Jim Tomsula ended his NFL head coaching career by trying to deflect the conversation away from his precarious parking space and toward the players who mostly failed to fail in Sunday’s final game of the season.
To Tomsula’s way of thinking, beating the equally inert St. Louis Rams in overtime, 19-16, was the topic of the day, even if he was the only one who thought so.
And as it turned out, he was the only one. He got taken out in a meeting barely two hours after his last win, and the San Francisco 49ers found its sacrificial lamb swiftly and surely.
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It shouldn’t have been the only one, of course, but in keeping with the team’s usual operating procedures, it was the easy one.
That is the lesson here – with John Edward York, the president in charge of accountability by proxy, motivation and mood are everything, and the necessary appearances clash with his loathing of the public eye. His stadium never causes him this much trouble, or shows him at his most awkward.
And that is the guiding principle here – what seems like the least painful alternative to the president.
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York, you see, is the guy who gets pulled over by the Highway Patrolman and says, “Don’t you know who I am?” and when the cop says, “Yeah, you’re the guy who blew up his own football team,” Jed responds, “No, that’s not me.”
But it is him, down to his socks, and Tomsula’s preordained fate notwithstanding, the spectacular disaster that is the San Francisco 49er Experience will burn on.
Not that Tomsula had anything else coming. His team was dull, dry, inconsistent, losing and most scandalous of all, defiantly unentertaining. They were a deadly chore to watch, bereft of talent and inspiration. Not unlike their superiors.
The 49ers are as they are because nobody in the present football hierarchy that begins with York is capable of proactive thinking. The York-Trent Baalke partnership has developed a seemingly limitless ability to react at the expense of proacting, and that company failing has presented York with this new conundrum – how the coach he is about to fire for being exactly who he is gets whacked while Baalke, who built this roster and is being charged with replacing that coach, survives, maybe even getting a contract extension for his trouble.
And the best part? Neither of them will be able to coherently explain what they are doing to the coaching candidates they engage, or to their alienated fan base, all the while hosting the first Super Bowl of the AARP Era. They are putting on a party and having to pop naked out of the cake at the same time. You couldn’t make up this kind of scenario with a room full of comedy writers and a central heating system force-feeding nitrous oxide through the ducts.
This isn’t the first time a Super Bowl host has grappled with a coaching change at the same time. Actually, it happens fairly often – Tomsula is the 13th coach to get the gate from an owner whose attentions are diverted by catering, security, traffic flow and pleasing his fellow owners come the big week. Among those 13, there are such notables as Buddy Ryan, Hank Stram, Jim Mora, Jon Gruden and Nick Saban.
In other words, it is what it is, the way it is. This is who the 49ers have been for most of the last 15 years.
It is pointless to list all the ways this monumental cock-up could have been avoided. Jed could have inherited less his father John’s ownership traits, like micromanagement, a tin ear, fear of the public eye and hypersensitivity. Jed could have told Baalke to handle Jim Harbaugh and avoided the personal irritations that caused him to put his own impatience ahead of the results, or hired someone to be the John McVay-style intermediary to both of them. He could have tried to better understand the market in which he operates, which would have meant developing relationships outside the business world in which he operates most comfortably.
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But Jed is who he is, a young man whose skills are those of the businessman who has deftly used the football team he inherited due to his grandfather’s generosity and his uncle’s recklessness to achieve his very business-y ends. The stadium is the cash cow that could not have happened without the football team, but the football team’s needs largely escape him. Indeed, if you remove the deeds of the two coaches who irritated them both (Steve Mariucci was John’s personal Harbaugh), father and son are 51-93 as football operators.
There is a clear message here, one which almost surely not be heard. York wants to win, be not fooled by the results or his seemingly diffident public response, but he places himself at the top of the organization’s needs too often.
He is most comforted by Baalke’s political cozying and the language of his financial people. Barring a crash course in the Bill Veeck books that provided the tutorial in being a public figure in sports, he will always be that guy, with all the operational shortcomings they provide.
In the meantime, Jim Tomsula is an ex-coach, with a 5-11 record and an unstylish approach to both game-day work and public speaking as the superficial reasons why he is merely the latest casualty in the York football management style.
Hologrammatic flailing.