George Kittle, longtime 49ers make good on Super Bowl promise: 'I will be back' (2024)

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — “I will be back here. I will be back here. And I will be back with motherf—ing vengeance.”

George Kittle said those words, captured by NFL Films, four years ago as the clock wound toward a defeat to the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIV. On Sunday, it was Kittle who grabbed an onside kick that essentially sealed a 34-31 comeback win that not only sends the San Francisco 49ers back to the Super Bowl but sets up a rematch with the Chiefs.

The 49ers are indeed back in the big game as Kittle promised, but whether they are arriving as an avenging force like he envisioned is another matter.

.@gkittle46 made a vow after losing the Super Bowl 4 years ago

Now he's back 💪 pic.twitter.com/phyJSifaDV

— NFL Films (@NFLFilms) January 29, 2024

The road to this year’s Super Bowl has been far different — and far more difficult — than it was in the 2019 postseason when the 49ers practically coasted to Hard Rock Stadium in Miami. That was especially true of the NFC Championship Game in which they jumped out to a 27-0 lead on the Green Bay Packers and rolled up 285 yards on the ground.

On Sunday, it was the 49ers who looked like they might get trampled.

They trailed 24-7 at halftime with Brock Purdy throwing a second-quarter interception while the defense, for the second straight game, got pushed around at the line of scrimmage and whiffed on tackles at the second level. The Detroit Lions had 148 rushing yards in the first half alone.

“It was embarrassing. We kind of felt helpless,” defensive end Nick Bosa said. “We didn’t want to go down as failures. And we know that our defense was way too good to play like that.”

Four years ago, Bosa was a rookie whose role was to be seen and not heard. On Sunday, he was one of the loud voices in the locker room. He said spent the first few minutes of the break lying on his stomach with a heat pack on his back “just screaming nonsense.”

Pressed for details, he said his message was that all it would take was a couple of small adjustments to stop the running game and to knock Lions quarterback Jared Goff, who was an efficient 13-of-20 for 145 through two quarters, off his mark.

That was the team-wide tone as the 49ers took the field for the second half — discontent, defiant and, according to coach Kyle Shanahan, “extremely pissed.” It was one thing to lose in the playoffs, he said, but another to get shoved around in their own building.

“We didn’t want to go out like that,” he said. “We’d dug ourselves in a big hole.”

Linebacker Fred Warner, who always gives a short, pump-up speech in the middle of the halftime locker room just before they retake the field, said his message on Sunday was that there wouldn’t be any rah-rah words this time.

“There was no time for any pep talks,” Warner recounted. “It was, ‘Offense, you’ve got to go out and score. Defense, we’ve got to get a stop. And if we don’t, we’re not going to Vegas.’”

After their Super Bowl loss to the Chiefs, Kittle and the 49ers thought they’d be able to bottle up the disappointment from their misfire in Miami the very next season. They called it their “revenge tour.”

“We’re gonna make another run,” defensive tackle DeForest Buckner said at the time. “We’ve got to go back to the drawing board, have a strong offseason and put in a lot of work, but we’ve got it in us.”

Buckner, however, would be traded to the Indianapolis Colts the next month, and as one season after another ended with setbacks, the 49ers’ roster steadily changed.

The current squad has a different quarterback and an entirely different offensive line. In addition to Kittle, the only two offensive players who likely will start both Super Bowls are Deebo Samuel and Kyle Juszczyk. On defense, the only holdovers are Bosa, Arik Armstead, Warner and Dre Greenlaw. Bosa, Samuel and Greenlaw were rookies that year and Bosa remembers thinking back then the 49ers probably would be in a lot of Super Bowls in the coming years.

The ensuing years debunked that notion.

One season ended with the team holed up in a Phoenix-area hotel due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Another came to a close with the 49ers unable to fight to the finish because they had run out of healthy quarterbacks.

Even this season, one in which the 49ers were as healthy, rested and seemingly as ready as they’ve ever been for a postseason run in the Shanahan era, was a struggle.

“You never realize how hard this stuff is, even when you’ve been through it,” said Juszczyk. “When you go through it again, it’s always such a shock. This league is so hard, these teams are so good.”

Bosa was asked whether securing the No. 1 seed on Dec. 31, one week before the regular-season finale, has worked against the 49ers to this point. While the 2019 team had to win three of their last four games down the stretch — including a dramatic, last-second victory in Seattle in the finale — to secure the top seed, the current squad essentially had a three-week hiatus before the playoffs began.

Bosa said he thought the issues began even before that, that the 49ers “weren’t playing our best ball” at the close of the season. He said the team got up for big matchups against the Dallas Cowboys and Philadelphia Eagles — both of them impressive blowout victories — but didn’t play at that level for other stretches.

“There were a lot of holes in what we were doing,” he said. “We weren’t executing great down the stretch. And I attribute it a lot to a long season. Stuff happens, you’re not going to play your best ball throughout a whole year.”

But he and other 49ers said that might be what makes this year’s squad better — or at least better prepared — than the one that faced the Chiefs four years ago. They had to fight in the fourth quarter to beat the Packers in the divisional round. And they had to come back from 17 points down to top the Lions on Sunday.

This year’s 49ers are learning how to struggle and survive in grimy games. And they certainly know what they need to work on over the next two weeks to avenge their Super loss to the Chiefs.

Kittle said the way the last two games have gone “throws some gas on the fire as far as the sense of urgency.”

Said Bosa: “I think these two games — we got through them and now we kind of understand what needs to be done.”

(Top photo: Ezra Shaw / Getty Images)

Matt Barrows is a senior writer for The Athletic covering the 49ers. He joined The Athletic in 2018 and has covered the 49ers since 2003. He was a reporter with The Sacramento Bee for 19 years, four of them as a Metro reporter. Before that he spent two years in South Carolina with The Hilton Head Island Packet. Follow Matt on Twitter @MattBarrows