Has Chiefs’ dominance gotten in 49ers’ heads? S.F. can send message Sunday

Yeah, yeah, this is just Game 7 in the San Francisco 49ers' regular season. In mid-October. Against an AFC opponent.

It is not a "must win." It is not Super Bowl "LVIII.5." It cannot exact true revenge.

But do not try to convince me that Sunday's game against the Kansas City Chiefs isn't enormous or hugely consequential. For the entire 49ers team. But most of all for Kyle Shanahan.

There is so much more to this game than the surface details. This is not just a football game, but an emotional, psychological hurdle to overcome, played out against a background of total one-sided ownage and devastating, life-changing losses.

Even Shanahan, as honest an NFL coach as there is, conceded to some PTSD earlier this week.

"Everyone understands that we've lost the two Super Bowls to them," Shanahan said. "So I mean, that can give a little post-traumatic stress when you turn on the tape. I think that's human nature. But you've got to make sure you don't get caught up in that."

Shanahan is 0-4 against Andy Reid's Chiefs, more losses to one team and one head coach than any other in his coaching tenure. Going further back to pre-49ers, Reid handed Atlanta offensive coordinator Shanahan a one-point loss in 2016, one of just five losses the Falcons suffered on their road to the Super Bowl that season.

But it is the 49ers' losses to the Chiefs that are monumental. Historic, excruciating and franchise-defining in the way the team's losses to the Dallas Cowboys were in the past.

The first was in 2018, in Kansas City, when Jimmy Garoppolo tore his ACL, derailing an entire season. The second was the Super Bowl on Feb. 2, 2020, when the 49ers had a 10-point lead with 2:35 to play in the third quarter and couldn't stop Patrick Mahomes. The third was an October blowout at Levi's in 2023, when the 49ers came in with a 3-3 record, just like they will Sunday. That game, Christian McCaffrey's first with the team, was so out of hand that rookie Brock Purdy took over from Garoppolo late in the fourth quarter and completed the first passes of his NFL career.

And you know all about the fourth loss, coming just eight months ago in Las Vegas, one in which the 49ers again held a ten-point lead. A crushing, soul-breaking overtime loss that creates feelings of anguish throughout the 49ers building.

Sunday's regular-season game against the undefeated Chiefs, who are coming off a bye, can't make up for that loss. Can't chase those Super Bowl demons. Shanahan knows that.

"This game has nothing to do with past games," he said. "That was last year. We're playing a really good AFC opponent. We're .500 right now. We want to stay on top of our division and get a win... It really has no correlation, and you try to make sure that it doesn't."

But what a win would do is make everyone feel really good. A victory would be cathartic and would catapult the 49ers into the second half of their season. Handing Reid and Mahomes their first loss of the season would send a message around the league that, yes, the 49ers, despite the early season struggles, are still elite.

Both teams have been weakened by injuries. Both teams have red zone issues. Both teams are playing below their standard. The difference is that the Chiefs have held on to win close games, while the 49ers haven't, giving away two division games and losing to another NFC opponent in Minnesota.

The key to beating the Chiefs is to get up early, and stay ahead. But the 49ers have done that before against the Chiefs and have still been unable to stop Mahomes.

Mahomes and Reid win close games. And that is something that is, generally speaking, harder for the 49ers. Honest Shanahan conceded as much the other night, after the victory in Seattle.

"We've gone on a stretch here the last two years where we won a lot of games in a row and a lot of the fourth quarters in some of those wins these last two years haven't been that tight," Shanahan said. "Guys have been able to relax a little bit on stuff. ... I think we got a little spoiled in that way, of just human nature, of sometimes feeling too relaxed, and you can never feel too relaxed."

There's no doubt that Shanahan's teams have performed best when they've had a huge lead and can cruise in the fourth quarter. Shanahan has a .667 winning percentage as a head coach, which would be higher if you tossed his early games with an awful team. But this week Associated Press writer Josh Dubow posted some damning statistics that lurk within Shanahan's record.

Per Dubow, Shanahan's winning percentage drops to .378 in games decided by seven points or fewer. Of the 124 coaches in NFL history who have coached 40-plus regular season games decided by seven points or fewer, Shanahan ranks 119th on the list.

Also from Dubow: Shanahan has lost 18 games when his team is leading by ten or more points. Six of those losses have come when his team is leading by ten or more points in the fourth quarter. Two of those sixth fourth-quarter collapses have come this season, against the Rams and the Cardinals.

And two of the 18 losses after holding a 10-point lead have come against the Chiefs in the biggest game in the NFL.

The Chiefs are coming to town. The sight of them is traumatic. Stressful.