The Kyle Shanahan car crash story keeps getting scarier. On Monday, Chris Simms went on PFT Live and dropped a detail that had not been in any of the earlier reports: the 49ers head coach came very close to losing his right eye in the July 14 accident.
Simms said Shanahan’s wife Mandy sent him photos of the coach’s injuries not long after the crash. He described them as jarring even for someone who had already seen the official injury list.
“You’ve seen the injury report, the broken ribs, 40 stitches to the face, the broken nose, the broken left hand, of course the bad concussion,” Simms said. “But when you first see it, and it’s fresh, and some of the cuts are still wide open, it’s jarring. He was this close to maybe losing his right eye, the scar is so big.”
That is a wild sentence to read in the middle of an NFL training camp cycle. The Niners had already announced Sunday that Shanahan would take on limited duties at the start of camp, and the plan is still to have him running the show in Week 1. But that plan sounds a lot more fragile once you know how close this got to being a life-changing injury instead of a season-opening inconvenience.
Shanahan, 46, is one of the ten or so head coaches you can honestly say the league revolves around. He has been San Francisco’s head coach since 2017, holds a regular season record of 82-67, and has taken the franchise to the playoffs in five of nine seasons. Two Super Bowl trips and two other NFC Championship game appearances are already on the resume.
The bigger takeaway is how much of the 49ers’ identity is tied up in one guy. Kyle Juszczyk retiring did not shake the offense. Deebo Samuel getting traded did not shake the offense. The offense is Shanahan. He calls the plays, designs the runs, sets the tone. Take him out for even a few weeks and the entire operation gets thinner.
Backup HC responsibilities during camp will fall on defensive coordinator Robert Saleh and assistant head coach Brian Griese. That is a solid pair of adults. But they are not the reason the Niners have won more playoff games than any NFC team since 2019.
Give San Francisco credit for the way they handled the messaging. They waited until Shanahan was well enough to be seen in public before releasing any details, and they have been careful to project confidence about Week 1 without making promises. Given what Simms just described, that is probably the right posture.
For now, the win is that Shanahan can still see, still coach, and still walk into the building. Everything else is gravy.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
