Can the San Francisco 49ers get their franchise back on track?
The 49ers sure have dug themselves into a deep hole this year. Colin Kaepernick seems to be getting the brunt of the blame, but his poor play this season is truly the tip of the iceberg. Under the surface, you have one of the most dysfunctional organizations that have graced professional sports in recent years. To diagnose the problem, we first have to look at where this team was before the current major players in the front office arrived.
From 2002-2010 the 49ers recorded no winning seasons, one 8-8 year, and a record of 46-82 in that span. In 2011, Trent Baalke, who had been with the team since 2005, was named the general manager. His first big move was the hiring of Jim Harbaugh. Harbaugh brought with him Greg Roman and Vic Fangio, two guys who coached at Stanford with him, to operate as his coordinators. With the hype created, the new look 49ers were off and running. While Baalke gets the credit for bringing in names such as Michael Crabtree, Vernon Davis, Patrick Willis, Justin Smith and Joe Staley just to name a few, it was not until under Harbaugh’s leadership before we saw any of these players reach any sort of peak performance.
With those pieces in place, the 49ers moved from a 46-82 mess to a 36-11-1 unstoppable machine over night. Going from 6-10 to a run of three straight conference championships and a Super Bowl appearance clearly was not enough for Baalke, as well as his boss CEO Jed York, two guys who apparently have tasted misery and would like seconds.
After going 12-4, Harbaugh was the subject of trade rumors, and almost every major pundit said it was Super Bowl or bust. There was not even the idea that the Super Bowl could save Harbaugh’s job. With that seemed to be a demand to expand Kaepernick’s role, for him to throw more and to pick teams apart with his arm instead of a run first attack and a passing game which used misdirection and play action. It wasn’t Harbaughs’ style, nor was it Roman’s, to force a player to fit a system, but they tried. And they proved that they were right to run the old scheme. The system they ran for Kaepernick in the two previous years had them as the 11th ranked offense in scoring. In the year of change for Kaepernick the offense plummeted to 25th, and went from the fourth most efficient passing team in 2013 to 21st in 2014.
Kaepernick took a lot of heat, as he was just given a contract the summer before, but it was certainly a different offense. And for that Greg Roman took the majority of the blame, as he was cast aside with Harbaugh that year. We now look to Roman in Buffalo and we see a team where he is coaching two different quarterbacks, neither of whom have the athletic upside of Kaepernick, and a team with injury issues at all skill positions. He still has an offense that is ranked 12th in offensive efficiency. In Roman’s place, Geep Chryst comes in as a guy who has not been an offensive coordinator since 2000. In 2000 his offense ranked 29th in efficiency. In 2001 after he was fired the offense shot up to 17th. Roman was handicapped by forcing his quarterback to do things he never has, and he got his offense to 16th in efficiency. Chryst, with similar personnel, has the offense at second worst in the league. And you wonder how bad it would have been without Carlos Hyde pounding for 168 yards in week one.
Since that opening week, the 2015 49ers have been in free fall. When Harbaugh left, it was noted through rumors that this is what the players wanted. Since then, Patrick Willis, Anthony Davis, Justin Smith, and Chris Borland have retired, and Davis even hinted at coming back at a better time. Frank Gore, Michael Crabtree, and Mike Iupati did not want to re-sign, and Vernon Davis and Shareece Wright did not put in much of any effort for first year coach Jim Tomsula before their runs on the team ended during the season. For a move that was made for the players, the most talented players did not want it in any way.
In the end, it all comes back to York and Baalke. These are two guys who saw the ship at rock bottom, figured out how to dig it out, and then in one quick swoop buried themselves again. To right the ship, it will take a plethora of moves and potentially a few years of bad football in Santa Clara. Blaine Gabbert for Colin Kaepernick not only isn’t a fix, but it is more than likely going to make things worse. With neither quarterback fitting the front office’s idea of a future, the position will need to be addressed.
With an incompetent offensive coordinator, Chryst will have to go sooner rather than later. With a defensive coordinator who was a tight ends coach last year, being the guy responsible for taking the fifth most efficient unit and turning it into one of the league’s worst, you would assume he is nowhere near the answer.
For a head coach who has one year of head coaching experience (a 6-4 stint in NFL Europe) it is clear he’s way in over his head. The former defensive line coach is much better suited being just that. And while he is great at playing puppet to York and Baalke, and much less hard-headed than Harbaugh, the 49ers will not win enough with him leading the charge. The 49ers appear to be in a worse spot than when they started in 2010. To get things back on track they need a coach who can rebuild the franchise. They need a guy who can do it quick, and won’t need to turn over the entire roster. It will require coach who could turn a quarterback everyone is calling bust and take him to the playoffs. A breath of fresh air, maybe a college coach, who can bring his assistants and create a change in culture. The sad thing is, what the 49ers need to do is what got them in this place to begin with.
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