The Sports Xchange

Quarterbacks get the most money and coaches are the most frequent front men, but occasionally we get reminders that the most important person in any NFL franchise is the owner, and for this season’s object lesson we can thank the San Francisco 49ers.

After last season, the 49ers ran off a coach, Jim Harbaugh, who made the franchise relevant after it stunk for most of a decade, and guess what has happened? They stink again.

Yeah, Harbaugh was an egomaniacal jerk and a difficult employee for management. But the first two syllables of management are manage, and the owner failed to do that with the best coach the team had in nearly 20 years.

This has to be especially galling for San Francisco fans because the boss who put the team in this fine mess, Jed York, had not one, but two glaring examples right in front of his face in how to deal with a coach who was tough to manage, and he followed the wrong one.

York’s uncle, former 49ers’ owner Eddie DeBartolo, had a notoriously short fuse with coach Bill Walsh, who believed he was fired several times. But cooler heads always prevailed, Walsh kept coming to work, and the partnership created one of the NFL’s great, lasting dynasties that did not come crashing down until after winning five Super Bowls.

Because DeBartolo could always be convinced that Walsh was doing what was best for his franchise, they’ll soon be preparing a bust in Canton for DeBartolo, just as they did for Walsh. Jed York hasn’t heard from the sculptors yet and is not likely to any time soon.

Just across the Bay from San Francisco, Jon Gruden coaxed the Oakland Raiders back to relevance by convincing (forcing?) Al Davis to change some of his antiquated methods, especially regarding the team’s offensive strategies. In the early part of this century, Gruden produced a championship contender before Davis got rid of him because the owner did not like sharing the spotlight with his coach.

Gruden provided Davis, another Hall of Famer, with the only success Davis had in the last two decades of his life.

There’s another parallel, too.

Just as Walsh begat George Seifert, who coached two Super Bowl winners himself, Gruden begat Bill Callahan, who coached the Raiders into the Super Bowl the year after Gruden left — where the Raiders were destroyed, by a Tampa Bay team coached by Gruden. That was the 2002 season, and the Raiders have not had a winning season since then.

DeBartolo was smart enough to listen to the people around him who told him not to let Walsh go. Davis, on the other hand, had no one who could tell him not to dump Gruden, at least not anyone Davis would listen to.

York could have found a lot of people who would have told him it was a mistake to get rid of Harbaugh, but the young owner was more interested in flexing his muscle than ceding full control to a pain-in-the-rear coach like Harbaugh.

As a result, a 49ers team that had been among the best in the league for three years has lost its last two games, giving up the most points it has allowed in back-to-back games in 35 years. And with Green Bay paying a visit next Sunday, prospects are not good for an immediate turnaround.

San Francisco apologists can summon all sorts of excuses for cutting ties with Harbaugh, who produced a .695 winning percentage and one NFC championship in his four seasons, starting with the fact that he’s a jerk.

But while that’s a convenient excuse, it’s no reason to change coaches.

Further, it is important to reminder that it’s not just the head coach who got dispatched, but much of his staff, too.

When the 49ers dumped Harbaugh, they had the option of promoting defensive coordinator Vic Fangio instead of defensive line coach Jim Tomsula. Maybe Tomsula will turn out to be the next Vince Lombardi; three games is hardly enough to measure a career. But we know Fangio did a fantastic job with the 49ers’ defense and, when he did not get promoted, he moved to Chicago as the Bears’ defensive coordinator.

So … three weeks into the season, the 49ers rank 25th in the NFL on defense. The Bears, after playing Green Bay, Arizona and Seattle, arguably the NFC’s three best teams, rank 11th in the NFL on defense.

It wasn’t so long ago the 49ers were excited at the prospect of perhaps being the first team to play the Super Bowl in their home stadium. That will not happen, and now, the question is how many years it might be before the 49ers are even a legitimate contender again.

–Ira Miller is an award-winning sportswriter who has covered the National Football League for more than four decades and is a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame Selection Committee. He is a national columnist for The Sports Xchange.