49ers Insider Matt Maiocco on Odds Kyle Shanahan Misses WK1 after Concussion

Matt Maiocco sat in Kyle Shanahan's office on Tuesday, and the report he brought back to the show was careful, specific, and not entirely reassuring.

"He's getting better," Maiocco said. "He's still feeling the effects and his emotions are kind of all over the place, but physically, as he said, his plastic surgeon did one heck of a job stitching him back together."

The stitches are the easy part. The brain injury is not.

Maiocco described a slow, uneven return across the 49ers' first three practices. Day one, Shanahan was out there roughly 30 to 35 minutes, standing way back in the defensive secondary. Day two, a bit more. By the third day, he was out for the entire 11-on-11 period and easing back into watching film.

The detail that says the most about where he actually is: Shanahan told Maiocco the cranked-up practice music is the biggest thing he is dealing with right now.

"It's not just this steady progression from here to up there," Maiocco said. "It's kind of going about it like concussions tend to do, and everybody's different."

Which brings up the part nobody around the team can plan around. The 49ers open the season in Melbourne. They leave the Bay Area on September 2nd, and getting there means a 16 to 18 hour flight across the international date line.

John Lynch said at Saturday's press conference, a couple of hours after the team released its statement about the accident, that they expected Shanahan to be cleared well in advance of the game to resume full coaching duties. Maiocco is not dismissing that. He is also not pretending the questions are answered.

"I think that there is the possibility that he won't be all the way back," Maiocco said. "There's no timetable right now. I think they're still expecting him to be back, but I'm sure they have to make some contingencies." Whether Shanahan is best served on the sideline or in the booth once he lands is, in Maiocco's words, an unanswered question.

The contingency plan already has a shape. Chris Foerster, the assistant head coach and a longtime assistant to the Shanahans, is the front man. Kyle's instruction to him was refreshingly simple: do what you want to do and delegate what you don't want to do.

So Foerster pushed the team meetings out to the coordinators. Klay Kubiak handles the offensive players. Raheem Morris handles the defensive players. Maiocco expects that structure to carry into the preseason, with Kubiak calling offensive plays, Morris calling defensive plays, and Foerster overseeing and making the decisions.

That makes the three preseason games, starting with the opener on the 13th, more important than preseason games usually are. It is a live test of the chain of command in case the darn near unthinkable happens and Shanahan cannot go week one against the Rams.

The most human part of the conversation came last, when Rich asked how Shanahan looked. Maiocco said he looked good, still shaken up, and then told a story that is genuinely rare in this sport.

Reports pulled from a public database on Monday night suggested the other driver was at fault. Shanahan called in seven beat reporters specifically to correct that.

"Who in the NFL says that there were errors made in reporting, and I want to clear it up, I was the one at fault," Maiocco said. "And that's exactly what he did."

The official Palo Alto police report had Shanahan at fault. When the data moved to the public database, the fault landed in the wrong column, apparently a drop-down error. Shanahan wanted it on the record that the other driver, a woman in her early twenties, was not to blame.

His account of the accident was equally unsparing. His phone was on his lap, not in his hand. It fell between the seats. He reached down, was distracted for two seconds, and veered over the double yellow line.

"He says he has no qualms whatsoever about taking responsibility," Maiocco said. "He has nothing to hide."