Laloosh":3kvmjgt8 said:
Hey Marv / Popeye, I don't know much about the timeline but I honestly don't understand how you can make the argument that it's not about money.
If it were about winning, they would have given Harbaugh the keys to the kingdom. Best stretch of football since your team in the 90's and aside from SEA, they were easily the class of the league with regard to how things went on the field.
I know you're trying to educate us on the particulars but as an onlooker I just get the impression that they knowingly torpedoed their own ship.
I think the assumption you're making here is that "winning" and "money" exist in a binary, and they don't.
All signs point to it being about things that were put OVER winning, none of which need be money. We can question the wisdom of putting these things over winning without mistcharacterizing them as money, I think.
Just to be clear, in what's to follow I'm not arguing that these types of things SHOULD HAVE been put over winning, merely that they WERE put over winning. Also worth considering that we need to put a disclaimer on that too, as if Harbaugh HAD continued to win last year -- he didn't -- we might not even be having this conversation.
Things to Know About Harbaugh:
1. Harbaugh is atypically not motivated by money. We know this because 1) he turned down more money from the Dolphins to come to the 9ers, 2) once there rather than angling to make himself one of the league's top paid coaches he angled to get his assistants to be the the top paid coaches and 3) he took the same salary from Michigan that he was getting from the 9ers rather than getting a pay raise from another NFL team., 4) he agreed to "part ways" with the 9ers rather than make them fire him, and gave up five million dollars by doing so.
2. Harbaugh, thoughout his coaching career, has been a difficult personality to work with, and on every stop he has been on the front office (be it athletic directors or GM/owners) have started out by trying to appease him by fulfilling his oddball requests, only to learn over time that doing so only increases the frequency of them. It's a major factor in why Stanford didn't try to retain him.
3. Harbaugh is more of an inspirational leader than he is a fundamentals guy. He leans very heavily on his assistant coaches for the details.
4. Going back to his college days Harbaugh has a long history of grating on some players when they don't perform his enthusiasm with him.
Things to Know About York and Baalke:
1. York, according to someone I spent a night talking to at a wedding who works in the 9ers FO, is a really smart guy, but simply isn't old enough or seasoned enough to run the whole operation. According to this guy If he wasn't the owner's kid and had to wait in line for another 20 years like anyone else would he'd be a great owner, but cutting in line probably isn't great for him in the long run. Basically he's reactionary and easily influenced because he's out of his depth. As such Baalke and Paraag Marathe have a lot of influence over him.
2. Baalke is almost as difficult of a personality as Harbaugh. He has very exacting standards, he doesn't bother with pleasantries and politeness, and he can be just as demanding. He's similar to Harbaugh. They were fast friends and then fast enemies.
Factors We Know Caused Some Dissolution in the Relationship
To be clear, this is all just stuff that's gotten out. It's "tip of the iceberg" stuff. It's stuff that's
indicative of what the problems were, meaning, to say "so you're saying the 49ers fired Harbuagh because of THAT?!?!?" is missing the point. Again, it's INDICATIVE of the problems, not the whole shebang.
1) When Harbaugh came to the 9ers he said he didn't like their practice field, and asked them to build him a new practice field. They did. Then he said he didn't like the scoreboard on the new practice field, and asked them to get him a new scoreboard for the practice field. They did. Then he decided he'd rather use the old practice field.
When this first happened York was just trying to make his new coach happy, because he didn't realize that this type of stuff is just day-to-day life of working with Harbaugh. As it was at Stanford, as soon as you give Harbaugh what he wants, he forgets you gave it to him, ignores it, and is right back to asking for new things.
2) It was the same story with player acquisition. Harbaugh would lobby incredibly hard for Baalke to draft players, and then when Baalke did, Harbaugh would instantly forget about it and not even bother playing them. Instead, he'd just go back to lobbying hard for new players. This is supposedly what happened with LaMichael James, and also what was supposedly happening with the never-ending carousel of back-up quarterbacks. Over time a belief grew that the 9ers were losing talent off the back end of their roster (e.g. BJ Daniels, Marcus Cooper) because Harbaugh would insist of having someone else who he would then promptly ignore.
3) Harbaugh just wouldn't play the game on the finer points of being part of an organization, which really grated on York over time. As two examples Levi's Stadium was built so that the high rollers could get an inside peak into the players coming out to the field (the high rollers are the one's really paying for things, it's just part of business), and Harbaugh decided he didn't want that to happen, so the space went unused. He also showed up late and wouldn't wear a suit to the stadium unveiling. Again, not big stuff in isolation, but it added up over time and grated on York.
4) It was believed that Harbaugh was loyal to his players to a fault, and over time Baalke and York grew tired of taking heat for it. After Aldon's DUI the agreement was that he'd be allowed to suit up but wouldn't play, but instead Harbaugh started him and played him the whole game.
5) Harbaugh would also regularly publicly lobby in the media for 9ers players to get paid more when their contract negotiations came up, which is fine, except it pissed off Baalke and York because they were the one's who actually had to do the negotiations and the agents would use Harbaugh's public declarations as leverage. They made Harbaugh aware of this and he just kept doing it anyway.
6) Over time the belief grew that Harbaugh is most skilled at turning teams around, rather than sustaining success. Folks began to believe that he was more of an inspirational cheerleader than someone who was detail oriented or could develop talent or innovate. This belief took hold in a myriad of ways:
A) There was a belief in the FO that Kaepernick had all the tools, but needed to develop the fundamentals (footwork, trajectory, progressions, etc.). Harbaugh on the other hand, is still a player at heart, and thinks that trying to teach a QB the fundamentals can mess up what they're already good at. He has always stated this publicly. This caused a big riff, and is why it shouldn't be any surprise that within a week or two of Harbaugh leaving for the first time in his career Kaepernick is spending the off-season with Kurt Warner working on footwork, trajectory, etc.
B) Over time Baalke grew frustrated with what he perceived Harbaugh's disinterest in developing young talent, as expressed with refusing to rotate in younger players, or even give them meaningful practice snaps.
C) Harbaugh's reliance on his coaches also raised questions, and over time the 9ers questioned the degree to which he could, like players, develop coaches. Simply paying his positional coaches more and more every year to keep them from leaving wasn't sustainable.
D) Over time the belief grew that Harbaugh couldn't really innovate in his coaching. His power-run based WCO -- really just a reboot of the earliest days of the WCO --was dominate when it first appeared in the NFL again in 2011, but over time teams adjusted, and Harbaugh didn't. Baalke and York over time began to believe that bringing back those old concepts was Harbaugh's only trick, and that as the rest of the NFL adjsuted to it, he couldn't adjust back.
7) Harbaugh's antics on the sidelines grated on York over time. From his vantage point Harbaugh's lack of attention to detail is also what was causing the team under Harbaugh's reign to unravel over time. In this York saw everything from all of the players' mounting legal troubles, to Harbaugh playing through this last year with the team spread out across two different locker rooms.
So, to be clear, this is just indicative of what York/Baalke THOUGHT the problems were, and what they, rightly or wrongly, valued over "winning." I'm not saying that's the right move, I'm just saying it's indicative of what was going on. Long story short there was a TON of stuff going on that can't just be reduced down to "money," which I really don't think played much of a role at all.
Also worth saying that they promoted Tomsula because in all of these ways he's kind of the anti-Harbaugh. As I've said repeatedly before, I think promoting Tomsula is a huge mistake, but that's what their thinking is.
TBH I'm also on the fence about what they SHOULD have done with Harbaugh. I think they were in a crappy situation, and I don't think either solution (keeping him or moving on from him) was really a great one. If it were me I'd probably keep trying to make it work, but I wouldn't feel to confident about the long-term feasibility of that strategy while doing so.
