Chiefs-Niners Is One of the Super Bowl's Weirdest Rematches

Super Bowl LVIII may look a lot like Super Bowl LIV — but the cast of characters has changed a lot, too.

Thirteen years ago, I called the 2011 NBA Finals the “Strangest Rematch Ever” because, by then, both the Dallas Mavericks and Miami Heat were already quite different from the versions that had faced off in the Finals in 2006. Fast-forward to 2024, and we can say something similar about the upcoming Super Bowl LVIII between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers — itself a rematch of Super Bowl LIV from 2020.

In terms of headline names, Kansas City is still led by the likes of Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce and Chris Jones, with Fred Warner, Deebo Samuel, George Kittle and Nick Bosa doing the same for San Francisco. But plenty more impact players in this matchup were nowhere to be found back when these teams met on Super Sunday four years ago.

Think about the 49ers back in 2019. They were obviously a very good team then, as now. (Despite playing one fewer game, the 2019 Niners actually posted one more win than the 2023 version.) But they were quarterbacked by Jimmy Garoppolo, with Raheem Mostert leading the team in rushing. Meanwhile, Trent Williams was on the Washington Football Team. Brandon Aiyuk was a senior at Arizona State, and Brock Purdy was a sophomore at Iowa State.

Christian McCaffrey was leading the NFL in yards and touchdowns from scrimmage… but as a member of the Carolina Panthers. Coach Kyle Shanahan was still calling the shots in San Francisco, but many key members of his staff then — such as Robert Saleh, Mike McDaniel and DeMeco Ryans — have since left to become head coaches elsewhere. Just seven of the Niners’ 22 starters against the Detroit Lions on Sunday were in the starting lineup in that Super Bowl from four years ago.

To take an even more analytical view of things, just 26.8% of the 2023 49ers’ total Approximate Value (AV) this season was produced by players who were also on the roster in 2019. For context, the average for all Super Bowl teams ever is 38% of value from players on the team four seasons earlier — and while that number drops to 31% since the start of the free agency era, with more players moving around between teams, the average specifically for teams returning to a Super Bowl four years later is 46%. Only one team who made it back to another Super Bowl in that timeframe was led by fewer players from their original run than these Niners.

And of course, that team is the 2023 Chiefs. At a glance, this may seem odd: Mahomes and Kelce were and still are the faces of the franchise. Andy Reid is still one of the NFL’s most creative play-callers. How much really could have changed?

But this masks just how much Kansas City has evolved since that first Super Bowl run. While the 2019 Chiefs finished fifth in scoring with Mahomes leading the way in AV — and four of the team’s top five players were on offense, including WR Tyreek Hill and OT Mitchell Schwartz — this year’s team ranked just 15th in points. Mahomes was still among the team's AV leaders, but he had his worst year as a starter, and two of the team’s three leading players by AV were now defenders (Jones and CB Trent McDuffie). Amidst the Taylor Swift craze, Kelce had his fewest AV ever in a full season. Hill was leading the league in receiving yards, but doing it for the Miami Dolphins. Schwartz had long since retired, while DE Frank Clark and SS Tyrann Mathieu had moved on to other teams.

In a lot of ways, that’s the normal course of evolution for an elite team in today’s NFL. Players come and go; adaptation is key to remaining on top. If you study the table above, there is a clear temporal trend whereby older teams were able to return to the Super Bowl with more of the same talent. It says a lot about both the Chiefs’ and 49ers’ front offices and coaching staffs that they were able to make it back to the Big Game while swapping in and out such a large number of important pieces in such a short time.

But it also makes this notion of a championship rematch a little odd, at least compared with previous cases (even ones as recent as the 2011 Giants-Patriots matchup). A handful of very familiar faces will still be there for fans who tuned in four years ago. But most of the work in getting back to the Super Bowl was done by players on both teams who were somewhere other than Hard Rock Stadium on Feb. 2, 2020.

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Filed under: NFL, Super Bowl