Tom Krasovic: John Lynch’s 49ers look to finish the job next year

For a group of San Diego Swifties who attended the Super Bowl this month, their fondness for Taylor Swift did not extend to cheering for the pop star’s newly adopted NFL team and boyfriend Travis Kelce.

Taking precedence for the dozen-plus San Diegans was their membership in the San Francisco 49ers’ fan base known as The Faithful.

Easy decision, that.

“All of these family members, while Swifties, were there to support the 49ers,” reports John Lynch Sr., father of 49ers general manager John Lynch Jr., regarding the dozen-plus relatives’ Las Vegas football junket.

With Kelce catching nine passes from Patrick Mahomes as the largest audience in U.S. television history looked on, the Kansas City Chiefs snatched a 25-22 overtime victory that, along the way, had Swift biting her fingernails and Kelce raging at coach Andy Reid for holding him out of a few plays.

What next for the bummed-out Niners?

As any Swiftie would know, it’s best to shake it off.

The NFL offseason being his baby, those efforts will begin with Lynch.

“I hurt for everybody here,” Lynch said Tuesday while seated near coach Kyle Shanahan, “but the only thing I know how to do is pick yourself up, let it hurt for a while, use that as fuel and move forward.”

For the San Diego Swifties among The Faithful, it may be too soon to listen to “You Belong to Me” — radioactive because it could evoke Swift’s favorite team seizing Super Bowls 54 and 58 from Niners clubs that led each game by 10 points.

Lynch, 52, termed Chiefs’ recent bout of clutch playmaking “devastating.”

“A blow to the gut,” he added.

But as a Hall of Fame safety and Super Bowl champion himself, Lynch appreciated what the Chiefs pulled off.

“Hats off to the Chiefs, to Andy, to the organization,” said Lynch, a Torrey Pines High School graduate, “and they’ve got a pretty special guy at quarterback. He’s tough to beat.”

His main point: the current Niners group’s push for a sixth Super Bowl trophy ain’t dead yet, despite the throbbing pain.

“Ultimately we’re going to have to live for a lifetime with the reality that we didn’t get it done this time. But I say ‘this time’ because that’s this time,” Lynch said.

Oddsmakers like the 49ers’ chances of rebounding. San Francisco’s ’24 team stands as the Super Bowl favorite although just three clubs have won the Super Bowl one season after losing the big game.

It’s up to Lynch and Shanahan to extract useful truths from the Super Bowl 58 defeat.

What did the 75 minutes of football teach a Niners team that led 10-3 at halftime and held leads of 16-13, 19-16 and 22-19?

First on Lynch and Shahan’s list should be drilling into the Chiefs’ successes on several late-game plays involving a blitz.

Also: how did the Chiefs exploit 49ers star edge rusher Nick Bosa on a few late-game plays? And why in both Super Bowls did the Chiefs succeed on several high-leverage, triple-option plays directed by Mahomes — many of which he almost never ran during the season?

Lynch and Shanahan can balance their deep dive by reminding themselves that in every Super Bowl, outlier events will affect outcomes.

Take Super Bowl 58’s most comparable predecessor — San Francisco’s 20-16 victory in Super Bowl 23, a defeat for a Cincinnati Bengals club led by coach Sam Wyche and quarterback Boomer Esiason that surely stung as much Sunday’s loss pained the Niners.

Much like today’s Niners losing standout linebacker Dre Greenlaw to a first-half Achilles injury and seeing the Chiefs benefit, the ‘88 Bengals lost All-Pro nose-tackle Tim Krumrie to a first-quarter compound leg fracture and saw the Niners take advantage.

Where Mahomes got away with a fourth-quarter, up-the-middle floater that landed between a cluster of Niners defenders and a zip code away from any Chief, Niners great Joe Montana threw a pass to Bengals cornerback Lewis Billups only for Billups to drop it in the end zone.

Echoing the famed Bill Walsh-Montana offense, the famed Reid-Mahomes unit mustered only three first-half points. In fact, wrote Super Bowl historian Bob McGinn, the Niners’ offensive performance through nearly three quarters was so bad that Walsh couldn’t bring himself to watch the tape for more than a year.

But as if scripted by NFL Films, both Montana and Mahomes led their team to game-winning touchdown drives. For Montana, the 92-yard flourish — actually, the drive covered 102 yards — claimed his third ring and second against the Bengals. For Mahomes, the 75-yard march brought him his third ring and second against the Niners.

At 28, Mahomes is four years younger than Montana was when he vanquished the ’88 Bengals.

So, yeah, as Lynch said, the Chiefs’ QB rates as “pretty special” and “tough to beat.”

When Mahomes flavored Sunday’s winning drive with two rushes for critical yards and directed Reid’s chef’s-kiss of a final play that sprang receiver Mecole Hardman to gather Mahomes’ 3-yard touchdown pass off a triple-option threat, it was enough to send Lynch back to the drawing board.

“We have a saying: we call it W.I.T. — what it takes,” said the GM. “They’re not just words. They’re what we believe in.”

Lynch said the W.I.T. lesson from the first Super Bowl loss to the Chiefs was this:

“We need finishers in every area of our team,” he said.

“We’ve got a lot of those. “And it still wasn’t quite good enough.”

Perhaps boosting Lynch’s next round of W.I.T. efforts, the Chiefs may stand to lose All-Pro defensive lineman Chris Jones or star corner L’Jarius Sneed in March.

Both will command large contracts. Both excelled in Super Bowl 58 —especially Jones, who came up big late in Super Bowl 54, too.

For their part, the Niners’ reaching a fifth NFC championship in six years looms as a slog, given the recent gains made by the youthful Detroit Lions, Green Bay Packers and Los Angeles Rams.

But Lynch once again will have a surplus of draft picks, in addition to a good starting QB in Brock Purdy, 24, whose meager salary will enable ample spending on a star-laden roster.

Lynch didn’t ride a glide path from Solana Beach to a bronze bust in Canton.

He had to solve problems. Such as moving from quarterback to safety deep into his Stanford career, after Walsh showed him film of Ronnie Lott.

The next act in his football career may be his most interesting one yet. Twice denied the ultimate prize by a Chiefs franchise that showed it can play higher-level football when it’s most needed, the Hall of Fame safety and the offensive-minded head coach Shanahan — who’s 21 years younger than Reid, 65 — will try to finish off the journey.