It’s good practice for NFL teams to take stock of the best of the best. What are they doing? How can our team be more like them? It’s a copycat league, after all. While the world’s eyes will be upon the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LIX on Feb. 9, their peers have already taken a close look at the NFL’s two top programs. That includes the San Francisco 49ers, for whom championship Sunday couldn’t have gone any better. Proxy battles don’t bring trophies, but for Kyle Shanahan, Robert Saleh, John Lynch, and the Niners, the Eagles and Chiefs winning provides a convincing argument that San Francisco isn’t far away from contending again.
As I see it, there were four lessons to be learned from the NFL’s final four weekend, and if the Niners heed them all, they’ll be in great shape in 2025. Programs over quarterbacks Both Philadelphia quarterback Jalen Hurts and Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes were excellent on Sunday, but neither was the star attraction at their position in the game. No, both Washington and Buffalo could boast a “Superman” in Jayden Daniels and Josh Allen.
It turns out that Superman can only do so much for the other 47 active players on game day. The Eagles and Chiefs won for many reasons (a few to be listed in the paragraphs to come), but above all, they had better rosters and played far better situational football. To boast both takes years of roster building and more than one year of team chemistry. To execute the way the Eagles and Chiefs did Sunday is hardly fly-by-night. Perhaps Daniels and Allen will get over the hump in the years to come, but this isn’t the NBA – you can’t win the biggest games because you have the singular best player on the field. Quarterbacks win games. Programs win championships. This is great news for the 49ers, because while Brock Purdy is poised to make a lot of money in the coming years, he is not a quarterback like Daniels or Allen. The 49ers won’t ask him to carry the load like that, either.
In turn, the Niners will have to double-down on the process that took them to two Super Bowls since 2019 – a great overall team roster, with the quarterback included. I won’t blaspheme and compare anyone to Mahomes, but surely Purdy and Hurts can be considered of a similar ilk these days. The rosters around them? Not so much. But the Niners know the fixes. It’s all about the offensive line Did Eagles running back Saquon Barkley become a better back when he moved to Philly, or is he simply running behind the best offensive line in football? It’s obviously the latter, and it turned the former Giant running back into my league MVP this season.
The Chiefs might not have the Eagles’ offensive line, but I’ll take their interior (though left guard Joe Thuney was shifted to tackle for the postseason) over anyone else’s in the league. The better offensive lines won on Sunday and that wasn’t a one-day trend – this was the truth around the league in 2024. I don’t anticipate a change in 2025 or beyond. And for the Niners, it means they need to upgrade at both left guard and center this offseason.
It’s doable, as the Niners (contrary to popular belief amid Purdy contract speculation) will have money to spend in free agency and possibly 10 picks in the NFL Draft. That’s the kind of ammunition that can fill a lot of gaps, particularly the A and B. Invest in beef While both Kansas City and Philadelphia have excellent offensive lines (the Eagles, more so), they also boasted the better interior defensive linemen in Sunday’s games.
The Chiefs have the best interior defensive lineman in the game, Chris Jones. The Eagles have the best interior defensive line in the sport and have a contender for that top individual spot. While the go-to move in the league is to list off the quarterbacks who have won recent Super Bowls, I think it equally informative to list out the best defensive players on the champion teams.
Starting with the Chiefs win vs. the 49ers to cap the 2019 season, the list goes: Jones (KC), Vita Vea (Tampa Bay), Aaron Donald (L.A.), Jones, and Jones. This year, it’ll be either Jones or the indomitable Jalen Carter. Here’s the new motto: DTs win titles. The Eagles have not only Carter but also Jordan Davis and Milton Williams. Those are some war daddies up front, getting right up in the grill of your quarterback in the pocket.
The 49ers do not have anyone like that. They haven’t boasted anyone like that since they traded Deforest Buckner after the Super Bowl in 2020. That has to change this offseason, and the best place to find a player like Jones or Carter is in the draft. The good news for the Niners is that they should have something close to dibs at pick No. 11 in an excellent defensive tackle draft. The bad news: They can’t mess up that pick again.
Conservative football is dead Kyle Shanahan takes a do-no-harm approach to the game. Don’t do anything too risky – in his mind, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Well, moving forward, that mentality will be doing harm. Conservative football is dead. Seven fourth-down conversion attempts in each of the championship games tell us as much. The Eagles and Chiefs would have tried for more than one fourth-down conversion, but both teams had only one realistic option to go for it. The Chiefs (who had three fourth downs all game) converted a fourth-and-1, the Eagles capitalized on a bold fourth-and-5 from the Washington 45. Meanwhile, the underdogs repeatedly went for it on fourth down to mixed results. Lions coach and fourth-down swashbuckler Dan Campbell isn’t some brash standalone – he was a trailblazer. The Niners only attempted 16 fourth-down conversions all season. Only three teams had fewer tries.
