There's plenty of familiarity as Kyle Shanahan, 49ers visit Broncos

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. – Kyle Shanahan’s memories of Colorado are probably fairly common for an NFL coach’s kid. He’d hear from schoolmates if the Broncos didn’t play well with his dad, Mike, at the helm. He’d wonder what analysis the newspapers would bring on Monday morning.

Oh, and there’s the big one, too.

“My best memory was my senior year of high school when they beat the Packers in the Super Bowl,” Shanahan told Denver-based reporters in a conference call this week. “That probably wasn’t just my best memory of Denver, that’s one of my favorite memories in life. That was an awesome, awesome day.”

Football is cyclical in so many ways and that will be felt pertinently when Kyle Shanahan brings his San Francisco team to Denver for a Sunday night matchup with the Broncos. It’s his first trip back to Denver as a head coach, though he downplayed the emotions attached to that, saying, “The biggest one for me ever, where I was probably more emotional than (Mike), was when he was at Washington and coming back here with him for that.”

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The current renditions of these teams, though, also have overlap. Under first-year head coach Nathaniel Hackett, the Broncos are hanging their hat on yet another offshoot of the Shanahan-Sean McVay offense, which is rooted in the system that Mike Shanahan popularized in Denver in the mid-1990s.

“You have something successful, whether it's defense, offense, special teams, everybody is going to study it,” said Hackett, who spent the past three years working under Green Bay Packers coach Matt LaFleur, himself having coached for Mike and Kyle Shanahan in Washington from 2010-13 and with Kyle again in Atlanta from 2015-16. “You’re doing everything you can to try and gain an advantage and see how people are doing things. It’s a credit to Kyle, it’s a credit to (longtime Mike Shanahan offensive line coach) Alex Gibbs, and Mike Shanahan a long time ago because that’s really where the foundation starts.

“Kyle is taking it to another level.”

Kyle Shanahan and Hackett never actually worked on the same staff, but they’ve worked with many of the same people. Shanahan said this week that, had his former passing game coordinator, Mike LaFleur, taken a job on the Packers staff when his brother Matt became the head coach, Hackett was among the people he would have considered as a replacement.

Now they face off against each other, with Hackett and company in the process of trying to put together an offensive system built on the same zone-based run game principles and then tailored to quarterback Russell Wilson’s strong suits. This is the way of the world in the NFL, though Shanahan wishes it wasn’t quite so.

“I wish not so many people did it, so it doesn’t make me that happy,” Shanahan said. “It’s not about other people doing it, I just hate defenses getting practice against it other weeks. I like it when they just have to deal with it our week and three days of practice. … That’s the only thing that’s changed to me these last few years because so may defenses see that week in and week out, so they’re just a little more used to it.”

Not only did the Broncos defense get extensive work against its offense during camp, but it also features three regulars who are former 49ers in defensive lineman D.J. Jones, inside linebacker Jonas Griffith and nickel K’Waun Williams. First-year defensive coordinator Ejiro Evero spent the past five seasons with the Los Angeles Rams and now is preparing for Shanahan’s offense for the 12th time in the past five-plus seasons.

For an interconference matchup, the familiarity level is very high.

Even still, there’s one element that San Francisco brings to the Mile High City that Hackett and the Broncos simply cannot replicate or burnish in a matter of weeks: Continuity of system and process.

In an interview this summer with USA TODAY Sports, Mike Shanahan said the process of truly mastering the outside zone system can take coaches and players years.

“No. 1, do they believe in it?” he said. “And if they believe in it, do you know what you’re talking about? If you believe in it, then you’ve got a chance to start with. If you believe in it, you’re going to run it and you’re not going to give up on it.”

The 49ers have seen turnover on their coaching staff like several others, but the ability to reload internally – in particular, defensive coordinator Demeco Ryans and offensive line coach Chris Foerster succeeding Robert Saleh and John Benton, respectively, when Saleh was hired by the Jets and took Benton with him after the 2020 season – makes a difference.

“Over the years, when you have familiarity with the same scheme and the same players are doing the same thing, they just really get to know it and they get to master it,” Evero said of San Francisco’s offense. “They’ve done a good job.”

That certainly helped last week when quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo was thrust back into action in the wake of a season-ending ankle injury to starter Trey Lance. Garoppolo has started 46 games in San Francisco since 2017 and won 36 of them.

Defensively, the linebacking trio of Fred Werner, Dre Greenlaw and Azeez Al-Shaair are entering their fourth season playing together for Ryans, who moved from linebackers coach to coordinator after the 2020 season.

“When those guys have been in the same system this long — any time you can have a group of players be within that, they get to play more, their athleticism, their ability starts showing even more,” Hackett said. “You see that with that group. Then you add in that they have played (against) Russell a lot, so they know that there are a lot of things that he does. That’s definitely an advantage for them, but it’s something that we know they have that advantage, so we have to try and reverse it back on them.

“They are a very good group.”

Hackett has spent the first weeks of his first regular season in charge learning that something about his decision-making process is not working and diving deep – including, he says, conversations with general manager George Paton and assistant GM Darren Mougey – to try to find quick fixes. The theme of the offseason was newness. New coach, new coordinators, new quarterback, new ownership group. That comes with lots of energy and buzz, but also kinks and roadblocks.

It may in time all work out in terrific fashion. On Sunday night, however, in a game featuring so many familiar faces, familial connections and schematic similarities, on the field the matter is one of whether newness can hold up against continuity.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 49ers' Kyle Shanahan will face a familiar system in visit to Broncos