How beating the Giants in 2017 helped put 49ers on path to Super Bowl two seasons later

MIAMI — Jimmy Garoppolo still was relatively new to the 49ers in the middle of the 2017 season, so much so that he wasn’t even playing for them yet. He’d been acquired from the Patriots — a team that won a lot and usually showed very little emotion when it did. So when he walked into the locker room after a Week 10 victory, he was a little shocked by what he saw.

“It was different to me, I’m not gonna lie,” he said of the scene he beheld. “It seemed like a normal regular-season game and I can remember people throwing water in the locker room, boom boxes were going, everything.”

Said C.J. Beathard, the starting quarterback in that game: “It was like we had just won the Super Bowl.”

Now the 49ers are in position to actually win the Super Bowl. But the euphoria and joy and optimism that bubbled forth from the players and coaches in that 31-21 comeback victory over the Giants remains part of the team’s identity. It was the first tangible proof that they were heading in the right direction after starting the era with Kyle Shanahan as head coach and John Lynch as general manager with nine straight losses.

“We think about that a lot,” Shanahan said on Thursday. “It’s your first year as a head coach so you kind of want to get that monkey off your back, at least get one win. We had to wait until the middle of November, which is a lot longer than I anticipated. But it did feel like we won a Super Bowl after it.”

It was a miserable loss for the Giants, who made a cross-country journey to play a winless team and gave a deplorable effort. In many ways, it was the beginning of the end for coach Ben McAdoo. He still was a month away from benching Eli Manning and getting fired with four games to go, but that loss to the 49ers less than a year after the Giants had been a playoff team was Exhibit A in how dysfunctional and divided and lost the organization had become.

For the 49ers, though, it was the exact opposite. It was Chapter One of their Super Bowl LIV book, with the final paragraphs to be written on Sunday. 

Along with the oddity of the celebration, Garoppolo recalls how pure it was.

“It was real,” he said. “That was the first thing I saw from this team when I first got here was everyone was very honest and real and genuine. That’s where it all starts and that’s what makes us a good team.”

Back then they weren’t good, but there were signs of fight. They lost their first nine games, but they set an NFL record by losing five in a row by three or fewer points.

“That’s not something you’re proud of, but it means you’re a good 0-9, I guess,” Shanahan said, chuckling.

He recalled that the 49ers had a bye, then lost the game after the win over the Giants — “We probably did enjoy it a little too much” — but in Week 13, Garoppolo started and they beat the Bears. Then the Texans. Then the rest of their opponents, ending on a five-game winning streak and content in knowing that they had their quarterback of the future in place.

“There have been a number of teams that started 0-9, but no team had ever finished with more than three wins,” Shanahan said. “We were able to finish 6-10 that year. I learned that if you want to get people excited about a 6-10 year, just start 0-9.”

But if you want to get a team and an organization excited about a new direction, sometimes it takes just one win. For the 49ers, it came against the Giants.

Kicker Robbie Gould, who had enjoyed success with the Bears and Giants, was one of the veterans brought to the roster in 2017. He grasped what that day was about for his new team.

“You understood that there were brighter days ahead and that everything we were going through was going to be really meaningful down the road,” he said this week. “It was just a matter of staying the course, and all the guys did.”

All the way to Super Bowl LIV.

Notes & quotes: Shanahan said all 53 players on the roster — including Tevin Coleman, who was limited all week after dislocating his shoulder in the NFC title game — will be available Sunday. “Everyone is good,” Shanahan said, according to a pool report. “That was the goal.” He said Coleman is “good to go” and “confident.”

By Tom Rock

tom.rock@newsday.com@TomRock_Newsday

Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.