LAS VEGAS — Lisa McCaffrey is nervous as Super Bowl LVIII approaches on Sunday.
“I’m trying to stay calm,” he said Monday over coffee in the lobby of a hotel on the Strip. “I’m trying to keep busy. “I’m trying not to think about it until kickoff.”
It’s a familiar feeling for McCaffrey. Her husband, Ed McCaffrey, won three titles as a wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers and Denver Broncos. And now his son, Christian McCaffrey, is set to play a central role when the 49ers face the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday.
“I’m probably even more nervous this time because it’s one of my kids,” she said. “But I was definitely stressed then too.”
That past was immortalized in magazine form 25 years ago, soon after Ed McCaffrey won his last Super Bowl with the Broncos in January 1999.
Denver had beaten the Atlanta Falcons. That’s when 2 1/2-year-old Christian McCaffrey, wearing Ed’s No. 87 jersey that was far too big for him, ran across layers of confetti on the Miami field to produce an image that Sports Illustrated would feature as one of his main photos in full circulation.
Her husband had won another championship, so the stress was gone. But Lisa suddenly found herself facing another worry as her young son weaved in and out of traffic on a crowded post-Super Bowl football field.
“I think I lost Christian at some point,” he said. “I remember being exasperated.”

Christian McCaffrey and his older brother Max run onto the Miami field following the Broncos’ Super Bowl victory in 1999. (Robert Beck/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)
The future NFL star was already a prodigious runner then.
“He started walking around seven months, which was unusually early,” Lisa McCaffrey said. “I know it sounds strange, you can’t believe me, but I swear it’s the truth. Ask your pediatrician about her. She was doing things that her mind wasn’t ready to do. It was like, ‘Please don’t hold on to the chandelier.’
“Christian’s brain was moving at a normal speed, but his body was moving faster.”

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He was also ready to play tackle football at an exceptionally young age, and one such game with his older brother, Max McCaffrey, and the children of several other players broke out on the Super Bowl field in Miami that night.
Christian McCaffrey says he was too young to remember that night, but Kyle Shanahan remembers postgame scenes from that era. The 49ers coach at the time was a college freshman and his father, Mike Shanahan, was the Broncos coach who had just helped Denver win back-to-back Super Bowl titles.
“I always loved Ed and knew he had a crazy group of kids,” Kyle Shanahan said. “They all played tackle football together outside of games and killed each other all the time.”
Two decades later, Ed and Christian McCaffrey have a chance to become the second father-son duo to win a Super Bowl as players on the same team, joining Steve and Zak DeOssie for the New York Giants. And the chance to do so left the young McCaffrey stunned by all the 49ers’ ties to the past.
“It’s surreal, man,” he said. “Not just with Kyle and Mike Shanahan. My dad played with (49ers QB coach) Brian Griese. He played with (49ers co-head coach) Anthony Lynn. Lots of connections to Kubiak. Bobby Turner was the running backs coach when my dad was in Denver.
“Even though I didn’t grow up in San Francisco, I feel at home. All the names that are in our building are the same names that I remember my father would say, and that’s just the next generation. “It’s really nice to be able to go to work with all those guys, knowing that we’re cut from the same cloth.”
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the current 49ers vividly remind the McCaffreys of the 1994 team that won the franchise’s last Super Bowl title.
After the New York Giants cut Ed McCaffrey in 1994, he signed with the all-star 49ers.
“That’s when I really learned what great culture is,” McCaffrey said Tuesday in Las Vegas. “We were welcomed by all members of the team.”
McCaffrey was unsure of his chances of making the 49ers roster. Center Bart Oates and his wife Michelle welcomed Ed, Lisa and their newborn son Max – the first of four McCaffrey children, born in May 1994 – into their home so that the young couple would not have to buy or rent a house in amidst all that uncertainty.

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McCaffrey ended up making the roster. He and Lisa experienced the journey of the entire season, from the opening loss to the Philadelphia Eagles to the monumental NFC Championship Game victory over the Dallas Cowboys at Super Bowl XXIX, to the 49ers’ blowout victory over the San Diego Chargers.
“I remember that team feeling like they were a family,” Lisa McCaffrey said. “Everyone liked each other. They were kind to each other. There were group dinners that included all the wives. Us too: And he was the low man on the totem pole behind Jerry Rice. He barely smelled the field, but they treated everyone really, really well, like they do now. “I had never been a part of an NFL team that was so warm, kind and open.”
That openness carried forward into the decades to come. Harris Barton, a fixture on the 49ers offensive line of that era, hosted many of those 1994 team dinners. Twenty years later, when Christian McCaffrey enrolled at Stanford, Barton and his wife Megan — who still live in Palo High – opened the doors for the next generation.
“When Christian got sick at Stanford, he would go there and they would take care of him,” Lisa McCaffrey said. “They really took him under their wing.”
Ed McCaffrey said, “From Steve Young down to every guy on the team, they welcomed us with open arms. It was a completely unselfish team where the guys competed against each other, but at the same time supported each other and pushed each other to be the best. There were such high standards and expectations for a player to perform well and live up to their standards.
“A lot of those players, even though I was only there for about seven months, are still dear friends. “It felt like we had been there for 10 years.”
McCaffrey would follow Mike Shanahan, the 49ers’ offensive coordinator, to Denver after Shanahan signed to become the head coach of the Broncos in 1995. The era that followed saw Christian McCaffrey enter the world. It also saw the most important developmental years of Kyle Shanahan’s career as a player.
The future 49ers coach, a high school wide receiver at the time, began to idolize Ed McCaffrey.
“Christian’s dad was my hero,” Shanahan said. “I cut my shoes like him. “I wore my shoulder pads like him.”
Shanahan said he even shook his head after making the catches in a manner that resembled McCaffrey. Even his jersey number in high school and college in Texas, 87, was a tribute to Ed.
“I didn’t know until he was older,” Ed McCaffrey said, laughing. “I am honored and flattered. If I had known that he was emulating me I would have behaved a little better”.

Ed McCaffrey won three Super Bowls as a player and his number 87 was later worn by Kyle Shanahan during his high school and college playing career. (Allen Kee/Getty Images)
Both Ed and Lisa McCaffrey were thrilled when the 49ers traded their son to the Carolina Panthers last season.
“We knew he was going to an incredible organization,” Lisa said. “There was a winning atmosphere that we knew many years ago. And you don’t have that on every winning team. “You don’t just do it.”
Christian McCaffrey, meanwhile, isn’t shy about expressing how much he’d love to share the Super Bowl title with his dad. He’s missing a win.

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“It would definitely be nice,” he said. “We were lucky enough to have a dad who won three Super Bowls, he was very successful, he played 13 years, but he also did it the right way and was a great father. He taught all of us how to play and do it the right way. “To be able to share that moment with him would be amazing.”
It’s a moment that even Kyle Shanahan would like to see. Like the McCaffreys, he has been part of the fabric of the 49ers for a long time. And so he knows what a Super Bowl win would mean, not just for the current team but also for the larger story of connection that underlies it all.
“It’s really special to think about it now and the history we have with all those things,” Shanahan said. “We came back and nothing has really changed.”
(Top photo: Cooper Neill/Getty Images and Robert Beck/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)