Mahomes will likely continue to hold on to the ball to make plays, especially when he gets pressured. That habit leads to a lot of positives, but sacks are inevitably one of the downsides. (Brady and Goff kept their sack rates low, in part, by avoiding these moments.) Mahomes was pressured more than 71% of the time when he held the ball for more than four seconds, but he was sacked on just 16.5% of those plays. The only player with a better sack rate in those situations was Allen, who was one percentage point ahead. The league-average rate is 31.2%.
Most of those pressures are coming before four seconds and forcing Mahomes to try to escape. If a defense doesn't get pressure within four seconds, though, it's not bringing him down. Quarterbacks who are pressured after the four-second mark are sacked more than 24% of the time, a fate even Allen hasn't been able to avoid. (He's at 22%.) Mahomes was pressured after four seconds 31 times this season. He was sacked once. That's a 3.3% clip. Even if those plays are producing throws out of bounds and left-handed incompletions, saving the yardage losses that come with sacks does so much to keep the Chiefs from getting stuck in third-and-long. The only player who has produced more expected points added (EPA) per play on those extended plays over the past three seasons is Allen.
Those extra seconds allow a Kansas City team that isn't blessed with great talent at receiver to go into scramble drills, where Mahomes can go into playground mode and throw open a pass-catcher. Those plays place extra stress on defenders, who lose their structure and have to stick to opposing receivers in what amounts to man coverage. The extra time creates more opportunities for penalties: Over the past three seasons, the Chiefs have benefited from 36 defensive holding calls, 10 more than any other team. (If you think that's a product of referee bias, consider that they have drawn only 13 pass interference penalties on opposing defenders over that stretch, the second fewest of any team.)
Mahomes is also an incredible scrambler. He's not as physically imposing as Allen or as fast as Justin Fields or Lamar Jackson, but his list of game-breaking scrambles is quickly becoming legend. There's the 27-yard touchdown at the end of the first half to take the lead in the 2019 AFC Championship Game against the Titans and the third-and-11 scramble that set up a touchdown against the 49ers two weeks later. In the 2022 AFC title game, a Mahomes scramble on third-and-4 picked up a first down and an unnecessary roughness penalty to set up the winning field goal against the Bengals, and in Super Bowl LVII, a 26-yard scramble got the Chiefs in field goal range for the game winner against the Eagles.
This January alone, Mahomes had a 28-yard scramble to convert a fourth-and-5 against the Dolphins and a 24-yarder to set up a touchdown against the Bills. On the final drive in a close win over the Jets in October, he had a third-and-13 scramble for a first down called back for a holding penalty. He promptly responded by converting the ensuing third-and-23 by scrambling for 25 yards.
Mahomes' instincts for when to scramble are impeccable. He led the league with 40.7 EPA on scrambles this season. He tied for the league lead with 26 first downs on scrambles alongside Jackson, but Mahomes got there on 51 scramble attempts. Jackson needed 75. Mahomes ranked second in scramble EPA in 2021 and fourth in 2022, all while scrambling less often than the players ahead of him. The 28-year-old has added a league-best 21.3 EPA on scrambles over the past three postseasons. For a quarterback who isn't part of the designed run game and isn't allowed to sneak by coach Andy Reid after he suffered a knee injury in 2019, he adds an incredible amount of value with his legs.
To see this play out, watch another one of Mahomes' scrambles from that October game against the Jets. Some quarterbacks would be rendered useless by the initial heavy pass rush on the interior. When Mahomes goes to escape the pocket, the Jets have another rusher winning to the outside, which would flummox just about every other quarterback. Even mobile passers would typically end up taking this to the edge and the play would end with a sack or an incompletion out of bounds. He instead has the wherewithal and physical tools to go back against the grain, run away from two defenders and pick up 12 yards. What could have been third-and-10 or third-and-15 is instead a first-and-10 for Kansas City:
An example of Mahomes's incredible movement. 91 wins to the inside, so Mahomes tries to escape to the right, but the Jets have 94 there waiting. Lot of QBs bail to the sideline and this is a sack or a throwaway. Mahomes re-sets and finds 12 yards. pic.twitter.com/HC8gb75VHh
— Bill Barnwell (@billbarnwell) February 3, 2024
Mahomes' aptitude for avoiding sacks has been even more noticeable in the postseason. In the divisional round last season, despite suffering a high ankle sprain, he wasn't sacked once on 32 dropbacks against the Jaguars. After being sacked three times in 49 tries by the Bengals, he wasn't sacked a single time on 31 dropbacks by the Eagles, who had racked up 78 sacks over their first 19 games of the season. As I wrote in my Super Bowl recap, a Philadelphia team that turned one-third of its pressures into sacks during the season couldn't bring him down on any of its 10 pressures.
Things haven't changed in 2023. A healthy Mahomes wasn't sacked in 68 dropbacks during the first two rounds of the postseason, even after the Dolphins blitzed him more than 50% of the time in the wild-card round. As Underdog Fantasy's Hayden Winks noted on Twitter, Mahomes had gone 16 consecutive quarters without being sacked in the postseason before the Ravens took him down twice in the AFC Championship Game. He has been sacked twice on 112 dropbacks in this playoff run, a sack rate of 1.8%.
When the 49ers and Chiefs played in the Super Bowl four years ago, San Francisco was able to control most of the game with its pass rush. Through the first 48 minutes, Nick Bosa & Co. sacked Mahomes three times on 35 dropbacks and pressured him a whopping 40% of the time. After the Chiefs famously converted the third-and-15 pass to Hill in the fourth quarter, though, the pass rush lagged. The 49ers came up with one sack and two pressures the rest of the way, with the sack coming for 1 yard on a play in which Mahomes was already scrambling.
That 49ers team was excellent against the pass during the first three quarters of games during the regular season, but when the fourth quarter came around and the pass rush got tired, the Niners fell from third to 19th in QBR allowed. There's no such split with the 2023 49ers, who are much more impressive in coverage and not as reliant on their pass rush. They will need to do what the Eagles couldn't and actually take Mahomes down when they get pressure. They'll also need to contend with a wrinkle we saw from the 2022 Chiefs post-Hill that has helped improve the offense during this postseason. ...
Kansas City's lucky number: 13
When the Chiefs traded Hill to the Dolphins after the 2021 season, they didn't acquire a direct replacement. They went for quantity over quality by adding Marquez Valdes-Scantling, Kadarius Toney, Skyy Moore, Justin Watson and JuJu Smith-Schuster before swapping out the former Steelers wideout for second-round pick Rashee Rice in the 2023 offseason. Rice has shown some promise as a rookie, but none of those players has come close to matching Hill's production.
With the Chiefs about to hit their second Super Bowl in two seasons after the Hill trade, it's clear they've managed to overcome his absence. One of the ways they've done so is by embracing larger formations on offense. In 2021, Hill's final season with the team, they used 12 personnel (one running back, two tight ends), 13 personnel (one running back, three tight ends) and 22 personnel (two running backs, two tight ends) on a combined 27.6% of their snaps. In 2022, that jumped to 40.5%, with Travis Kelce accompanied by Noah Gray and Kansas City finding a role for Watson as the designated wideout in 13 personnel packages.
In 2023, with Kelce banged up for stretches and sitting more often than he ever has, the Chiefs took things a step backward. They split the difference between the previous two seasons and used one of those heavy personnel groupings on 35.7% of their offensive snaps. In part, that was informed by their success, as they had a success rate north of 47% when they used one of those three groupings in 2022, which was well above league average. In 2023, their success rate in those same groups has dropped to 41.5%.
Since the postseason started, however, the Chiefs have thrived with a rather fortuitous and coincidental number. Yes, the 13 personnel grouping has feasted. They have nearly tripled their usage of 13 personnel during the postseason, going from using it about 7% of the time during the regular season to 19% during the playoffs. They've succeeded on 43% of their plays out of 13 personnel over the past three games, up from 39% during the regular season. Combined with 12 personnel, they are using two or more tight ends on more than 45% of their snaps this postseason.
Some of the benefits of playing 12 and 13 personnel are obvious. With more big bodies on the field, there's more heft when teams want to run the football. As my friend Nate Tice has noticed over the past few years, the Chiefs have gone away from the heavier doses of run-pass options they ran with Hill and embraced more straightforward gap run concepts. They ran some version of power, one of the oldest run concepts in the book, at least 14 times against the Ravens. Many of those plays came with two or more tight ends on the field.
The play-action game can also thrive off those bigger sets. Teams unprepared for longer passes might not have their best pass defenders on the field, and when Kansas City has Kelce as a potential target, 13 personnel can create mismatches. Mahomes has gone 15-of-19 for 197 yards and two touchdowns out of 13 personnel over the past two postseasons; no other quarterback has more than four completions in 13 personnel over that same stretch.
One other key component for Kansas City is that throwing that formation on the field tends to generate some level of personnel certainty for the defense. Three tight ends is such an extreme and uncommon look that opposing defenses typically answer it with only one set of players. Leaving aside plays inside the 5-yard line or on fourth down, when the Dolphins saw 13 personnel in the wild-card round, they responded with their base defense (with four defensive backs) on 14 out of 15 snaps. The Bills, thin at linebacker, played their nickel defense (five defensive backs) on 10 of 10 snaps. The Ravens went back the other way and played their base defense on all eight of the 13 personnel snaps they faced in the conference title game.
There won't be much confusion with the 49ers. The league as a whole played 13 personnel with nickel defenses about 25% of the time, but that wasn't the case for coordinator Steve Wilks' unit. It saw 13 personnel on a total of 23 snaps (outside the 5-yard line or on fourth down) during the regular season and played its base defense every single time. San Francisco was the only team to play its base defense against 13 personnel on every snap.
The 49ers were one of the league's most consistent units against 12 personnel, too; while the league played its base defense about 40% of the time when it saw two-TE sets, the 49ers played their base defense against 12 personnel more than 83% of the time during the regular season. Again, no team played its base defense more often against these sets. The Niners ranked eighth in EPA per play allowed against 12 personnel, but that dropped to 27th against 13 personnel.
Stephen A. Smith delivers a passionate rant as to why football today favors Patrick Mahomes and passing offenses.
If an offense knows how a defense is going to respond in advance when it sends out a grouping, it has already learned a valuable piece of information before the game has started. The offense can game-plan to attack specific defensive players or take advantage of the constraints provided by a particular defense.
The 49ers have great players at all three levels of their defense, but they don't have stars everywhere. Expect the Chiefs to try to use these 12 and 13 personnel packages to attack two players. One is third linebacker Oren Burks, who is more of a run defender than a player San Francisco wants in coverage. The other is whoever ends up starting at safety next to Tashaun Gipson. The 49ers lost Talanoa Hufanga to a torn ACL in November and initially replaced him with rookie third-round pick Ji'Ayir Brown, who then suffered a sprained knee in December and was replaced by veteran Logan Ryan.
Brown was healthy enough to return for the divisional round game against the Packers, but the 49ers elected to stick with Ryan, saying they didn't want Brown's first game back to be in the playoffs after four weeks on the sideline. Brown didn't play a single snap. After Ryan allowed a touchdown pass and whiffed on a couple of tackles on big run plays, however, the 49ers changed their minds and inserted Brown back into the lineup against the Lions for all 72 defensive snaps. He had some issues against the run and didn't step up on a completion that set up a touchdown, so it's no guarantee they stick with him Sunday.
With all due respect to Gray and Blake Bell, Kelce is the player who makes the big formations work. For all the concerns about Kelce falling off toward the end of the regular season, he has been all the way back in the playoffs. The future Hall of Famer averaged 2.6 yards per route run during the first half of the regular season, but that mark fell to a modest 1.6 yards per route run from Week 10 onward. Since the start of the postseason? He's back averaging 3.0 yards per route run, which is an elite figure and even better than what we saw from him during his record-setting 2022 season.
Kelce is a different player than the guy we saw the last time these two teams played for a title. Back then, he was more of a physical force. The Chiefs thrived by lining up in 3x1 formations with three receivers on one side of the field and Kelce alone on the other side and dared defenses to pick their poison. If defenses shaded toward the three-wideout set, he would have a one-on-one against a defensive back and bully him with slants. If they tried to help on him, the Chiefs would exhaust defensive backs with bunches and picks and get Hill one-on-one against a cornerback in a speed mismatch.
Kelce is still physically imposing, but he operates differently now. Mahomes and Kelce have an almost preternatural connection on what the other is thinking. Kelce has an incredible eye for spacing and picking apart zone coverages, and the Chiefs give him the freedom to abandon the called route to attack whatever space he finds. That's a dangerous game to play if the quarterback doesn't know where his receivers will go, but Mahomes and Kelce almost always end up having the same idea. It makes Kelce downright uncoverable at times, even now in his mid-30s.
The Chiefs use what might as well be called Kelce motion given how often he uses it. He'll line up next to a wide receiver and take a few slow steps inside or outside that receiver, depending on how Kansas City wants to manipulate leverage. (If you think I'm picking on Kelce by saying the steps are slow, I'm not; NFL Next Gen Stats often doesn't even classify his movement as a shift or man in motion because it's such a short, slow movement.) He almost always gets a free release.
If any defender can match Kelce for his genius in attacking zones in the middle of the field by instead defending that space, it's Fred Warner. As good as Dre Greenlaw has been at his best, there's no linebacker in Warner's league right now. Warner's coverage on a CeeDee Lamb seam route last year was one of the plays of the 2022 postseason, but it's not just his rare physical traits. He has special instincts for where to move as plays go along and the ability to squeeze dig routes that teams (like the 49ers, ironically) love to use to attack linebackers in coverage. This is a matchup of Hall of Famer versus Hall of Famer.
The advantage the Chiefs have is that they get to decide where Kelce lines up and where he goes after the snap. We saw the Lions have success throwing to Sam LaPorta and working the middle of the field last week because offensive coordinator Ben Johnson was able to cycle multiple receivers through the middle and run Warner out of plays. LaPorta had nine catches for a team-high 97 yards, while Jared Goff went 19-of-26 for 213 yards and a touchdown between the numbers. Two of those seven incompletions were drops by Josh Reynolds.
Over the full season, though, the 49ers have thrived defending the middle of the field. They ranked fourth in QBR allowed on passes between the numbers, a figure buoyed by a whopping 17 interceptions on throws in that space. That mark led the league. We saw them turn the game around against the Packers by landing a crucial interception on a pass that was tipped by a receiver into Greenlaw's hands. Tips and overthrows have sunk the Chiefs at times this season, most notably in the loss to the Lions in Week 1. Kansas City wideouts have dropped just one pass this postseason after posting the highest drop rate for any group of wide receivers in any season over the previous decade, but they can't afford to be sloppy again.
Can the 49ers overwhelm the Chiefs with sheer talent?
The closest comp for these 49ers might be the Legion of Boom-era Seahawks. Those Seattle teams didn't disguise things because there was no need. You knew where they were going to line up. You knew what they were going to run most of the time: Their Cover 3 defense was something quarterbacks had been seeing since junior high. They were simply so talented, smart and gifted that knowing all of that didn't matter.
This San Francisco team is a defense with two likely future Hall of Famers (Bosa and Warner) and a handful of starters who play at a Pro Bowl level (Greenlaw, Javon Hargrave, Arik Armstead and Charvarius Ward). The 49ers have six defensive players who should win one-on-ones more often than their peers and who have the potential to make a game-changing play on just about every snap. Most weeks, that's enough. They're built differently and don't necessarily play the same style of defense that those Seahawks did, but they thrive by being more physical and talented than the teams they face.
The word that MatchQuarters' Cody Alexander used to describe the 49ers' defense is probably the most accurate one: static. They will make exceptions, as we saw when they showed man coverage pre-snap and played zone afterward on the second failed fourth down by the Lions, but they're generally consistent. What an offense sees before the snap is what it's getting after the snap. And what it saw last week is what the offense is going to see this week.
I mentioned San Francisco's tendencies to match 12 and 13 personnel with its base defense at the league's highest rate. The 49ers also don't budge their cornerbacks. Ward plays almost every snap on the left side of the defense, facing the right side of the offense. Deommodore Lenoir lines up on the right side of the defense and faces the left side of the offense. When the 49ers go with their nickel package, Lenoir moves into the slot and Ambry Thomas comes off the bench to take the right cornerback spot.
Knowing where cornerbacks are going to line up allows opposing coordinators worth their salt to line up their receivers accordingly. Want to avoid Ward, San Francisco's best cover corner? Don't line up the best wideout on that side of the field. Want to attack Thomas, the weak link in the bunch? Send 11 personnel out onto the field and line up the best wideout on the left side of the formation. When the Commanders played the 49ers in December and Washington offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy needed a touchdown, guess what he did? He sent Terry McLaurin out with two other wideouts, lined McLaurin up on the left side of the formation and got his best wideout matched up against Thomas. Sam Howell immediately threw a back-shoulder pass to McLaurin for a touchdown.
During the postseason, Thomas has given up six catches on eight targets for 86 yards as the nearest defender in coverage, per NFL Next Gen Stats. He also has committed two pass interference penalties for 54 additional yards. He won't be on the field when the 49ers are in their base defense, so the Chiefs won't see him in those 12 and 13 personnel groupings. They still play in 11 personnel more than half the time, so he will see his fair share of snaps Sunday.
In a league in which more and more teams try to show one pre-snap look to quarterbacks before morphing immediately after the snap into something different, the 49ers haven't felt the need to mix things up. ESPN has a measure called disguised dropback rate, where a defense shows one type of coverage before the snap and then spins to something different.
The 49ers disguised their coverages at the league's third-lowest rate. Only the Giants and Jets were less likely to disguise their post-snap coverage. The Jets and 49ers are proof that defenses can thrive without disguising often, but Mahomes had one of the best games anybody had all season against the Jets in Week 4. The Chiefs racked up 401 yards and 24 first downs, and they would have scored 30 points if it weren't for Mahomes sliding down to run out the clock 2 yards short of the end zone after the two-minute warning.
The Jets had stretches in which they dominated the Chiefs up front and forced Mahomes to make mistakes. The 49ers have the personnel to do that at the line of scrimmage, especially if the Chiefs are without star guard Joe Thuney. The All-Pro left the win over the Bills with a pectoral injury and then missed the conference title game. Nick Allegretti stepped in and held his own, but the longtime backup came up wanting on a couple of runs against the Ravens, including a third-and-2 stuff and a play in which Kansas City wasn't able to run on what amounted to a four-man Baltimore box. Hargrave versus Allegretti is the sort of mismatch the 49ers thrive on exploiting.
Bosa will spend most of his day matched up against right tackle Jawaan Taylor. Bosa has already attempted to get his preferred message in the heads of the officials; when asked what he thought of Taylor and left tackle Donovan Smith, Bosa simply said, "They hold a lot," and moved on to the next question. I won't argue with his evaluation, but the tackles have been better during the postseason than they were during the regular season. Getting Smith back for the overmatched Wanya Morris, in particular, has been a boon.
The 49ers might consider making a change across from Bosa. Chase Young has been at the top of the rotation after he was acquired from the Commanders in October, but the Packers and Lions beat him up in the run game. Young was getting sealed by wide receivers and seemed to loaf on the backside of Jahmyr Gibbs' 15-yard touchdown run. The 49ers won't have Clelin Ferrell (knee) for the Super Bowl, but they could shift the rotation further toward Randy Gregory or give Armstead more snaps outside on early downs -- a tactic they used in previous years.
The 49ers could then give bigger roles to Javon Kinlaw or late-season addition Sebastian Joseph-Day, formerly of the Rams and Chargers. They typically run the wide-nine fronts preferred by defensive line coach Kris Kocurek, looks that dare opposing teams to run the ball with positive box counts. If they can slow down the Chiefs' rushing attack with five- or six-man boxes, it's going to represent a huge schematic opportunity.
The Chiefs will force the defensive ends to work, both in the rush and with chasing down receivers near the line of scrimmage. Reid has been the genius of screens for more than two decades, and the 49ers ranked 26th in EPA per play against screen passes during the regular season. The Chiefs still run RPOs and/or have run plays tagged with the option to throw a bubble or tunnel screen to the outside if the numbers are in their favor.
If all else fails, the 49ers can hold on by winning in the red zone. The Chiefs have improved dramatically on offense during the postseason, jumping from a league-average 0.00 EPA per play on offense outside the red zone during the regular season to 0.15 EPA per play during the playoffs. That would have made them the league's best offense outside of the red zone during the regular season.
In the red zone, things have fallen apart. Mahomes & Co. have converted just 6 of their 13 trips into touchdowns, with five field goals and two failures on Mecole Hardman's fumble through the end zone against the Bills and the fourth-and-1 stuff by the Ravens last week. Red zone performance tends to fall in line with how a team performs outside of the red zone, so if the Chiefs continue to move the ball well, I'd expect their red zone performance to improve. They went a combined 7-for-9 punching red zone trips into the end zone during their Super Bowl victories against the 49ers and Eagles.
Defending the 'death lineup'
The 49ers offense the Chiefs played in Super Bowl LIV doesn't bear much resemblance to the players we'll see Sunday. Kyle Juszczyk and George Kittle were around, but Deebo Samuel was a rookie who hadn't yet broken out into the physical force of nature we'd see in the 2021 season. The team's second wideout was Emmanuel Sanders as opposed to Brandon Aiyuk. Raheem Mostert was the lead back, not Christian McCaffrey. And the left tackle was veteran Joe Staley, who was playing his final NFL game. The 49ers traded for Trent Williams after the season to replace Staley.
Brock Purdy was in his second season as the starter at Iowa State, where the Cyclones had finished 7-6. The 49ers were two years away from drafting Trey Lance, let alone adding Purdy, who made his debut in 2023 and hasn't yet looked back. These 49ers are more explosive than the Jimmy Garoppolo-era teams, and they bludgeon teams more often than their predecessors. Three of the five best offensive performances of the Shanahan era in San Francisco by EPA per play occurred with Purdy under center in 2023.
To make a second reference to the Warriors in this preview, Nate Tice refers to San Francisco's base offensive personnel -- McCaffrey, Juszczyk, Aiyuk, Samuel and Kittle -- as its "death lineup." Shanahan is comfortable lining up any of those five players anywhere on the field and having them catch passes or run with the ball. Outside of Juszczyk, the other four are among the best players with the ball in their hands in the entire league. If a team has a weakness on defense, Shanahan has both the personnel and the savvy to find it and exploit it.
In this matchup, that player is likely to be Chiefs linebacker Leo Chenal. Like Burks on the other side of the field, Chenal is a run-first defender who will play when Kansas City is in its base defense. When the Chiefs faced 21 personnel during the regular season, they responded with their base defense of three linebackers 73.5% of the time. Nick Bolton is their best linebacker, and Willie Gay is perhaps their most physically gifted. They have gotten steady production out of Drue Tranquill, but they didn't use Bolton, Gay and Tranquill together for a single snap this season. If Gay is able to play after aggravating a neck injury in the divisional round and missing the victory over the Ravens, Tranquill will likely be on the bench or rotating with Gay.
Chenal's usage makes it clear the Chiefs try to hide him in passing situations. When Bolton was healthy during the regular season, Chenal played just 13 snaps on third downs, and 12 of them were in third-and-short situations. Shanahan loves to attack base personnel by throwing on early downs. Facing base defenses on first downs this season, the 49ers averaged 7.0 yards per play. No other team was above 6.2 yards per snap in those situations. I would be surprised if the 49ers didn't pick on Chenal and dare him to hold up in coverage when the Niners work out of play-action.
If the Chiefs respond by playing their nickel defense against the death lineup, the 49ers will try to run the ball down their throats. Kansas City ranked 26th in rush defense success rate against runs from under center this season, although that was weighted heavily toward quarterback scrambles and designed runs. It ranked 29th in success rate against quarterbacks, 25th against wide receivers and 16th against running backs. Purdy has had some success scrambling this postseason, and the Chiefs have to have eyes on him when he escapes the pocket. Getting Gay back would help.
Man or zone against the 49ers?
While Shanahan has rightfully been regarded for years as one of the game's offensive masterminds, his counterpart on Sunday is finally getting his flowers. Steve Spagnuolo was lauded for his work in helping the Giants stop the Patriots in their famous Super Bowl upset in 2007, but after struggling with the Rams and Saints, he had to start over. Winning two Super Bowls with the Chiefs has restored his reputation, and after an impressive 2023 season, he has been recognized by both his players and the public as one of the league's best defensive coordinators. Despite fielding the second-youngest defense this season, he has put together the best D of the Mahomes era.
I'm fascinated to see how he approaches this matchup. Throughout the season, he has relied on a deep, physical secondary to play plenty of man coverage and hold up behind his exotic blitzes and sim pressures. Led by wildly underrated top cornerback L'Jarius Sneed and second-year standout Trent McDuffie, the Chiefs have played man coverage on 52.7% of opposing dropbacks, the fifth-highest rate for any team. On third down, that jumps to 60.7%. Spagnuolo trusts his guys to hold up, and he's right more often than not.
The problem is that Purdy and the 49ers absolutely, positively chew up man coverage. Including the postseason, the 49ers have averaged 0.39 EPA per play versus man-to-man defense. The only offense that has been more dominant against man coverage over the past decade was the 2020 Packers, who had Aaron Rodgers in an MVP season. The "death lineup" is a series of walking mismatches; it makes sense they would obliterate man coverage when defenses inevitably have somebody one-on-one against McCaffrey or Samuel.
Playing man coverage also invites the 49ers to run away from defenses after the catch. They were the best team at producing yards over catch over expectation on open targets this season. They generated an average of 2.1 yards after catch more than typical receivers would, according to the NFL Next Gen Stats model. No other team was above 1.2 yards after catch over expectation.
This is an area in which the Chiefs can match fire with fire, though. They were the league's second-best defense at preventing teams from generating yards after catch over expectation, allowing a total of two YACOE all season. Only the Falcons were better. Sneed, McDuffie and Justin Reid are all excellent tacklers and comfortable playing physical football.
Between the two sides, I would expect the Chiefs to blink and play more zone coverage than usual. The two highest zone coverage rates for them all season came in their two games against the Dolphins, against whom they played zone 60.5% of the time in the regular season and 67.4% in the frigid playoff rematch. The Dolphins run an offense under Mike McDaniel that more closely resembles Shanahan's attack than that of any other team.
Even if the Chiefs play man 30% of the time, that's a meaningful percentage of snaps that could come to define the game. Spagnuolo has used Sneed to shadow opposing teams' top wide receiver in man coverage, and Sneed has managed to shut down wideouts such as Justin Jefferson, A.J. Brown and Stefon Diggs in the process. Sneed gave Tyreek Hill fits in the wild-card game, as Hill's touchdown came on one of the few snaps Sneed wasn't in coverage.
Against the 49ers, though, where should they put Sneed? McDuffie is their slot corner, so Sneed will play on the outside. Sneed's physicality is usually an advantage he can use to break down opposing wide receivers, but can he really outmuscle Samuel? And if the Chiefs use him to shadow Aiyuk, will McDuffie and Jaylen Watson be able to slow down Samuel? This might be a game in which Kansas City doesn't use him to shadow and gives him a relatively even number of snaps against both Aiyuk and Samuel.
When the Chiefs do play man coverage, expect the 49ers to try to take advantage of their physicality and aggressiveness by using crack toss as part of their run game. Shanahan helped get the Falcons -- as their offensive coordinator -- out to an early lead in that fateful Super Bowl LI against the Patriots, a man coverage-heavy defense, by relying on crack toss to get his offensive linemen out on the edge against the New England secondary. The Chiefs' defensive backs do a great job of fighting off blockers to force plays back inside and make plays on the edge, but it's a little different when Williams is running at them.
One thing I'm sure of with Shanahan: If a play works, he won't get away from it until the other team proves it can be stopped. Against the Patriots in that Super Bowl, it was crack toss. In a midseason game against the Bucs, he called for the 49ers to run H-G Counter with a guard and an H-back (Juszczyk or Kittle) pulling four times in six plays, then went back to it multiple times as the game progressed. Some playcallers will have success with a concept and then go away from it out of fear that the defense will know it's coming. Shanahan usually doesn't share those concerns.
The Chiefs aren't a great run defense, but they are fast and do a great job of catching up with pursuit from the backside as runners slow down to make their cuts. McCaffrey is incredibly smooth and decisive when he chooses to cut upfield on zone runs, but the 49ers can help him by doing something to occupy those defenders on the backside. The Packers had a lot of success running against Kansas City by using jet motion away from the direction where the run was going to distract the pursuit defenders. They also overloaded one side of the formation with tight ends, forced the Chiefs to match personnel on that side of the field, and then ran the other way against the light side of the defense.
How can Spagnuolo slow down Purdy and the 49ers?
Pass pressure is the one thing that reliably causes every quarterback to slow down, and Spagnuolo and the Chiefs thrive at creating havoc on opposing quarterbacks. While I mentioned the 49ers are one of the league's most static defenses, Spagnuolo loves presenting different post-snap pictures to opposing quarterbacks and daring them to process in real time. He's also aggressive at using sim pressures to create overloads and unblocked rushers, which give every quarterback pause. Kansas City led the NFL in sack rate (8.8%) and ranked third in pressure rate (35.3%) during the regular season.
One of the goals for Spagnuolo has to be slowing down Purdy's processing ability. Showing a single-high coverage before the snap and then switching to a two-high look after isn't in itself going to flummox the second-year quarterback, but the timing and rotations are everything. Can Spagnuolo get that coverage to change in the time while Purdy's back is turned as he's executing a play-fake? Can he get Purdy to lose a defensive back in coverage or trick him into misreading someone's responsibilities? That's how Baltimore coordinator Mike Macdonald and safety Kyle Hamilton got a critical pick of Purdy early in what would eventually be a comfortable Ravens victory on Christmas.
If Spagnuolo doesn't, blitzing for blitzing's sake is not going to stop the 49ers. Purdy and the Niners rank first in QBR against unblocked rushers, with Purdy posting an 85.0 QBR against free runners in a league in which the average mark is 44.0. Shanahan can spread out the offense into empty backfields to give Purdy quicker identifications on mismatches; San Francisco is best in the league in QBR working out of empty. (The Chiefs are the eighth-best defense in the league defending those empty sets.) If you remember the Patriots running Hoss Y-Juke three times in a row to set up the only touchdown of the game in their Super Bowl LIII win over the Rams, don't be surprised if you see that concept again Sunday; the 49ers have the perfect personnel for it and scored a touchdown using it against the Bucs this season.
One thing the 49ers typically won't do? Use tempo, which can simplify defenses and prevent opponents from dialing up exotic pressures. They ran just 23 no-huddle snaps during the regular season, the fewest of any team. Most of those came in two-minute drills while they were trailing, and some were with Sam Darnold under center. They've trailed the past two weeks in the second half, but Shanahan has resisted the urge to play fast. San Francisco ran one snap of no-huddle on the second play of the second half against the Lions, then didn't go back to it the rest of the way.
The ultimate pressure package for Spagnuolo is to bring the house, something he does more than anybody else. The Chiefs played Cover 0 with no safety help, man coverage across the field and everyone else going after the quarterback on 6.5% of their defensive snaps this season. The 49ers torched Cover 0, going 12-of-14 for 151 yards with five touchdowns and two sacks. I don't know if Spagnuolo will be brave enough to use an all-out blitz more than once in this game, but he likely will save a Cover 0 snap for a critical moment.
Instead, Spagnuolo's philosophy in this matchup might be about trying to confuse Purdy while playing things safe and trusting his front four to win. As aggressive as they can be, the Chiefs play two-high coverages just under 50% of the time, the league's eighth-highest rate. That mark has jumped north of 60% during the postseason, owing in part to the fact they played two-high more than 79% of the time in their matchup against the Dolphins. Protecting the middle of the field is going to be critical against the 49ers, which could lead to more single-high coverages to try to close up gaps between the numbers, but the goal might simply be to avoid giving up big plays until the pass rush can get home.
If the Chiefs are going to win without blitzing as often as they usually prefer, this will have to be a Chris Jones game. In what might be his final 60 minutes as a Chiefs player, he will have every reason to deliver one final dominant performance in advance of unrestricted free agency. With Williams at left tackle, the place to attack the 49ers is on the interior, both by lining up Jones on the inside or by starting him at defensive end and using twists and stunts to loop him inside while forcing San Francisco to communicate and pass off responsibilities.
I would expect the Chiefs to try to target 49ers right guard Jon Feliciano. I've always thought he was an underrated player, but he's also on his third team in three seasons and wasn't starting before the Niners' Week 9 bye. They have had to shuffle the interior of their line because of injuries, but they seem to have settled on Feliciano at right guard ahead of second-year lineman Spencer Burford. Feliciano has allowed 1.5 sacks and nine pressures on 71 pass-blocking opportunities (a team-high 12.7% pressure rate) this postseason, per NFL Next Gen Stats.
On the other hand, the Chiefs won't be as deep up front as they hoped heading into the postseason. End Charles Omenihu, who had seven sacks during the regular season, tore his ACL in the Ravens victory. Interior lineman Derrick Nnadi will also be sidelined after he suffered a triceps injury against Miami. That's more than 900 snaps of defensive line play missing with a title on the line.
The Chiefs will bring back rookie first-round pick Felix Anudike-Uzomah, who has been a healthy scratch during the postseason, and they'll likely promote veteran Mike Pennel, who had been out of football before signing with his former team in midseason. Even with those two, this is a much thinner line than the Chiefs would have expected. That could end up being a problem, especially later in the game.
Will Purdy be overmatched?
The postseason has delivered a little bit of everything in the perpetual weekly referendum on Purdy. He has looked overmatched for stretches of games and made throws that look like video game glitches (in a bad way). He has been lucky to complete some of his throws, most notably the 51-yard bomb to Brandon Aiyuk that bounced off Kindle Vildor's helmet against the Lions. He also has delivered massively during a pair of second-half comebacks, playing nearly perfect football exactly when the 49ers have needed him to step up. Whether you're a Purdy skeptic or believer, this postseason has given you plenty of ammunition.
I land somewhere closer to the believer side of the equation given his remarkable efficiency in the San Francisco offense, but this will be a tough matchup. The Chiefs have one of the league's best defenses, and Purdy's numbers have fallen precipitously when he has played top defenses.
The Chiefs finished the regular season fifth by defensive EPA per play. During his brief and meteoric career, Purdy has faced top-10 defenses by EPA seven times in 21 starts. That includes 2022 games against the Commanders, Cowboys and his brief start against the Eagles in the conference title game, as well as starts in 2023 against the Steelers, Cowboys, Browns and Ravens. The 49ers have a 4-3 record in those games, although it seems unfair to count their quarterback's elbow injury against Philadelphia as a meaningful start.
Purdy's performance against those defenses has been noticeably worse, with his QBR dropping by more than 20 points, his interception rate more than doubling and his completion percentage dropping by seven full points. Facing top defenses, he takes more sacks, averages fewer yards per attempt and his stratospheric first down rate disappears. His 41.4% first down rate since the start of 2022 is comfortably the best in football. Over his short career, he has posted a staggering 44.1% first down rate against non-top-10 defenses, but that drops to 35.9% when he faces the best defenses in the league.
Now, I know what you're thinking. A quarterback playing worse against the best defenses shouldn't exactly surprise anybody. You're right. Purdy's numbers against great defenses aren't terrible. Compared to the rest of the league, though, he drops off much more significantly against the stiffest competition defensive coordinators can offer. QBR adjusts for the quality of opposing defenses, so the league as a whole declined from a collective mark of 53.5 to 49.9 when it played top-10 defenses between 2022 and 2023. That's a 3.6-point swing. Purdy declined by 20.3 points of QBR.
QBR is not the only measure where his struggles against top defenses have been more pronounced compared with the rest of the league's quarterbacks. Their passer rating declined by 10 points. Purdy's dropped by 24. They averaged 0.6 yards per attempt fewer when facing top-10 defenses. Purdy fell off more than twice as significantly. Their completion percentage over expectation (CPOE) dropped from 0.3% to minus-1.8%. Purdy's CPOE underwent a six-point swing. And while their first-down rate dropped by 3.3 percentage points, Purdy's fell by more than eight points.
Purdy has further to fall than most quarterbacks, which plays a part here. He has been otherworldly efficient against sub-top-10 defenses, and it's going to be hard for any quarterback to keep that up against better competition. We're also talking about a sample of six games against the league's best defenses if we don't include the Eagles loss, and that's not a significant amount of action. Facing a top-10 defense doesn't immediately sink him, to which his performance against the Cowboys earlier this season can attest, but his worst starts have been against the Browns and Ravens. If he dominates against the Chiefs, it won't be by picking on inferior competition.
The special teams gap
Projecting an advantage on special teams in a single game is difficult because the variance swamps talent to a greater extent than it does for offense and defense. Mahomes will get 40 dropbacks to make an impact on the game. Harrison Butker and Jake Moody might only try three field goals or extra points all day.
On paper, though, the Chiefs should have a comfortable advantage on special teams. Dave Toub's unit ranked sixth in the league in DVOA and win probability added (WPA) in the regular season. The 49ers ranked 25th in DVOA and 30th in WPA.
On the Chiefs' side, Tommy Townsend fell off a bit this season by the Puntalytics methodology, but he's one year removed from being a first-team All-Pro. It has been a resurgent year for Butker, who missed just two of his 87 field goal and extra-point tries all season, including all 14 of his attempts in the postseason. And after experimenting last season with returners Skyy Moore and Kadarius Toney with mixed results, Kansas City has gotten steady return work from Richie James.
For the 49ers, Mitch Wishnowsky has been solid. Ray-Ray McCloud is their primary return man and should see most of the work Sunday, but there's always the break-in-case-of-emergency option in Deebo Samuel, who returned six kicks this season while McCloud was injured. If the 49ers need a big play, I wouldn't be surprised if they gave Samuel an opportunity in the second half.
Shanahan will undoubtedly be nervous about his rookie kicker. Moody has missed field goals in each of the past three games, adding a failed extra point against the Rams in Week 18 for good measure. One of those kicks was blocked, but he has pushed the other three wide to the right. To be fair, he had hit his first 60 extra points in a row during the regular season before missing his 61st and final attempt, but four misses in three games has to weigh on his coach.
Having questions about a kicker can sometimes encourage playcallers to be more aggressive, something I'd love to see from Shanahan in his return to the Super Bowl. While the offensive wizard is a Hall of Fame-caliber playcaller, his reticence to push the envelope situationally has hurt him in each of his trips to the Super Bowl. It's another place where the Chiefs have the advantage.
The game management battle
In Super Bowl LIV, Reid bested Shanahan when it came to decision-making. While the Chiefs coach needed to take a timeout before doing so, Reid kept his offense on the field for a fourth-and-1 on the 49ers' 5-yard line. They converted and then scored a touchdown two plays later. Shanahan later kicked a field goal on fourth-and-2 from the 24-yard line early in the third quarter to take a 13-10 lead. The win probability swing on those two decisions, per NFL Next Gen Stats, amounted to nearly five percentage points. It didn't decide the game, but it certainly helped push things in Kansas City's favor.
During the 2023 regular season, when the Next Gen model suggested Shanahan should go for it, he only did so about 42% of the time. That's not a great number, but I should note that most of the times he decided to punt or kick a field goal were relatively small changes in win expectancy. He didn't have an egregious fourth-down decision-making mistake.
In the postseason, though, Shanahan has been more conservative. He has gone for it just once in nine situations in which the Next Gen model thought he should have tried a conversion, costing his team nearly nine percentage points of win expectancy in the process. Skeptics will note he has won both those games, but he has lost advantages in critical games by making conservative decisions. In addition to the Super Bowl, think about Shanahan punting on fourth-and-2 on the Los Angeles side of the field in the fourth quarter of the 2021 NFC Championship Game, a decision he admitted after the game he didn't even consider in the moment.
Beyond the fourth-down decision-making, I'd argue the more damaging philosophy for Shanahan has been how he handles two-minute drives. At the end of the first half against the Chiefs four years ago, he took the air out of the ball with two runs, got the Chiefs to call a timeout with 20 seconds left and then suddenly decided to start trying to score. He got a 20-yard completion to Wilson and nearly had a bomb to Kittle to get the 49ers into scoring range, only for a questionable offensive pass interference penalty to wipe away the completion. Shanahan said afterward he felt good about getting to the half at 10-10, even though general manager John Lynch was seen furiously signaling for the team to use one of its three timeouts from the press box.
Against the Packers in the divisional round, this sort of decision-making came back. The 49ers got to their own 38-yard line at the two-minute warning and ran nearly 90 seconds off the clock to gain 17 yards. They then used all three of their timeouts to set up a 46-yard field goal, which was blocked.
You can see what Shanahan was doing. He wanted to exhaust the clock of any possibility for the other team to score before attempting to try and score himself. The problem is the 49ers are foregoing a realistic chance at scoring a touchdown in those situations to eliminate the opposing team's chances of scoring at all, and given how good Shanahan's offense is at scoring, that trade-off is helping the opposing team more than it's hurting. If Shanahan had a great long-distance kicker, a dominant defense and a sloppy offense, his game plan would make sense. As it stands, he's giving opposing defenses a drive off and playing to his team's weaknesses as opposed to emphasizing its strengths.
Reid wasn't much better during the regular season. He only went for it 43% of the time in situations in which the Next Gen model suggested the offense should stay on the field. He also made what I believe to be the single worst mistake of the season from the model when he kept his offense out on the field to convert a fourth-and-25 with 2:09 to go in the Week 1 loss to the Lions. If you ever wonder whether a win probability model suggests a team should punt, here's your example: The model thought Kansas City cost itself 10.6 percentage points of win expectancy by not punting.
What Reid will do Sunday is trust Mahomes to score on every single drive. That alone might be an advantage over Shanahan. In a game projected to be close in which both teams have an offensive advantage, the coaches should be aggressive on fourth down.
The pick
The deeper I looked into this matchup and how both two teams are playing, the more I found advantages leaning toward the Chiefs. We can't count out the 49ers given how explosive they can be on offense in a matter of seconds, but they've been inconsistent on both sides of the football since Christmas. Their defense has struggled over that stretch, and Mahomes' pocket movement and poise neutralizes their biggest strength.
Is it a vote against Purdy? I guess it has to be, right? I don't want to be the guy screaming "He can't keep getting away with this" for the next decade as he puts the ball in danger and succeeds, but this is the sort of matchup and the sort of defense built to take advantage of those moments in which he takes unnecessary risks.
The 49ers will get a late score to make it close, but having picked the Chiefs to win the title before the regular season and before the playoffs began, I'm not wavering now. Chiefs 27, 49ers 20.