Miami

The most important thing that happens when the San Francisco 49ers have the ball takes place before the play even begins. That’s the entire point of it. The 49ers do more before the snap than any other team in football. They flummox defenses before quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo even says “hike.”

The 49ers’ dash to this Super Bowl has, on its surface, seemed anachronistic because of how they play offense. That was especially true against the Green Bay Packers in the NFC Championship, when Garoppolo passed only eight times. In the modern NFL, that is the equivalent to driving 8 kilometers an hour on the Autobahn. They have a strange affinity for running the football, they lean heavily on their fullback and they play the game as if they’re from a time when there is still a gold rush in San Francisco.

But the 49ers are actually closer to reimagining football from a bygone era than they are to simply replicating it. Their 40-year-old coach, Kyle Shanahan, is an offensive wizard who has installed schemes and systems that take old-school concepts and transform them into completely new ones.

It’s what creates gaping holes for running back Raheem Mostert to burst through and why their pass catchers get so open. The clearest way to see how they do that is by watching their plays before those plays start, when their players move back and forth like a game of musical chairs in cleats.