Kurtenbach: The 49ers lucked out in landing Raheem Morris as defensive coordinator

They say it’s sometimes better to be lucky than good.

That’s nonsense. It is always better to be lucky than good.

And on Sunday, Kyle Shanahan and John Lynch got lucky. Again.

Raheem Morris is coming back to the Bay to be Shanahan’s defensive coordinator. It is a home-run hire, one that provides an immediate upgrade to the 49ers’ coaching staff and, perhaps more importantly, might finally jam up the revolving door at the DC position.

Morris is the fifth defensive coordinator in Santa Clara in five years. That is not a recipe for sustained success; it’s one for vertigo.

But while Morris is a two-time head coach in this league, the tea leaves suggest he won’t be getting a third bite at the apple anytime soon. He could very well become Shanahan’s Steve Spagnolo — the venerable Chiefs coordinator who has ridden shotgun with Andy Reid since 2019, racking up three Super Bowl rings while largely being ignored by the head-coaching carousel.

And if Morris is the 49ers’ Spags, the rest of the NFC West is in trouble.

And let’s be clear: This outcome was almost entirely accidental. It was only made possible because the Arizona Cardinals — the red-headed stepkids of the NFL — decided not to hire Morris for their head coaching vacancy, and because the rest of the league passed on giving Rams defensive coordinator Chris Shula a head coaching job, too.

If Shula had landed a top job, the word in league circles was that Rams coach Sean McVay had a standing offer for Morris to return to be DC in Los Angeles.

He didn’t. They didn’t. And those losses are the 49ers’ massive gain.

The connection here is obvious. Morris and Shanahan go way back. They were young assistants together in Tampa. They have history — Shanahan was even detained by police at the 2005 NFL Combine in Indianapolis for intervening when Morris was taken to the ground in an incident Shanahan perceived as racial profiling. (It was later deemed “mistaken identity,” and charges were dropped.)

The power of friendship wins again.

But this isn’t nepotism; it’s pragmatism. Morris is a foundational piece of the 49ers’ plan to replicate the Rams’ path with their young defensive roster.

Morris is a chameleon. He is not bound by dogma. When he arrived in Los Angeles, he intended to run a 3-4 front. He looked at his personnel, realized it wouldn’t work, and quickly pivoted to a light-box base 4-2. He adapts to his players, rather than forcing players to adapt to a spreadsheet.

That ability to recognize and maximize talent — specifically the young defenders they put around all-time great Aaron Donald — is what landed him the Atlanta head coaching gig before the 2024 season. In Atlanta, he shifted again, adopting an even, gap-splitting front with two high safeties.

Yes, that is exactly what the Niners want to run.

It’s what they certainly would have run if fate hadn’t intervened. The likeliest outcome before Sunday was the 49ers hiring former Jaguars head coach Gus Bradley — Robert Saleh’s right-hand man.

The difference between Bradley and Morris? To keep it simple: Morris tries stuff.

Bradley — who, to my knowledge, didn’t even interview for other coordinator jobs this cycle — is a relic. He once went an entire season in Indianapolis without running a single simulated pressure.

His philosophy of “bend but don’t break” is, effectively, to curl into the fetal position until the other team gets tired. A nicer way to say it is “rope-a-dope.”

But hiring him to run a defense in 2026 would have been a dopey move.

Morris, conversely, is modern. The Falcons, under Morris and former 49er Jeff Ulbrich, authored a stunning pass-rush turnaround in 2025. They posted a 35 percent pressure rate and the fourth-best sack percentage in the league. They didn’t do it with superior talent; they did it with six-man hot blitzes and coverage disguises that made quarterbacks see ghosts.

They brought it. Snap after snap.

That is how you play defense in the modern NFL. The rules are tilted so heavily toward the offense that sitting back and waiting for a mistake is suicide. To be static is to be exploited.

You have to put the offense on its back foot. You have to be the dictator, not the reactor.

Look around the league. The best defenses take the fight to the offense.

Mike Macdonald in Seattle does it by eliminating substitutions and using power and versatile chess pieces to negate the matchups Shanahan’s offense thrives on. Houston’s DeMeco Ryans doesn’t sub either, but attacks with more speed and violence. Brian Flores in Minnesota wins through pure chaos, crowding the line and daring the quarterback to guess wrong.

Morris doesn’t have one singular ideology like those men. But he has something arguably better: the willingness to steal what works and the teaching ability to install it.

What will he do in San Francisco? Maybe it’s more of the creative fronts Saleh wanted to run last year before injuries forced a simplification. Maybe it’s something entirely new.

But you can trust it will be active. It will be aggressive. And it will be exactly what the 49ers need to survive — and perhaps even thrive — in 2026.

Sometimes it’s better to be lucky. But if you’re lucky enough to hire Raheem Morris, you’ve got a pretty good chance of being good, too.