The dust has barely settled on Super Bowl LIX. The champs have just been crowned, and I'm already thinking about next season.
Who will hoist the Lombardi one year from now? What team will ride the regular season wave, survive multiple rounds of winter playoff football, and finish the job in Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California?
Could it be the same team that already plays there all season long? The San Francisco 49ers are my first bet to win the 2026 Super Bowl, and you should bet them to win the title at +1700 (BetRivers).
Kyle Shanahan Is the NFC's Patrick Mahomes
The AFC remains absolutely loaded, mostly because of the quarterbacks.
Patrick Mahomes will be back again, as always. Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson just battled for MVP. Joe Burrow would've also been in the mix if he had gotten any defensive help at all. Justin Herbert and C.J. Stroud are waiting in the wings.
You can make a pretty easy argument that the five best quarterbacks in the world — at least! — all reside in the AFC. The NFC has no such quarterback at the top. But maybe Kyle Shanahan is the NFC's version.
Any vote of confidence in the 49ers next season starts with Shanahan.
Shanahan's 49ers went 6-11 this season but won at least 12 games in four of the five previous seasons, going 62-33 over that stretch.
Those four teams made the playoffs, and all four of them won at least two postseason games and made the NFC Championship, two of them making the Super Bowl.
Add in the 2016-17 season, when Shanahan was the architect of an MVP Matt Ryan season and a 28-3 lead in the Super Bowl with the Falcons, and that makes five of the last nine NFC Championships for Shanahan.
Is Kyle Shanahan the NFC's version of Patrick Mahomes or Tom Brady?
Shanahan's offensive schemes remain unstoppable, and his teams contend year after year. Yardage is typically a great high-level measure of a team's success. Here are the 49ers yardage differential ranks over the past six seasons under Shanahan: third, fifth, third, fourth, first, fourth.
Keep in mind those rankings include two seasons in which the 49ers were waylaid by major injuries, ranked bottom six in giveaways, won only six games each, and still found that much efficiency and success.
Since the 49ers traded for Christian McCaffrey, Shanahan's offense has been an absolute buzz saw when healthy. And that's still true! They just were never healthy this season.
McCaffrey started the season on extended IR and played four games all year, never really looking like himself. Brandon Aiyuk held out all training camp waiting for a contact, then missed 10 games with a torn ACL. Stud left tackle Trent Williams missed seven games. Brock Purdy, George Kittle, and Deebo Samuel also missed multiple games.
That's 36 missed games combined by the six most important 49ers offensively, an average of six per player. And even with all those injuries in a lost season, the 49ers offense ranked fourth in yardage, seventh in yards per carry, and fourth in net yards per pass attempt.
The besieged 49ers offense finished ninth in DVOA, a far cry from Shanahan's usual, but still ahead of teams like the Eagles, Rams and Vikings and nearly dead even with the Chiefs.
And again, San Francisco did that in an entirely lost season. That's how good this offense is.
Shanahan's running scheme remained dominant, even with McCaffrey out. Backup Jordan Mason ran for 5.2 yards per carry. A dude named Isaac Guerendo — raise your hand if you'd ever heard of him before this season — ran for five yards a pop, too. Jauan Jennings caught 77 passes for almost 1,000 yards. Former Mr. Irrelevant Brock Purdy quietly turned in his best individual season as a pro.
Kyle Shanahan's offense lost every key player for stretches of the season and kept right on producing.
Seven of the eight teams that finished ahead of the 49ers offense in DVOA this season made the playoffs, and that's no surprise. Elite offense still wins the day in the NFL, season after season.
The 49ers will finally get healthy this offseason after three long and grueling seasons and back-to-back-to-back trips to the NFC Championship Game. And when they do, they'll return with the best weapons in football by far (even if Deebo Samuel is traded) and maybe still the league's best play-caller.
But it's not just the offense with reason for hope.
Robert Saleh is Back to Fix the Defense
San Francisco's defense fell off even harder last season.
That's the sort of thing that happens when an ongoing brain drain sees Robert Saleh and then DeMeco Ryans both leave for head coaching positions. The 49ers tried to replace Ryans with Steve Wilks but were unhappy with the results, then failed again with new DC Nick Sorenson.
Now San Francisco turns back to a name Shanahan and the team already know it works: Saleh.
Outside of his first year with the Jets, Saleh's defenses ranked second, fifth, fourth, third, and third in yards allowed. They were absolutely elite, season after season — even still including much of this one before Saleh was fired, after which the Jets defense absolutely cratered.
There's a long list of coordinators-turned-head-coaches who failed at the top job but returned to their coordinator position to find great success — look no further than the two Super Bowl defensive coordinators, Vic Fangio and Steve Spagnuolo.
Saleh inherits plenty of talent to work with, too. The 49ers defense wasn't quite as ruined by injuries as the offense, but it should still be much healthier next season.
Perennial DPOY candidate Nick Bosa missed three games, top corner Charvarius Ward missed five, and safety Talanoa Hufanga missed 10. Linebacker Dre Greenlaw was effectively out for the season after his devastating Super Bowl injury, and San Francisco's big move for DT Javon Hargrave resulted in just three games.
This defense ranked in the top five in DVOA each of the past three seasons before this one, even outranking the elite 49ers offense in two of those three seasons.
The 49ers are as Talented and as Good as Any Team in the NFC
Even in a totally lost season with injuries up and down both sides of the ball, the 49ers finished inside the top 10 in DVOA offensively and just outside of it on defense.
San Francisco also had bad turnover luck all season and poor luck in one-score games, finishing 2-6 in such contests. Flip the results in just those coin-flip games, and the 49ers finish 10-7, win the competitive NFC West, and make the playoffs — and maybe yet another NFC Championship Game.
The truth is the 49ers look an awful lot like next year's Eagles.
Philadelphia came into this season somewhat overlooked after stumbling from a 10-1 start to lose six of its final seven games. But the Eagles were never as bad as they looked down the stretch last year, and the core of this team was good enough to have played in the Super Bowl just one season prior.
It sounds a lot like San Francisco, and so does the return of a legendary defensive coordinator to whip the defense into shape, with a healthy Christian McCaffrey playing the role of MVP candidate Saquon Barkley.
A bounce-back season always made sense for these Eagles, and it does for the 49ers, too. With Shanahan at the helm, the healthy 49ers have consistently been as good as any team in the NFC season after season.
The 49ers are priced as the sixth Super Bowl favorite at most books. They're behind the Lions and Eagles, but after a sizable drop, about even in odds with the upstart Commanders.
At +1700, San Francisco is paying more than double a ticket on Detroit or Philadelphia right now when there's little reason to believe the 49ers shouldn't be just as good as both teams next season, if not better.
The 49ers fell off the radar this season, but they'll be back, and this ticket is priced far too long while San Francisco is out of sight, out of mind.
If history is any indication, the 49ers won't stay that way much longer.
I already grabbed a 49ers Super Bowl ticket at +2000 when the market opened a week ago, my first Super Bowl bet of the new season. There's still huge value on San Francisco at +1700 (BetRivers).
Much like Eagles +2200 a year ago at this time, that 49ers +1700 ticket won't be available much longer once the season gets moving and everyone remembers just how good this team is.
With any luck, our 49ers ticket will age just as beautifully as our Eagles one and give us yet another Kyle Shanahan team in the NFC Championship Game with plenty of options going forward.
