Jed York swung for the fences again, only a year after he fired his last home run.
This time, the winner (pending developments) is Chip Kelly, canned by the Eagles after three tumultuous politically bloody years in Philadelphia, and after fully colonizing the state of Oregon. An offensive outlier, a guy who wants the grocery list, the cart and the wallet, and like Jim Harbaugh, a guy who can save York and Trent Baalke from further years of ignominy.
He is indeed the riskiest of available hires, and given the way things played out, perhaps he might have been their stone-cold second-choice lock after Hue Jackson all along. The five-year contract is proof of that.
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In hiring Kelly, though, York and Baalke also reversed everyone’s thinking on the doom of Colin Kaepernick. Presumably Kelly’s preferred offense will fit Kaepernick better than Harbaugh’s, and certainly Jim Tomsula’s, if you could call that an offense.
But the fact that Kelly, seemingly an odd fit, became the next 49er coach is an indication that York felt that same desperate twinge he did when Mike Singletary had reached the end of days. His team was in disarray, his name was being disparaged by land, sea and air, and running a football wasn’t very fun at all.
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Kelly is the outside-the-factory-where-the-boxes-are-made hire that we thought York had weaned himself off after his largely unpleasant experience with Harbaugh (and in fairness, Harbaugh’s largely unpleasant experiences with York).
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It also serves as a reminder to Baalke, whose contract expires before Kelly’s does, that he is the next one on the doomsday clock.
York has now established himself for all time as the kind of owner who prefers to take the big swing. Mike Nolan was safety, and it didn’t work. Singletary was radical thinking, and it worked for awhile, until Singletary’s utter lack of experience betrayed him. Harbaugh’s hire was inspired yet downright dangerous, given what we all knew of his tenures at Stanford and San Diego, and his general M.O. as a player. Tomsula was complete safety, and complete failure.
And Kelly? Back out on the thin end of the limb. It turns out, after all this time, that York the businessman has a little more of his uncle Eddie in him than he ever let on. Hell, Uncle Eddie wanted Mike Shanahan, which would been a monumentally conservative choice, an appeasement to those 49er fans who believe the good opld days must be repeated all the way down to the characters themselves. So Jed was more Wackiest Ship In The Army than even the notoriously reckless Ed.
Does this work out? Who knows? It has all the feel of damp dynamite, ready to go off at the slightest nudge. Kelly may come to San Francisco chastened from losing the political battle to owner Jeff Lurie and defrocked general manager Howie Roseman in Philadelphia, but York may have learned a lesson as well about the ratio between butting one’s head against drywall and going to conference championships.
Either way, 49er football has ended its safe phase and is now steering itself back into the high seas. This may be the glory days redux. It may also be a spectacular disaster for all involved. But it will be worth watching again after the entertainment-devoid Tomsula period, which honesty shouldn’t even be called that, since Tomsula was delivered a bad hand and told to play it by himself. He was used, at a cool cost of $14 million, or $24 million less than the shares of the two relocation fees he is going to get from the Rams and Chargers.
See? The owner always wins the pot in the end. But now we’ll see if doing Harbaugh again is going to be worth it to him emotionally. At least for the time being, the air space over Levi’s Stadium will be clear.