SANTA CLARA — Some 49ers players went more than a week without hearing about their head coach’s condition, and the man tasked with taking his place only learned the full scale of his responsibilities in the news release the team put out a day before training camp began.
The new details revealed Sunday underscored the secrecy and uncertainty surrounding the car crash that left Kyle Shanahan bleeding from the head, concussed and with multiple broken bones.
Niners coach Kyle Shanahan, shown in a file photo, visited players Sunday during practice. Getty Images
For the shockwaves the story sent through the NFL when the news broke Saturday morning, it was almost as stunning to league insiders that the 49ers were able to keep it under wraps for almost two weeks and make it public on their own terms.
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One NFL source said it was “crazy” that the news didn’t get out until the team issued a release moments before general manager John Lynch’s news conference to open camp. Another described the situation as “kind of sketchy.” While a third said it was “not unusual,” given that it occurred during a dead period of the offseason and didn’t involve any arrests.
Shanahan made a brief cameo at the 49ers’ first practice of training camp Sunday morning, 12 days after the accident, wearing a cast on his left hand but otherwise showing no signs of the collision that reportedly left him with two black eyes, a broken nose and multiple broken ribs.
He wore a black baseball cap, sunglasses and a thick mustache, and he didn’t emerge until after the period of practice that was open to cameras shooting photos and video.
“I told him he had a great disguise with the sunglasses on,” said linebacker Fred Warner, one of a handful of veterans to pass by the head coach during the 30 minutes or so he observed.
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Warner was among the first 49ers players to find out about the accident, via word from Shanahan’s wife, Mandy, who passed the news along to his wife, Sydney.
49ers linebacker Fred Warner said he learned about the accident from his wife, who heard from the coach’s wife. Getty Images
“Of course my first reaction was just trying to make sure everybody’s good, everybody’s OK,” Warner said. “Yeah, it was scary. Anytime you have a car accident, you just never know what the severity of it is. But luckily everyone seems to be on the up and up and doing well.”
Trent Williams was apparently not so in-the-loop. The longtime tackle and team captain said he found out by reading the ESPN story that was published one minute after the 49ers put out a statement announcing that the collision happened earlier this month.
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“I heard when everybody else heard,” he said. In some ways, he preferred it that way. “Instead of getting a call, like, ‘He’s in the hospital’ and having to worry and pray, reading the story, I could tell, I knew by reading it that he was OK.”
Still, Lynch was left to address the team and inform any players who remained in the dark when the group gathered Saturday for the first time since OTAs. While Shanahan appeared to be mostly physically recovered, the lingering effects of a severe concussion prevented him from speaking to his team or taking questions from the media, as a head coach normally would.
Those duties fell on assistant head coach and offensive line coach Chris Foerster, who admitted the teamwide speeches weren’t necessarily something that came naturally to him.
He said he was motivated to give a good one Sunday after Lynch called him “grumpy.”
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“I was challenged yesterday, so I got a little bit fired up,” Foerster said. “I told them how fired up I was to be a part of this team and how much I loved the way they practiced, the energy they bring every day and that there’s a lot to work on, and we’ll keep working.”
Before they took the field for the first time, Foerster split the team into offensive, defensive and special teams groups, allowing coordinators Klay Kubiak, Raheem Morris and Brant Boyer to speak to their respective players rather than the team as a whole.
Some 49ers players went more than a week without hearing about their head coach’s condition. Getty Images
That was a product of one piece of advice passed along to him from Shanahan, a head coach with whom he has spent more than a decade of his 30-plus years in the NFL.
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“Do what you want to do. If you don’t want to do it, delegate it,” Foerster recalled Shanahan telling him. “I delegated this morning’s team meeting.”
The biggest surprise came Saturday, when Foerster learned through the team’s statement that he would take the podium for the head coach’s news conference the following morning.
“I didn’t know this was going to happen as it has until the last couple days,” Foerster said. “When I saw my name, I said, ‘Oh, OK, it’s gonna be that.’
“But we always knew that. We were talking for days before. Klay, Kyle, Raheem, Boyer and I — we were all talking about how we could fill in the blanks if needed.”
The new details revealed Sunday underscored the secrecy and uncertainty surrounding the car crash that left Kyle Shanahan bleeding from the head, concussed and with multiple broken bones. AP Photo/Jeff Chiu
Internally, the 49ers believe they are such a well-oiled machine, with so much institutional knowledge accrued in 10 years under Shanahan and with a swath of long-tenured veteran players, that even a traumatic brain injury to their head coach won’t throw them off course.
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Williams and Foerster used the word “autopilot” to describe their current state.
“We’ve got a lot of vets, man,” Williams said. “We’ve got that locker room.”
Shanahan made a brief cameo at the 49ers’ first practice of training camp, 12 days after the accident. Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
The long-standing relationships inside the 49ers’ building, which has prided itself on stability under one of the three longest-tenured coaches in the league, also meant that it hit that much harder when they learned of the horrific injuries their head coach had suffered.
Foerster, who resigned from his last job after video surfaced of him appearing to snort cocaine before Shanahan gave him a second chance in San Francisco, felt the need to preface his answer with “I’m not gonna cry” when asked about his reaction to hearing of the crash.
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“There’s not many people that I call ‘friend,’ and for a lot of reasons, Kyle is one of them. He and his wife, Mandy, are like family to me,” Foerster said. “He’s a close, close friend, and it scares the crap out of you when something like this happens to somebody so close.”
Williams, despite his veteran status, was kept in the dark for another 11 days.
“I was surprised a little bit,” he said. “But seeing how jacked up he was, I don’t blame him for not picking up the phone and not sending out a mass alert, ‘Hey, I’ve been in a wreck.’ I appreciate him thinking about himself first and recovering before he told everybody.”
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