RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 5 sourcesCredit: PFT Live
Chris Simms carried a piece of information about one of his closest friends for the better part of two weeks, watching the news cycle every day without seeing it surface.
Simms revealed on Monday’s episode of PFT Live that he’d known about San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan’s car accident well before the story became public, a gap he placed at roughly 12 to 13 days. He and Shanahan played together at the University of Texas, and their friendship goes back decades and is presumably how Simms learned about the accident in the first place. Knowing what he knew, Simms said he found himself checking the news daily, half-expecting the story to break each time it didn’t.
“I was sitting there every day after it happened going, ‘Is the news going to break today? Is the news going to break today? Is the news going to break today?'” Simms said. “I certainly looked at my wife a few times in the last 12-13 days, and we looked at each other, ‘Huh, this is pretty amazing it still hasn’t come out.'”
Shanahan’s accident occurred July 14 and left him with a broken nose, three broken ribs, a broken hand, a severe concussion, and more than 40 stitches to his face after colliding with an SUV. The 49ers didn’t disclose it publicly for 11 days, with the news surfacing on the first day of training camp. The team’s statement went out at exactly 12:00 p.m. ET on a Saturday, and ESPN’s Adam Schefter posted his own report one minute later, at 12:01 p.m., with an ESPN article following at 12:02 p.m. Mike Florio, Simms’ PFT Live co-host, had already written a column for NBC Sports , arguing that timeline reflected coordinated messaging rather than independent reporting, calling it “the antithesis of journalism.”
Brokering a deal (either in exchange for more facts or because the team asks nicely) to hold publicly-available information until the team decides to disclose it isn’t journalism. It’s the antithesis of journalism.
Simms took a noticeably softer line than Florio, and rather than reaching for coordination or a cover-up, he pointed to two ordinary explanations: Shanahan’s reputation in the Bay Area, built over nearly a decade as head coach, and the practical reality of where the crash actually happened.
“I think between that and the goodwill he’s worked up there in the San Francisco area, and the fact that, of course, I believe he was coming from a chiropractic adjustment when this all happened, so he was close to the stadium,” Simms said. “As you know and we know, these organizations are tied into the police departments that are around the stadium and the facilities and all that. So, with all that, I’m with you. I’m surprised it took that long to come out as well, but at the same time I understood it, once I shared a few of those details that I just explained right there.”
Florio pushed back, arguing the delay reflected an organized effort involving ESPN specifically, one aimed at holding the story until the 49ers were ready to release it themselves ahead of camp. He noted that the NFL now owns a 10 percent stake in ESPN, meaning the 49ers hold an indirect fractional interest in the network that broke the news, and argued that beat reporters and local outlets covering the Palo Alto area should have surfaced the accident independently through public police and first-responder records.
“I don’t know what happened and and and how it got under the radar there,” Simms replied. “If you ask me, yeah, I would think people were asleep at the wheel because it was a slow time and people just weren’t paying attention to stuff like that.”
That still left the question of why ESPN specifically ended up with the story first. Simms pointed to Adam Schefter’s ties to the Shanahan family, which go back to Kyle’s father, Mike, whom Schefter co-authored books with during Mike Shanahan’s own coaching career. Simms argued that history put Schefter in essentially the same position he was in, someone whose personal access to the family made him more likely to hear things early, whether or not he acted on any of it before the team was ready.
“When you talk about ESPN and Adam Schefter, Adam Schefter is a friend of the Shanahan family. We know that. So it’s a little bit like the same category as me. I met Adam Schefter when I was 19 years old at the University of Texas, when I was with the Shanahan family.”
Simms made the same point about anyone embedded in NFL circles long enough, reporters and non-reporters alike. Coaches and executives keep talking to the people who prove they’ll sit on sensitive information, and over enough years around the league, that trade-off leaves everyone carrying things they know but can never actually say publicly.
“As a guy here that, yeah, I’m not a reporter or whatever, but I guess you could say I’m somewhat of an insider, and I practice in some of those things as well. I know a few things, right, but I can’t tell it, because then that coach will never talk to me ever again,” Simms said. “It is the delicate dance of knowing things and keeping your relationships within the NFL. And like I said, Adam Schefter, who is the ultimate insider, he’s got a relationship with Shanahan that goes way back. And I think when you couple that with some of the medical issues and how sensitive it was, I can understand it. But I, like you, am also shocked that it took, you know, 12 to 13 days for it to come out.”
Simms also offered a firsthand account of just how serious the injuries actually were, having seen photos directly from Shanahan’s own family in the immediate aftermath of the crash. He described getting a text from Shanahan’s wife the day of the accident with images attached, photos raw enough that the wounds were still fresh and visibly open, and said Shanahan came dangerously close to losing his right eye. Nearly two weeks later, Simms said the facial injuries had healed considerably, but the concussion Shanahan suffered was still lingering and continuing to ca...
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