Is 49ers HC Kyle Shanahan the NFL's Best Offensive Coach?
49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan certainly is one of the top offensive coaches in the NFL, but is he the best?
His opening scripts are brilliant and his offensive system is the most popular one in the NFL. Teams all around the league have hired his assistant coaches to try to replicate his scheme, which is cutting-edge with all its pre-snap shifts and motions.
Lots of NFL analysts consider Shanahan to be the best offensive coach in football because he has been able to achieve so much success in the regular season without an elite quarterback. No matter how much talent the 49ers have at running back, tight end and wide receiver, Shanahan always is portrayed as the star of the offense, and the quarterback usually is portrayed as the Achilles heel. Ask Jimmy Garoppolo.
But as good as Shanahan is, a couple of things hold him back as an offensive coach. First, he's rigid. He doesn't want to change his scheme to fit his players -- he wants to find players who fit his scheme. A scheme that hasn't won a Super Bowl. And two, he doesn't have a great eye for quarterbacks. He didn't want Patrick Mahomes. Instead, he traded for Jimmy Garoppolo and made him the highest-paid player in the league. Then he traded three first-round picks for Trey Lance.
Compare Shanahan to Andy Reid. Reid isn't rigid. His offensive philosophy changes every year depending on the players he has. And Reid doesn't call attention to himself. He doesn't have to be the star. He empowers the quarterback to be the star. As opposed to Shanahan, who positions him to be the scapegoat when he inevitably falls short.
That's why Reid is the best offensive coach in the NFL.
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.