2026 will be the 10th year that San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan and general manager John Lynch will have been attached at the hip. In the modern era of football, where coaches and general managers are constantly changing, that seems like a rarity. Especially when the 49ers haven’t won a Super Bowl in that period.
This offseason, we saw quite the coaching carousel. Two of the league’s longest-tenured coaches, Mike Tomlin and John Harbaugh, are no longer coaching their respective teams. Additionally, there were 10 total openings, which is tied for the most in NFL history in a single cycle.
There weren’t just head coach changes; two general manager jobs (Miami Dolphins, Atlanta Falcons) opened up, while a whopping 18 (yes, 18) offensive coordinator jobs have become available this offseason. Then, there are the five new defensive coordinator jobs as well. The 49ers have one of those, with Robert Saleh leaving to coach the Tennessee Titans.
Stability has become an afterthought in the NFL, from both an organizational perspective and a coaching standpoint. And part of it is a good thing. Organizations have good coaches who get elevated and receive promotions elsewhere. But there’s also a constant cycling of coaches because owners get impatient, and we’ve seen a number of those situations unfold in the past few years.
When it comes to the 49ers, they’ve had the same top structure now for the last nine years with Lynch at general manager and Shanahan at head coach. What do they make of the current NFL landscape, and how has their relationship evolved over the years?
“That’s what’s easy with working with John. We don’t have to sit there and make much up or sit here and decide how I’m going to act before I go into a meeting room or anything,” Shanahan said at the end-of-year meetings. “I pretty much can act the same way with him in a meeting about free agency or the draft as I would having dinner with him at his house or something.
“When there’s not layers between things, it allows you to just speak and give people a chance to get better from what everyone says, and whether it’s right or wrong. And I think that’s how we’ve been since our first week together, and it’s cool that it’s 10 years later, and that hasn’t really changed. That’s to me why we bet, I think, more on each other as people before we knew how we would be. And I think that bet has worked out for both of us really well.”
For Lynch, while the stability is important, he understands that it comes with a level of expectations with one goal in mind. So the pressure is constantly there.
“I would just add that I think that’s every year that you rely on that. It’s a difficult business,” Lynch added. “You talked about all the moves out there, and I always stop and understand that with every one of those moves there’s a number of families that are affected. It’s not just the coach. It’s his kids who are going to school, it’s all of that. There’s players. There’s staff. And so, that is never lost on us. I love the stability.
“I’ll also tell you that I’m more fired up than ever to get this thing. While I’m proud of this team, we have higher standards, and we’ve knocked on the door for a long time here and came here to do one thing, and that’s win championships. So, I’m never going to stop striving for that. I love working with Kyle and his staff, and we constantly challenge ourselves, challenge each other to be better, and that won’t stop.”
Stability is rare in the NFL. The 49ers have it at the top with Shanahan, the third-longest-tenured head coach in the NFL, and Lynch. We’ll see now if they can achieve their final goal.
