Too often a car crash involves collateral damage to other vehicles or bystanders. Yet the car crash involving San Francisco 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan generated a firestorm far from the Palo Alto street where he collided with an SUV on July 14.

Shanahan, 46, was immediately hospitalized. According to reports, he suffered a severe concussion, nearly lost an eye, needed more than 40 stitches in his face, and broke his nose, three ribs and a hand.

According to the Palo Alto police department, the other driver was uninjured, neither driver was impaired and no one was cited.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that authorities believe the head-on collision occurred after a 21-year-old woman made an unsafe turn while driving a Mercedes SUV in the opposite direction on a four-lane street in Palo Alto, records show.

Shanahan was holding and using a cellphone at the time of the crash but was not at fault, according to the California Crash Reporting System, a statewide database of collisions.

The accident wasn't made public until Saturday, when the 49ers opened training camp and Shanahan's absence was obvious. General manager John Lynch was left to address the media.

ESPN published a detailed report on the accident moments after the 49ers released a statement about it, leading to speculation that the network knew about the accident yet refrained from reporting about it until the information came from the 49ers.

The NFL holds a 10% equity stake in ESPN, valued at roughly $3 billion based on a $30 billion valuation. The deal was part of ESPN's purchase of NFL Network and other league digital assets that was finalized in January.

"It happened on July 14, so the Niners kept it quiet for 11 days. I don't know how they did this, or why they did this," former ESPN Sports Center host Dan Patrick said on his radio show Monday. "The Niners posted a statement regarding the accident at midnight Eastern on Saturday. Adam Schefter posted his first tweet on the situation one minute later. The ESPN article about the accident published one minute after that.

"This isn't journalism. Not really reporting. They're giving you the information, and the acknowledgment of, 'OK, now you can tell everybody.' "

Criticism also was directed at San Francisco Standard columnist Tim Kawakami, who posted on X shortly before Lynch's news conference, "I think there's going to be some news later this morning."

Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk wrote that "brokering a deal (either in exchange for more facts or because the team asks nicely) to hold publicly-available information until the team decides to disclose it isn't journalism. It's the antithesis of journalism."

Kawakami (who previously worked at the Los Angeles Times, the San Jose Mercury News and the Athletic) fired back, explaining that he didn't have enough information to report on the accident.

"Florio can attack me all he wants. He's trolling, which he does sometimes," he wrote. "I knew around Thursday that Shanahan wouldn't do the presser yesterday. I knew he likely wasn't going to be coaching at the start of camp. I could guess why. I didn't know exactly. CONSPIRACY! COMPLYING!"

After fielding a barrage of comments, Kawakami responded Monday night with another post: "Any reporter also realizes that even if you're told something will happen, it's never 100%. Something might change. If you don't know the cause, you can't know it 100%. Then you're guessing and you have no factual backup.... I like backup. I like reporting only what I know for sure."

Ironically, Chris Simms, Florio's podcast co-host and a close friend and former college teammate of the 49ers coach, provided details about Shanahan's injuries and his family's reaction.

"When you first see it, and it's fresh, and some of the cuts are still wide open, I mean, it's jarring — it's jarring," Simms said on "PFT Live." "He was this close to maybe losing his right eye, right? The scar is so big right here. So all that stuff was just crazy to see, and of course, I was thinking of my friend. But yeah, it's tough."

Simms added that he and his wife received texts and photos from Shanahan's wife, Mandy, informing him that "Kyle's been a part of some horrible accident."

Florio wrote that Simms did not tell him about the accident.

"I wouldn't have wanted to know about anything that couldn't be reported until the 49ers wanted it to be known, because I would have felt compelled to develop and share objectively important information as it relates to one of the short-list NFC Super Bowl contenders," Florio wrote.

Why did the 49ers keep the information quiet for 11 days? Florio was indignant that the accident didn't become public sooner, yet he defended Simms for not breaking the story. He said Simms did the right thing by not betraying his friendship with Shanahan.

"Were the reporters asleep at the switch or did they knowingly engage in some sort of deal with the 49ers to not release it?" Florio said. "The 49ers didn't want this out until the day it was time to go to training camp and it would have been obvious at that point, where's Kyle? They wanted to wait until then."

Lynch said the team anticipates Shanahan will be back well before the season opener Sept. 11 in Australia against the Rams.

"Kyle basically is going to be like in the protocol," Lynch said. "And we're going to let the doctors dictate how he comes back, when he comes back. He's been in the building, so we've seen him. It's kind of like we do with our players, a phased-back approach. Number one for Kyle and the Shanahan family is getting him back right."

©2026 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.