Kyle Shanahan has yet to achieve the ultimate goal with the 49ers, but his record with the team since 2019 has been nothing short of stellar.

He has led San Francisco to three NFC Championship Games, winning one and reaching the Super Bowl in the 2019 campaign, in the last four seasons.

In that time, he has compiled a 42-24 record, while seeing three former assistants go on to head coaching jobs, with Robert Saleh, Mike McDaniel and DeMeco Ryans all moving into the lead role with the Jets, Dolphins and Texans respectively.

Shanahan is a coach whose offense has proliferated around the NFL, while his astute defensive coordinator hires have provided the league with two head coaches.

It is somewhat curious, therefore, to see him eighth in ProFootballTalk's ranking of the top 10 head coaches for 2023.

The reasoning seems to center on the 49ers' missteps at the quarterback position since Shanahan and general manager John Lynch took over to lead a San Francisco rebuild in 2017.

In his writeup, Mike Florio criticized the decision not to scout Patrick Mahomes ahead of his first draft in 2017, apparently in an assumption of signing Kirk Cousins the following offseason. He then took aim at the trade later that year for Jimmy Garoppolo, whose durability issues prompted a move up the 2021 draft for Trey Lance that now looks questionable.

He wrote:

Shanahan became sufficiently exasperated by Garoppolo’s inability to be available that the team grossly overreacted, ultimately investing three first-round picks and a third-round pick in Trey Lance, who through two seasons has been a disappointment, and who could be the third-string option when the season rolls around. If Shanahan had either scouted (and selected) Mahomes or waited for Cousins, the 49ers quite possibly would have two or more additional Lombardi Trophies to go with their prior five. And Shanahan would be No. 1 on this list or damn close to it.

It is true that Shanahan and the 49ers have made mistakes when it comes to evaluating quarterbacks, and the decision not to pick Mahomes when they went into the 2017 draft with the second overall pick will forever stand as one of the biggest 'what ifs' in NFL history.

But it is debatable whether Shanahan deserves criticism for Garoppolo's injury misfortune. And, for as much as the 49ers' process in selecting quarterbacks is worthy of scrutiny, Shanahan also deserves success for getting the best out of the quarterbacks who have played for him with the Niners.

Under Shanahan's tutelage, Garoppolo went 38-17 as a starter, a record that is a testament to his quarterback-friendly offense, one in which seventh-round pick Brock Purdy was able to win five successive regular-season starts in 2022.

The inability to land a long-term franchise quarterback will be an area of frustration for Shanahan. However, if he is going to be marked down in a head coach ranking for that failure, he deserves to be marked up for his success in elevating the signal-callers he has coached. As such, a ranking of eight for a coach who has done as much winning as Shanahan over the last four seasons seems extremely low. 

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