SANTA CLARA — To be the man, you have to beat the man.
But the San Francisco 49ers have not beaten Patrick Mahomes.
And in the third quarter of Sunday’s Super Bowl rematch between the Chiefs and 49ers, as the Kansas City quarterback scampered down the sideline with his trademark, toddler-like knock-kneed gait, with not one, not two, but four 49ers defenders missing their clear-cut opportunities to bring him down as he gained 33 yards and set up Kansas City’s third touchdown of the game — the game-winner, it would turn out — it was fair for the Niners, their fans, and the world wonder:
Will they ever?
For the 49ers, it’s a question so fundamental, so consequential, that the answer can tear a team apart.
And right now, seven years of evidence points towards “No.”
“There’s no way to sugarcoat this. We got our ass kicked today,” Niners head coach Kyle Shanahan said following his team’s 28-18 home loss.
The Niners can’t stop Mahomes in the Super Bowl, having lost both matchups with the Chiefs in 2019 and last season. They can’t stop him in the regular season, either, having lost their previous three games, with the last two coming in blowouts at home.
He is their bogeyman, their final boss, their supreme bugaboo. And while he and his team might play in the opposite conference and only face the Niners sporadically — Sunday was the fifth matchup, regular and post-season, since Shanahan became San Francisco’s head coach — his presence and his still-unblemished record against the Niners expose a serious vulnerability in San Francisco’s already fragile psyche.
Had the Niners finally beaten Mahomes on Sunday — no matter the circumstances — they would have exited Levi’s Stadium feeling like the favorites to achieve the team’s singular goal, winning the Super Bowl. They circled this game on the schedule when it was released — it was the ultimate measuring-stick contest — and they would have been justifiably riding high with a victory.
The inverse must be true in a loss.
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I won’t say the Niners’ season is over. There’s too much football to play, and too much talent remaining on this team. (Even in its hyper-injured state.)
But Sunday certainly marks the turning point for this 49ers season that has been chaotic at its best and disastrous at its all-too-frequent worst.
And in this all-or-nothing season, that represents a referendum on an era of 49ers football.
Just as the Niners, the media, and fans will looked forward to his game for months, we will all be look back on Sunday’s result in the weeks and months to come.
Either the Niners used this latest Kansas City barbecuing as a galvanizing event — something to bring a fractured (in an all-too-literal way) team together, bringing out a yet-to-be-seen best — or it was the point of no return for this not-quite-good-enough dynasty.
Yes, the coming weeks will prove to be Shanahan’s toughest test yet. It’s one thing to build a shrewd offensive plan for a week’s game. It’s a whole other challenge to keep together a team that’s emotionally on the brink.
And make no mistake, that’s where the 49ers stand.
Because even if Shanahan and the 49ers can find a way to overcome Sunday’s loss — to turn a negative into a positive — there will always be doubt in the back of this team’s mind.
And all signs point to it being insidious.
This San Francisco squad was built to compete for titles and be satisfied with nothing less. This team is fully justified in its belief it can beat 30 of the other 31 NFL teams.
But no one will take care of the 49ers’ problem — their singular problem, it seems — for them. The entire football-watching planet — has every reason to believe that Kansas City will be playing for football’s ultimate prize in New Orleans in February. It’s effectively preordained with Mahomes at quarterback for the back-to-back champions, who have played in four of the last five Super Bowls.
So what belief can the Niners still harbor that this team, now 3-4 on the season and with an injury list so prolific and pointed that it’s bordering on Shakespearean, will be able to beat the Chiefs and Mahomes should they meet up again?
The Niners were keen to diminish Sunday’s loss as “only one game” in a dozen different ways.
The issue is that the loss came to a team that doesn’t just have the Niners’ number — they have their letters and punctuation marks, too. They’re toying with them at this point, and the scoreline Sunday flattered the Niners, who were 2-for-11 on third down, threw three interceptions, and possessed the ball for ten fewer minutes than Kansas City Sunday, all while Mahomes and the impressive Kansas City defense made big play after big play when the circumstances of the game called for their best.
Mahomes’ greatness can only be appropriately described as magic. “Patrick Mahomes stuff,” Niners tight end George Kittle called it.
Football is a sport of brains and brawn — how do you beat something downright ethereal?
And how can the Niners think they’re the team to do it when their season has felt so cursed from the start?
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Of course, Sunday brought about another critical, season-changing injury for San Francisco — Brandon Aiyuk left the game in the second quarter with what is believed to be a torn ACL in his right knee. Pair that with an injury to go-to-receiver Jauan Jennings and an illness that kept Deebo Samuel sidelined for most of the game, and the Niners were running out a third-team receiving crew in the second half Sunday. Such shorthandedness feels like par for the course for this team.
The lack of receivers was one of the many reasons San Francisco lost, but the never-ending string of injuries hardly inspires confidence in the future.
And how does this team push forward when their confidence (and bodies) are so bruised?
Over the last few years, the Niners have delivered a series of destabilizing punches to their opponents. The Cowboys, Packers, Lions, and Eagles all curse the Niners’ name like San Francisco does the Chiefs’.
How often have I written that the Niners “broke” the opposition since the start of the 2019 campaign?
Well, the tables might have turned Sunday. And while the effects won’t be obvious immediately, when we look back on this game in a few months, we’ll know if this is true:
After six years of success all but one other NFL team would gladly take, Mahomes might have landed the blow that finally fell the once-mighty Niners.