Dan Patrick calls out ESPN for ‘holding’ Kyle Shanahan car crash story: ‘This isn’t journalism’

The story of San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan getting into a severe car accident would have been fairly serious on its own, and it was only made more serious by the way the news of it emerged from ESPN.

Heading into 49ers training camp, the team released an announcement about the incident and Shanahan’s recovery, noting that he would be away from the team for the start of practices. Two minutes later, ESPN NFL insider Adam Schefter posted about it on social media, and the network published a web report with the news.

Count Dan Patrick among those who are confused about that sequence of events.

“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,” 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.”

Patrick then questioned whether San Francisco instructed Schefter and ESPN about how to handle the information, and even wondered aloud if the NFL’s stake in ESPN had anything to do with how the network covered the story.

“Why is ESPN holding the information?” Patrick asked. “If you’re in the news-gathering business, or at least you used to be, the NFL now owns 10 percent of ESPN, but did ESPN have the information and chose to sit on it? For 11 days? Did ESPN say to the Niners, ‘We won’t release it until you tell us to release it?’ Hmm. OK.”

“Why is ESPN holding the information? Why are the Niners?”

– DP on the Kyle Shanahan car accident reporting pic.twitter.com/F9bArW23wE

— Dan Patrick Show (@dpshow) July 27, 2026

Elsewhere on NBC Sports platforms, analyst Chris Simms revealed that he knew about the accident for several days before it became public. Simms and his father, fellow television commentator Phil Simms, are close with the Shanahan family. In a podcast conversation with cohost Mike Florio, Simms speculated whether Schefter’s relationship with the Shanahan family may have had something to do with ESPN withholding the story.

If nothing else, the timing of the reporting suggests that ESPN was closely communicating with San Francisco in advance of the release. The fact of such close contact between the team and the network leads to questions about why the 49ers did not want the story out when the accident first happened.

Patrick underscored the clear ethical breach that Schefter and ESPN seem to have participated in.

“This isn’t journalism. Not really reporting,” he said. “They’re giving you the information, and the acknowledgment of, ‘OK, now you can tell everybody.'”

Often, questionable situations like these lead sports fans to ask why it matters if the 49ers wanted a story delayed, or what the problem is with Schefter or ESPN cooperating. The answer here and almost always is to imagine what could come next. If it is OK for ESPN to withhold the basic news of the accident, would it be OK for them to withhold knowledge of foul play around the accident? By waiting, did ESPN give up a chance to see if there was more to the story? Certainly, keeping the information quiet made it harder for the rest of the media to pursue additional details.

The job of a company like the 49ers is to do exactly that: Protect its employees and control the narrative. The job of a news outlet like ESPN and a reporter like Schefter is to get the truth out as accurately and quickly as possible. As Patrick noted, they abdicated that responsibility here. We can all hope it amounts to nothing, but if there is any more smoke to the Shanahan story, ESPN’s handling of it will only look worse.

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