- [Narrator] In January 2011, the San Francisco 49ers
were at rock bottom.
Across the prior eight seasons
they’d lost 82 games
and missed the playoffs each year.
Had a quarterback taken first overall
whose career looked to be beaten
and battered into oblivion.
But then, they won the Jim Harbaugh sweepstakes.
CEO Jed York and GM Trent Baalke
miraculously landed the hottest coaching commodity around.
And with Harbaugh captaining the Niners ship,
their days as an NFL bottom feeder looked to be over quick.
He brought quarterback Alex Smith's career
back from the dead,
with a passing attack that leaned heavily
on wideout Michael Crabtree
and tight end Vernon Davis.
The power run game Harbaugh installed
for tailback Frank Gore flourished
behind an offensive line of maulers
anchored by All-Pro left tackle Joe Staley.
But this was a team whose defense led the way
and set the tone, and that all started with a front
seven that oozed superstar talent.
Interior D-lineman Justin Smith was
the heartbeat of the team and its MVP.
The attention he demanded from opposing offenses
freed up not only Aldon Smith, their sensational
rookie pass-rusher, but also planet Earth's
top two inside linebackers, Patrick Willis
and electric first year starter NaVorro Bowman.
With Harbaugh pushing all the right buttons
they cruised through the regular season,
racking up 13 wins and clinching the NFC West title
plus a first round bye.
And though they won a thrilling back
and forth game for the ages on this last
second missile from Smith to Davis,
they also lost Ted Ginn to a knee injury in the game
and boy did they feel their return specialist's
absence the next week.
Facing the Giants in the NFC championship game,
the Niners had already rallied to overcome
one turnover by replacement return man
Kyle Williams and force overtime.
In the extra frame, the Niners forced a punt
that Williams fielded and again turned over,
enabling a chip shot field goal to
end their season in agonizing fashion.
When the next season rolled around,
Harbaugh led them to a 6-2 start
and had Alex Smith playing exceptional ball,
though a Week 10 concussion opened the door for
backup Colin Kaepernick to shine,
compelling Harbaugh to ride the hot hand and
stick with the youngster.
After again winning their division, Kaepernick
thoroughly dominated the Packers in his first
career playoff game, dissecting ‘em through
the air and running all over ‘em on the ground.
Highlighted by this 56-yard touchdown
that gave ‘em the lead for good on a night
where he rushed for the most yards by a quarterback
in any game in NFL history.
Then he went to Atlanta to win the NFC Championship Game,
earning a trip to New Orleans and Super Bowl 47.
After falling behind 28-6 against
a Ravens team coached by Harbaugh's brother,
the Niners rallied to cut the deficit to five
for their final possession, where they drove down
to the doorstep of the goal line and NFL immortality.
But on 4th-and-goal, Baltimore got quite
handsy with Crabtree and no flag
meant another year of brutal heartbreak.
Nevertheless, under the guidance of Harbaugh,
who, according to Hall of Famer John Madden,
had done the best coaching job in
the history of the NFL in year one,
the team was in magnificent shape.
They had an abundance of talent all overseen
by the khaki-wearing miracle worker
and nothing could get in their way.
Well, nothing but the pride and ego of Niner management.
In the 2012 NFL Draft that preceded that Super Bowl
run, Trent Baalke executed one of the most ghastly
draft classes imaginable, with the seven guys he picked
combining to play just 42 games for the team.
Punctuated by first round wideout A.J. Jenkins
who I will now show you every all-time pass
the Niners ever threw to him.
That's it.
And that hideous draft class is what sparked
the first real fissure in the Harbaugh-Baalke dynamic.
But they were still set up beautifully and
just had to take care of some offseason housekeeping
to keep the train rolling.
With Kaepernick now firmly entrenched as the team's
starting quarterback, they flipped Smith
to Kansas City for a couple 2nd-round picks,
while on the same day trading for grown
man wide receiver Anquan Boldin.
During the summer, Harbaugh and Jed York
held talks to extend his contract.
But York refused to cut the check necessary to get it done.
Clinging to the logic that he didn't want
to pay Harbaugh like a Super Bowl-winning coach,
because he hadn't won a Super Bowl.
And while that's technically accurate,
it's also pretty flawed logic.
I mean, had the officials properly flagged
Jimmy Smith at the end of Super Bowl 47,
with the Niners then winning,
would that somehow have made Harbaugh an
inherently better football coach?
So, he'd need to keep proving himself, no problem.
They again remained arguably the NFL's top team in 2013,
but with Seattle edging ‘em out for the division,
San Francisco got to take a lovely January
trip to Wisconsin featuring a wind chill
reaching double-digits below zero for Wild Card Weekend.
But the California-based team pulled it out,
and with a win the next week in Charlotte,
Harbaugh became the only coach in NFL history
to make the conference championship game
in each of his first three seasons.
During the following week’s de facto Super Bowl
in the Pacific Northwest, the Niners managed
to take a 2nd half lead on this absurd backyard-style
touchdown pass from Kaepernick to Anquan Boldin.
Their next possession ended with a punt,
but they should’ve kept the ball
when the refs failed to enforce what
clearly should’ve been a 15-yard penalty
and automatic first down.
- [Announcer] We see Lee get hit with that plant leg
and Mike Pereira, was that the proper call?
- [Mike] No, and I think Jim Harbaugh,
was making the point with
Gene Steratore — if you hit the plant leg
like they did here with the ankle turning over, that’s roughing
- [Narrator] In Seattle's ensuing drive that
shouldn't have happened in the first place,
they came up short on a 3rd down with
14:50 left to play.
In a lead with a 40-second play clock,
the discombobulated Seahawks were somehow able
to call a timeout 58 seconds later.
This wasn't some run-of-the-mill bad call.
It was an inexplicable administrative gaffe
that removed a delay of game penalty from the equation.
So on a drive that never should’ve existed,
on a 4th-and-7 that arguably
should’ve been 4th-and-12,
Seattle parlayed their serendipitous fortune
into scoring what was ultimately the game-winning touchdown.
This battle royale also provided the first huge domino
to fall in leading to San Francisco's demise
when midway through the 4th quarter,
NaVorro Bowman suffered this grisly
knee injury while ripping the ball away from the Seahawks
and clearly maintaining possession before getting
dogpiled with that shredded knee,
only to see the refs give the ball back to Seattle.
It took about a month for the next gut punch
when reports started emerging of the 49ers
having nearly completed a trade of Harbaugh to the Browns
before getting nixed at the 11th hour.
Now, Harbaugh can certainly be high maintenance
and his maniacal drive to win can be prone to rubbing
his superiors the wrong way, but that's how he thrived
and despite all the winning it produced,
York and Baalke apparently just preferred
to have a yes-man who never pushed back as coach.
The very next week, a report surfaced that Harbaugh
was losing the locker room.
It was the beginning of a year-long, drama filled
whisper campaign throughout 2014
with seemingly weekly leaks to the media by Jed York
and/or his minions, engineered to
try and make Harbaugh look bad.
And with their All-World linebacker sidelined
for the entire year after that horrific
knee injury in Seattle, the misery was just beginning.
Their very first game in brand new Levi’s stadium
saw them choke away a 13-point 4th quarter lead
against the awful Bears, when they let Jay Cutler
toss three touchdowns in a 7-minute span.
A month later, on the shitty Edward Jones Dome turf,
the other half of their inside linebacking
royalty succumbed to a toe injury and
underwent season-ending surgery.
Harbaugh somehow kept them afloat for awhile,
and they won 7 of their first 11 games.
But then things spiraled wildly out of control.
Starting with a Thanksgiving night embarrassment
against the Seahawks in a game so demoralizing
that York felt compelled to take to social
media to apologize for the product put forth on the field.
In the wake of that tweet, the Niners
fell to the 1-11 Raiders the next week,
dealing a near-fatal blow to their playoff hopes which
were shortly thereafter officially extinguished with a
Week 15 loss in Seattle.
Following that loss, management informed Harbaugh
that he would not be returning in 2015 and before the
season was out, he accepted an offer to return
to Ann Arbor and coach his alma mater.
Upon the conclusion of a distraction infested 8-8
season, York crafted a statement saying the two
sides were mutually parting ways, which was a lie.
York fired him.
Harbaugh himself would eventually confirm that
indeed he was told he wouldn't be the coach anymore,
and that the 49er hierarchy had left him.
And York issued that pink slip with no coherent plan
in place to replace him, as he and Baalke royally
bungled the coaching search.
They were on the verge of hiring Broncos offensive
coordinator Adam Gase, with an arrangement of him as
head coach and star incumbent D-coordinator
Vic Fangio remaining in place, but that deal blew up
at the last minute when management gave Gase an
ultimatum that D-line coach and longtime York favorite
Jim Tomsula had to be his defensive coordinator.
It didn't work. So they just made Tomsula the head coach.
Less than two months into his tenure,
utter disaster struck the organization
to kick off a period where key 49ers were
dropping off the roster like flies.
March 10th, 2015, 6-time All-Pro linebacker Patrick Willis
announces his retirement from the NFL at age 30,
citing chronic foot problems.
On the very same day, they watched the best back in
franchise history and one of the very best of all time depart
when Frank Gore signed with the Colts in free agency.
And for the cherry on top, savage run blocking
left guard Mike Iupati signed with the
the division rival Cardinals.
While Willis' stunning retirement was a monumental
blow from out of nowhere, the one silver lining
was the presence of promising youngster
Chris Borland who was coming off a tremendous
rookie season in which he led the league
in tackles over the 2nd half of the season
despite missing the final two games.
So, at inside linebacker, they were all set to
welcome back Bowman from his devastating knee injury,
and plug Borland into Willis' spot, until six days
later when the 24-year-old Borland also shockingly
said goodbye to football amid long-term concerns of the
repetitive head trauma inherent to his position.
Not a month later, they lost Crabtree when he ventured
across the bay to Oakland.
And in May, Justin Smith officially hung up
the cleats after 14 grueling years in the trenches.
How crucial was Smith to the Niners' excellence
of yesteryear?
Well, in 2012 the Niners played 19 regular
and postseason games.
In the first 13, San Francisco's D was
absolutely smothering.
Then he tore his triceps off the bone in Foxboro
in Week 15. He somehow returned to play in the
playoffs with a giant brace, but across their
final six games with Smith either sidelined
or playing with one arm, the defense totally
and completely fell apart.
Just a couple weeks later, their O-line took
another hit when right tackle Anthony Davis
announced that he, too, was walking away
from football at age 25.
And to cap the offseason from hell,
Aldon Smith was arrested for the 5th time
in his four years as a Niner when he was
charged with DUI, hit and run, and vandalism in August 2015.
As spectacular as his pass-rushing potential was, that was
the final straw and he was released just hours later.
Then it came time to play football.
With a coaching staff that was in completely over their
heads and Kaepernick playing through ailments
that would require not one, not two, but three surgeries,
they lost six of their first eight games
before more drastic change struck.
Vernon Davis, the only tight end in NFL
history with multiple seasons scoring at least
13 touchdowns, had now gone 19
straight games without finding the end zone
and was flipped to Denver the day after
the Niners got steamrolled in St. Louis in week eight.
Two days later, Tomsula officially announced
he was benching Kaepernick.
The keys to the offense were then handed to Blaine Gabbert,
a nice guy who tries his hardest, but happens to be a
remarkably incompetent NFL quarterback who
no one should want in the same time zone as their
team's city unless it's as an opponent.
Shockingly, he did not pull a rabbit out of the
hat over the second half of the season,
and down the stretch, even led the team
to a pitiful loss against Johnny honest-to-goodness Manziel.
Just a couple years removed from annual contention,
the team finished up a rotten 5-11 season
and were among the dregs of the league both offensively
and defensively, going nowhere fast.
York decided to take a half measure,
firing Tomsula after his lone, rancid season,
but keeping Baalke in charge of the football operation.
And with the current disastrous state of the franchise,
their options for a new coach were limited.
Baalke eventually settled on Chip Kelly,
the deposed former Eagles coach.
Kelly inherited a team with a quarterback situation
in complete flux.
Not only was Kaepernick recovering from operations
to his shoulder, thumb, and knee, but he was very nearly
traded to Denver, only to remain a Niner when
he refused the pay cut the Broncos wanted him to take.
With Kap unable to do much football work in the offseason,
Kelly opened the 2016 season by again trotting
Gabbert out as the Niners starting quarterback.
With the only reasonable explanation for his ongoing
presence on an NFL 53-man roster being
that he must know where all of the bodies are buried.
A Week 1 win over NFL punching bag, Jeff Fisher,
provided a false sense of competence before
everything immediately came apart at the seams.
They'd lose their next four games,
a stretch in which Bowman suffered another awful injury,
this time a ruptured Achilles’ that robbed
the defense of their leader, and punctuated by a loss
to the Drew Stanton-led Cardinals before
Chip mercifully yanked Blaine Gabbert from the lineup
and inserted Kaepernick.
But spearheaded by the league's worst defense,
the losses just wouldn't stop avalanching.
That vaunted run D from the Harbaugh era,
which didn't allow a single rushing TD for the
first 14 games of his tenure,
while in that time not allowing a single
back to crack even 65 rushing yards on ‘em,
was now replaced by a softer-than-tissue-paper
unit that hemorrhaged yardage.
Opposing backs feasted on the Bowmanless Niners
as they became the only team to ever allow a
100-yard rusher in seven straight games.
With the NFL having also caught up to Kelly's
unorthodox offensive principles,
it was all part of a franchise record 13-game
losing streak for the 49ers.
Despite that, one of the very few players
who did actually play relatively well was Kaepernick,
Literally an above average passer in 2016.
But throughout the season he took a knee every week
during the pregame National Anthem to protest
racial inequality and police brutality,
And for that, would become essentially blackballed
by the league's owners.
On January 1st, 2017, after ending their
repulsive season with loss number 14,
York fired his coach for the third year in a row,
this time finally sending Baalke packing alongside him.
The San Francisco 49ers under coach Harbaugh had
developed a blue collar identity that fought
like hell week in and week out,
did a whole lot of winning, and should have continued
to do a whole lot of winning.
However, they suffered through some excruciatingly tough
breaks, lost some aging foundational pieces,
and endured the departures of some extremely talented
players much earlier than anyone could have
foreseen for a variety of reasons.
But more than anything else, management just
couldn't resist trying to fix something
that was the furthest thing from broken.
Winning wasn't good enough, they just had to
win their way and get the credit for it, too.
And because of that, they ruined everything
and sent the organization rapidly spiraling
back to rock bottom.
Hey y'all, thanks so much for watching.
I gotta say, producing and re-living a video
on the collapse of a team I love with every
fiber of my being was just bunches of fun.
Anyway, don't forge to like, subscribe,
and click to watch more of our stuff.