Kyle Shanahan And The 49ers Are Not Entitled To Anyone’s Trust

Well, that mystery has been solved. Kyle Shanahan was fishing around for his dropped phone while driving at 20 miles per hour when he crossed into the other lane and hit a car. There. Everyone satisfied? Great. Show yourselves out, and have a nice day.

Well, no. Of course not. Shanahan, the coach and chief architect of the San Francisco 49ers, has been and still remains off work for an extended period of time because of the accident that neither he nor the officials and general population of Palo Alto, Calif., thought was noteworthy enough to mention for 11 days. He has a concussion, broken ribs, a broken nose, 40 stitches across his face and nearly lost an eye from the deployed air bag, which among other things means that he cannot perform his very public and vital duties protecting the nation from the absence of one-thirty-second of football.

And, well, nobody’s required to buy any of that story, even Shanahan’s belated acknowledgement that he was the one at fault rather than the 21-year-old woman driving the other car. These are not times in which anyone is or necessarily should be trusted; lying is everywhere, and liars are both prevalent and prolific. The biggest reason nobody’s required to buy any of it is because of the 11 days when neither Shanahan, the 49ers, the Palo Alto police, nor TMZ’s sprawling army of camera sleuths felt it worthy of mention. In doing so, they violated the basic rule of information control—the less you provide, the less control you have, because gossip abhors a vacuum, and the public will fill in the details we need to have in order to understand it in whatever way best suits our personalities, preconceptions, and sick senses of humor.