Firtst things first, thanks for the convo, Scott! :th2thumbs:
Scottemojo":l205t5ix said:
Popeye, one of the things that seems to be far different in Seattle than in SF is the player selection hierarchy. JS is Pete's employee, but Pete listened to him on Wilson after JS bombed on Whitehurst and Flynn stopped impressing Pete about 3 days after they signed him, which had to make JS look a bit silly too. Percy was Pete's mistake, but you will never hear JS hang that on Pete. Both have egos, but seem to keep them in check enough to move on from mistakes quickly. I can't imagine JS ever having one of the assistant coaches be a mole behind the back of Pete, yet it seems that Tomsula was just that for Baalke. That to me is just insane, yet it happened.
Agreed about Seattle, but I just absolutely don't believe that Tomsula was a "mole" on the inside. It 1) doesn't fit anything that has ever been said about Tomsula over the course of his career (and there has been a lot), 2) it doesn't make much sense (they're all in the same building, why would they need a mole?!?!), and 3) it requires the evil genius and raging idiot combination of characteristics that I never buy (York and Baalke are the evil geniuses by agreeing to a handshake deal with Adam Gase to keep people off the Tomsula scent, but also proven as idiots with no direction who are in over their heads as proven by backout out of the handshake deal).
Scottemojo":l205t5ix said:
Seattle fans went through years of the front office and coaches fighting over players, disputes over Holmgren having to use players he didn't want were well known under Ruskell. If I had to stick a pin in a reason why I think Baalke and Harbaugh were in decline, that would be it. Ego made them act stupid, Jim wanted his players, Ballke convinced Jim wasn't using HIS players correctly. Toxic.
Yeah, fully agreed on this one. This is what I think York was alluding to with wanting a "teacher"; there was an increasing annoyance about Harbaugh not playing draft picks or rotating them in (right or wrong), and an annoyance at increasingly paying Harbaugh's assistants each year (ending up in having the highest paid coaching staff in the league) rather than Harbaugh grooming coordinators and letting people go. There were also reports --even from Kawakami-- that Harbaugh was incredibly mercurial in his wants and needs (the backup quarterback carousel, wanting LaMichael James and then not playing him, etc.). We saw the same thing with Harbaugh's repeated insistence that you only mess up a QB's head by trying work on their mechanics, followed by Kaepernick dedicating the offseason to working on mechanics as soon as Harbaugh was gone (this might help, it might not, but the change in philosophy was clear).
Scottemojo":l205t5ix said:
The diminishing returns on Harbaugh's offense were true, part of that goes to a refusal by both player and coach to use Colin to the best of his running talents at a time when the premier back in SF was losing his juice. No adequate replacement for Gore really hangs on Baalke. He tried, LMJ, Lattimore, etc... But that offense has to be started by running, and it just wasn't reliable anymore. I don't think Harbaugh and Roman were comfortable with improv offense, which is what using Colin to his best requires, but how many coaches are? I also have to wonder if Baalke had something to do with those decisions, he didn't go get a front page receiving group just so his QB could run for 1000 yards. Speculation, sure, but maybe a bit of all those went into Colin trying to be something he isn't, a pure pocket QB.
If you listened to Harbaugh before last season and listen to York and Baalke now though it's pretty clear that the change in offensive philosophy came from Harbaugh, and that York and Baalke want to "get back" to the thing you're asking for. Harbaugh's formula was getting less effective (teams adjusted to it), and the change he instituted got away from what they did well.
As for the replacement for Gore, LMJ was Harbaugh's guy (listen to Harbaugh gushing about LMJ after the draft(), and Lattimore was definitely a classic Baalke pick (using a 4th round comp on an injured flyer) that ended up not working. Hyde is the replacement, though, although we don't know who to credit that to.
Scottemojo":l205t5ix said:
Harbaugh is far from a good coach in one area for sure. J. Martin should have never had a job in SF, Harbaugh wanted Marecic SO BAD, he clearly over values people he has worked with in the past that he knows buy into him as a coach. I have often said that Harbuagh was a better in game coach than Pete, but where Pete has shined is not letting Ego get in the way of success. His first offseason he picked up LenDale White but dropped his ass when Lendale acted entitled, skipped on Taylor Mays, and has a notable track record of NOT filling the Hawks with players he has coached in the past. He gave up on Percy when it threatened team chemistry, and IMO, was behind the campaign to extend Lynch this year, even though I am pretty sure he and Lynch are not really all that friendly. I'm not trying to shine Pete up, I really think that he has a cold hearted assassin quality when it comes to who he keeps or lets go, and his ability to put ego aside is part of that skill. That Compete stuff he spouts really does drive it all, it took me a couple of years to understand it wasn't a schtick. Making the team better within the constraints of the league really does drive all for Pete, and John, which is why they work so well together.
Absolutely agreed about both Harbaugh and Pete. Harbaugh is loyal to a fault (same story with Greg Roman; I believe the reports that Harbaugh was getting pressure to fire him), whereas Pete, to his credit, quickly rights mistakes and doesn't let loyalty override competition.
Scottemojo":l205t5ix said:
As far as your last post, no, York/Baalke did not tank the inaugural season. Not a chance. But they did so seeds of discord by being both leaky and transparent with their personal feelings about Harbaugh. Trust me, it isn't surprising, Harbaugh is an acidic man who could not get along with people and burned bridges even as a pro player. And when the writing was on the wall about the season, they got so transparent with the feelings about Harbaugh that it affected team effort. But having Tomsula in narc position all year really does make them look like underhanded sons a bitches and makes the formerly insufferable Harbaugh sympathetic. I mean, how big a douche do you have to be for Seattle fans to feel sorry for Harbaugh?
Disagree about Hawks fans. If York had fired Baalke and not Harbaugh Hawks fans would still be talking about how insufferable and awful Harbaugh is, the same way that Hawks fans would quickly switch from talking about how incompetent Kaepernick is to how idiotic the 9ers are for cutting or trading Kaepernick if they did so. It's just the way that fandom works. Remember that according to Hawks fans the 9ers were idiots for signing Ricardo Lockette (good measurables, but not a football player), until he went back to the Hawks and then he was a decent role player again until the end of the Super Bowl.
As for tanking the season, that was too strongly worded on my part, but you can't undermine the coach without undermining the team, and I just don't see how it was in their best interest to undermine their own team. They didn't need to. If they wanted to get rid of Harbaugh they could have just said that they couldn't agree to an extension (which was true!) and that rather than having him serve out a lameduck year they decided to move on. It's a much simpler story, and they don't have to be evil geniuse and idiots at the same time for it to be true.
As for the leaks, just to say it though, I personally think too much is being read into them entirely, but if there is a patient zero for them, I think Wickersham basically nailed it: Harbaugh has ALWAYS motivated with "us against the world" stuff. Wickersham and others basically suggested that it was Harbaugh who was doing it; the only rumor that reflects poorly on the 9ers that Kawakami never repeated or cooked up. And if Tim Kawakami actually did have a source inside the 9ers organization (I don't think he does, he's been doing the same schtick with the Raiders and Warriors for decades), you only have to look to who his guest was in his inaugural podcast: It was Jim Harbaugh. Everyone thought Harbaugh hated Kawakami, and as soon as Harbaugh was fired they were suddenly chummy. I still think Kawakami is doing what he has been doing since I was a kid in the 90s (just throwing stuff against the wall; remember that ALSO according to him a year ago Baalke and Harbaugh had patched up their relationship and the 9ers were going to win the Super Bowl), but I admit that I did raise an eye at that.
To be clear, I'm not trying to absolve York or Baalke in any of this, I just think they're deserving of shouldering SOME OF the blame rather than all of the blame.
To be honest, I think they have 1) poorly handled (that's important, and can't be discounted) 2) an unwinnable situation (which gets left out, IMO) and have also been suffering some bad luck that has been unfairly attributed to them (e.g. Willis and Borland retiring out of nowhere, and that the long standing plan to move on from Gore, Iupati, Crabtree and likely Justin Smith happened to end up happening while all this other stuff was happening). You can't discount #1, but I think ignoring #2 and #3 to pile on to #1 isn't accurate.