Author Archives: Damian Garside

1. Has to come to making winning it his ultimate goal: giving up the fantasy of  being the ultimate playcalling genius. Getting his priorities straight mesns getting himself straight and psychologically balanced. You cannot say thst you wsnt to win the thing and then blow?leads and self-sabotage to ensure you don’t. Tje patterm is clear: KS must be a divided self and part oc him, the self-sabotaging part absolutely doesn’t wan’t the other half of this divided self to go and win it — for whatever reason (and therapy is wgere you go to find out what is going on, and cut a long story short, confront, negoti6arw with and integrate your shadow. This achieved, we are ready to go.

2. Ready to go: realize and in so dping transform your core philosophy about foorball: it is not an abstracf game like chess, it is all about match-ups and person-centred tactics and strategies. The Chiefs are a bad match up for the 49ers. The 49ers must become a bad match up for them. In chess every piece of the same type has the same powers. The queen is the equivalent to the quarterback. And so, a great quarterback is like the queen in a chessmatch being moved by Kasparov. But in a sense here though a Kasparov queen may make moves like Mahomes, the analogy is a bad  one for football: viewed the other way round Mahomes is liks a chess queen commanded by Kasparov, he is not like a chess queen commanded by Andy Reid or Kyle Shanahan or any heas coach you might like to consider. Mahomes is the basis of the comparison. A queen commanded by Kyle Shanahan in chess may not excite possible comparisons with any quarterback at all. Mahomes is not Andy Reid’s queen he is his own Gary Kasparov-style queen, able to pull of the exceptional. I don’t Kyle Shanahan haz realized this, he needs to do so. He sees the head coach as the Kasparov and the quarterback as just a quarterback, just a wooden piece on the board. Obviously this is a huge exaggeration, but there is some truth in this. Sadly, the truth is at a deep level. You can’t view a foitball field a chess board because of the human factor and all sorts of important factors and contexts. Every player in a particular position is different with different strengths and weaknesses — which have to be factored in amf takem account of. To say that there is so much time left and the odds are stacked against any quarterback making them to win ths game only makes sense when tgibkinv of the average, where you are not facing someone like Mahomes who can score points at willl when it is absolutely essential to do so. And this is something that is empirically proven: he has done it to the 49ers on a regular basis, if this is known and it is, by everybody, if should be factored in. Lastly, to point of the obvious, there is no overtime in chess. Imagine playing in a chess tournamemt when you move a pawn forward two squares from the second rank moving one of their pawns  that is level and adjacenf to yours after this move  (on their fifth rank, adjacent file) taking yours off the board and  positioning their piece on your third rank ( theit sixth ) right behind the piece they removed and you squeal out “what the Hell waa that?” only for the opponent and officials to realize you have no idea abput the existence of en passant. And some of the players in the roon laughimg incredulously when they suss out what is going on. Just like the Chiefs players werw laughing at the Niners when they realized they had no idea about the recent change in the playoff overtime rules.

This brings me to 3. Preparation and preparedness. These were shown to be horribly lacking and why would be surprised to find that this mess up translated into a surefire defeat. On the Grant Cohn You Tube Video feature his co-host, the Coach, said it beautifully: the fact that players and staff on the Niners side had no idea what was actually going on, rendered them “dead men walking”. Wickedly, in dawned on the two of them that a situation might have emerged in overtime whete the Niners believed that they had won the game and started celebrating crazily, only to be reminded of the rules and that a Niner victory  was not the case: leaving the millions watching confused and astonished, and creating an incident so deeply embarrassing for everybody connected with the franchise that it might never ever have been lived down.

What needs to be done is to work on plays that don’t just look good on paper, are like sweet chess moves making perfect mathematical sense, but work to defeat specific styles of play connected with specific opponents, more specifically those that have our number, and more specifically of all: Mahomes, Reid and the Kansas City Chiefs. We should devise tactics and strategies designed with them in mimd. It is pretty nuch receivec opinion thaf one of tge greatest tactical and strategic military victories in the whole of history happening very much against the odds, was achieved by Hannibsl against a much larger Roman army, which he was able to encircle and destroy. But he was able to do this because to him the Romans were an open book, they had conquered nuch of the world via their military strengths, but now Hannibal realized he had to risk everything to have any hopr of victory, let alome annihilating their entire army, and he would dupe them into   a trap by using their strengths against them in a kind of jujitsu. He new stolid conservative tactics would have been disastrous: as disastrous for Carthage as they have been for the Niners in two Super Bowls and a number of Conference title games.

When you think about it carefully it seems cobtrary to the whole idea of an offensibe gameplan and offensive mindedness to go conservative. Conservatism can easily be the opposite of effective and thought- through. What we need for and from Kyle Shanahan is for him to become more not less innovative and offensive genius minded as the games get more important, the key moments emerge in these games and the stakes get higher. The truth of the Niners critical  losses at the highest level are both that they failed to stop the other teams from scoring and they stopped scoring themselves. It’s the great adage that defence wins championships, but maybe not so easily when offences find themselves in a hole unable to put points on the board.