49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan walks off the field after the San Francisco 49ers lost to the Seattle Seahawks 41-6 in the divisional round of the 2026 NFL Playoffs at Lumen Field in Seattle, Wash., on Saturday, Jan. 17, 2026.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan argues a call with a field official during the second quarter of the NFC Divisional Round playoff game between the San Francisco 49ers and Seattle Seahawks in Seattle, Wash. on Saturday, Jan. 17, 2026.
Scott Strazzante/S.F. Chronicle
SEATTLE — After the worst playoff loss of his head coaching career, Kyle Shanahan was businesslike.
In the past, when the San Francisco 49ers’ season abruptly ended, he’s come to the postgame podium emotional. Stunned. Hollow-eyed.
But not on Saturday. After the 41-6 thrashing, now the second worst playoff loss in 49ers history, Shanahan told his team how proud he was of them, then spoke to reporters in a matter of fact manner. The loss was, in so many ways, inevitable for a damaged and shorthanded team that had fought with heart all season.
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“We’re obviously real disappointed … we obviously didn’t have it today,” Shanahan said. “I just thanked them for the whole season, how much they battled through everything. They were sick about tonight.
“But I tried not to make it be about tonight.”
This was the earliest exit for Shanahan, who has made the NFC Championship Game every time his team has made the postseason, always winning two games. It was a historically bad loss, ranking only behind the infamous Massacre at the Meadowlands in January 1987, when Jim Burt sent Joe Montana to the hospital and the 49ers fell to the Giants, 49-3. Saturday’s loss surpasses another terrible postseason performance, when the 49ers lost 31-6 to Tampa in January 2003.
Both of those shellackings led to enormous, franchise-altering moves. In 2003, John York fired Steve Mariucci with no successor in mind and sent his team wandering in the wilderness for eight seasons. In 1987, Bill Walsh traded for Steve Young, creating a quarterback controversy that spurred Montana to new levels of greatness.
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No similar seachange is likely to take place in the coming months. Because, while what happened Saturday at Lumen Field was ugly and seemed a foregone conclusion 13 seconds into the game when Seattle returned the kickoff for a touchdown, this season was not a failure. To the contrary, it provided more optimism and excitement than expected.
The final game was the fated outcome of the 49ers season-long war of attrition, one that started deliberately in the spring with a purge of defensive veterans and continued all season as star player after star player was felled by the cruel business of football.
The shorthanded 49ers didn’t stand a chance against the team that had throttled them two weeks ago in the regular-season finale. The Seahawks will host the NFC Championship Game next Sunday and could — to Jed York’s horror — be lifting the Lombardi Trophy at Levi’s on Feb. 8.
But, as Shanahan noted, the main takeaway wasn’t the Lumen Field coda, but the arc of the entire season. The 49ers’ resilience resulted in 13 wins, a road win over the defending Super Bowl champs and dreams of a conference championship. But the wild ride was bound to end.
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“It’s nothing to hang your head over,” left tackle Trent Williams said. “Nobody even thought we would be here, let alone thought we would win this game. At the end, we were playing with house money.”
Williams was one of the veterans who thinks the future looks bright, largely because the young players got so much experience and grew so much this season.
Another area of growth? The head coach. This season, Shanahan became wiser, more intuitive, motivating and inspiring his players in many ways beyond the technical aspects of game day.
“Coach of the Year, in my opinion,” Williams said. “Y’all see what he does on game days. But what he does during the week, the message he conveys to the team every week, the way we prepare, the way he has guys bought into just giving their all, no matter what the scoreboard looks like. Guys just playing their butt off.
“A lot of that goes towards Kyle because he’s obviously the leader of this team. It all starts and stops with him. He definitely has done a great job.”
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At the end of last season, Shanahan asked his entire team to buy in, to show up to OTAs, to put aside contract disputes or personal agendas. And they did. He took his foot off the gas, and didn’t focus on making the playoffs but on incremental improvement. He encouraged his veterans to take on active leadership roles. He adjusted his coaching style from the normal Super Bowl or bust mentality to what the younger team that he had right now needed.
The result was enormous growth, a tight brotherhood and a bond that helped the team overcome the loss of key players.
“I’ve never been part of a program or a team that was so behind the eight ball and found a way to compete every week,” said Williams, a 16-year veteran.
This loss will sting. It will linger. It should. But it won’t be soul-crushing, like the overtime loss in the Super Bowl or the NFC Championship Game loss when Brock Purdy was injured, eliminating a team Shanahan believed could win it all. There won’t be a devastating hangover, no matter how historically lopsided the final score was.
“It’s a loss,” Shanahan said. “It’s very understandable to see how it got away. We’ll do that from a football standpoint — evaluate that throughout the offseason. It was a tough playoff loss, but you definitely don’t make more of it than it was.”
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The 49ers are optimistic that they will build on the spark that fueled them all season. They will get many of their injured players back — though not all — and they believe their Super Bowl window is still wide open.
That remains to be seen. The 49ers are an older team at several key positions. The injuries may be rehabilitated but they will still take their toll on bodies and longevity. And the competition within the division is definitely fiercer.
A message has been sent this January: The Seahawks are a team to be reckoned with not only in the past two weeks, but for the future. They are talented on both sides of the ball: ferocious on defense, effective on offense. They have drafted better than the 49ers. They have an excellent young coach. They play in one of the great atmospheres in the NFL. And they dealt the 49ers a historically humbling loss. The rivalry is definitely reignited.
The 49ers will be back. They collectively learned valuable lessons this season. That includes their coach who, despite the ugly ending, may have done his best coaching job yet.