These thoughts and other similar connections have been out there, mentioned by several other writers and readers and randomly by me, over the last few years, and I just thought I’d write them down all together once and for all, and here it is…
* Summary No. 1: The current Warriors franchise–critiqued, analyzed, re-analyzed, endlessly used as both a shining example and a curse for modern sports–is something we’ve never seen before in North America…
But in the Bay Area there is one root reference…
That’d be the 49ers Dynasty of the 1980s into the mid-1990s, back before the social media explosion, of course, so the dimensions and dynamics are different, but that was a franchise with incredible star power, shrewd and passionate leadership, and peak entertainment value.
VERY QUICK CAVEAT: Of course, the 49ers won five Super Bowls from 1981-1994, and the Warriors, to this point, have only one in this era.
And yes, the 49ers Dynasty went undefeated in its trips to the championship round, while the Warriors just lost in the Finals last June (and are 1-1 in the Finals in this era).
(But in another way, you can compare the Warriors’ win-lose epic battles over the years with Cleveland to the 49ers’ win-lose epic struggles with the NY Giants/Dallas Cowboys, it’s just that the 49ers’ bitterest rivals were in their own conference and the current Warriors cannot face their main antagonist until the Finals.)
I’m not saying this is an exact duplicate. In many ways, there will never be another team like the DeBartolo/Walsh/Montana/Rice/Young/Lott/Haley/Seifert/Etc. 49ers, for the Bay Area or the sports universe.
They changed the way football is played and the way the Bay Area feels about sports, period.
You can’t duplicate that level for that long in that sport (moving fro Joe Montana to Steve Young, from Walsh to Seifert, dropping Jerry Rice into the offense a few years into the dynasty), it’s just impossible.
But in other ways this Warriors team–by breaking the single-season victories record, by then adding Kevin Durant, by being the perfect team to explore every byte and camera light of the Digital Explosion–is exploding into unprecedented territory every moment and absolutely determined to do so for a long period of time.
The only natural antecedent for this, in our lifetimes, in this area… is the Dynasty 49ers.
Those of us who grew up as the 49ers Dynasty was happening… that experience is just baked into our Bay Area existence. It’s why the 49ers remain the singularly most important franchise in the area, still.
But I believe that people who are growing up in this era, watching sports in this area, will have the Warriors’
enterprise burned into their sports existence, for decades, because of what is going on now, you can just feel it happening.
The Giants will always be big. Other teams in the area will rise and fall.
The Warriors, though, are the first team to move into the realm of the 49ers Dynasty and to share that kind of ultimate stage, and that’s going to change the landscape–is changing it–for decades, I think.
To get there, the Warriors have to keep winning, and add a few more titles, but they are set up for this and knowing their ownership and front-office mandate, I can’t see them ever easing up on this.
I’ve written elements of this several times before, including right after the Warriors signed Durant, when I noted that people very closely associated with the 49ers Dynasty see strong parallels between Joe Lacob and Eddie DeBartolo, Jr., and that’s no small thing coming from that group.
I also talked to Roger Craig and Randy Cross last spring about how this Warriors team compares to the great 1984 49ers team.
–Here’s the basic formula–with the Warriors this is the front-line of significant people:
Joe Lacob. Bob Myers. Steve Kerr. Jerry West. Stephen Curry. Kevin Durant. Draymond Green. Klay Thompson. Rick Welts. Andre Iguodala. Formerly Luke Walton. Mike Brown. Ron Adams.
What other local franchise has a list like that? (Certainly not the current 49ers, and I will get into that in a bit.)
No, the group that is most reminiscent of the current Warriors’ group is (over the 15-year period)…
Eddie DeBartolo, Jr. Bill Walsh. Joe Montana. Jerry Rice. Ronnie Lott. John McVay. Carmen Policy. Steve Young. Harris Barton. Randy Cross. Roger Craig. Brent Jones. George Seifert. Mike Holmgren.
* OK, to Summary No. 2: The current 49ers, now 1-5 this season and 6-16 since the firing of Jim Harbaugh, are fumbling and foolish in their own ways, but also are almost a perfect spiritual heir to the Warriors back when they horrible, made irrational decisions, and were run by Chris Cohan and Robert Rowell.
That Warriors era goes back to the mid-1990s and through 2010 (with a brief skip-over when Chris Mullin got it rolling right in 2007-2008), when they were sold to… Joe Lacob and Peter Guber.
Here’s an excerpt from that column I referred to earlier, when I was describing the Warriors from six years ago…
-When Lacob and Guber took over, no good player wanted to be part of this and the bad ones wanted to be overpaid to be a part of it.
Hmm.
Let’s take a look at where Jed York’s 49ers are now.
ESPN just listed the 49ers as the worst organization–out of 122 NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL franchises–in all of North American sports–and though you can quibble with the exact order, you have to agree that the 49ers are not anywhere near the top of any ranking like that.
The Yorks are very different from Cohan because they built Levi’s Stadium and are more profitable than Cohan could’ve ever been–which also means that they have a lot less incentive to sell the team, the way Cohan did when he thought $450M for the Warriors in 2010 was selling at the top of the market.
(It wasn’t near the top, though–yet another Cohan mistake.)
But the current 49ers live and breathe and lose just like the Cohan Warriors used to, and are just about as paranoid, self-destructive and incapable of normal social behavior within their headquarters and of course with outsiders.
They have to over-pay free agents to come here, they are not spending nearly to the salary-cap total, and they are recently having trouble attracting top assistant coaches or even the best head-coach candidates because this is not seen as a destination franchise for up-and-comers.
Remember, this used to be the franchise that minted coaching stars.
But this is exactly what happened with Cohan’s Warriors–the atmosphere corrupted, they had to over-pay free agents, they let talented young players go, and they couldn’t attract the top coaching minds because who wanted to be the next guy to be set up to fail?
The result: The old bad Warriors spent far more time trying to sell their product–and attack their enemies–than actually put together one that was worth watching.
The current 49ers are set up to fail, yes. Not financially, but on the field. And we are seeing the results every week.
It’s the smallness that connects these two franchises–the pettiness, the anger and the lack of self-awareness.
Jed York is like a mashed up combination of Cohan (money guy who can’t be found in times of trouble) and Rowell (ruthless corporate political player who runs off any potential threat to his power).
Why won’t the 49ers bring in a top football executive to help them steady things and why are they so loyal to Baalke? Because Jed York wouldn’t want somebody who would immediately tell him to leave the football operations alone and that everything he’s been doing has been wrong.
Also, Rowell’s campaign to eliminate Mullin in 2008-2009 was a precursor (in a much smaller way) for Jed York and Trent Baalke’s plot to undermine Harbaugh in 2014.
Harbaugh and Mullin had credibility beyond the walls of the team headquarters. York and Rowell couldn’t stand that. So Harbaugh and Mullin were thrown out.
By the way…
The 49ers’ record in Jim Harbaugh’s first 22 games as coach: 17-5.
The 49ers’ record in the 22 games since he was fired: 6-16.
The idea that the current 49ers situation seems to have a lot of similarities to the Warriors under Cohan and Rowell has been brought up by others, including this very well done piece by the Bay Area Sports Guy.
I’ve covered both situations very closely, and I can add…
The Cohan/Rowell Warriors habitually cherry-picked random events that can happen to all teams–say, the arrival of Monta Ellis or the acquisition of Larry Hughes or David Lee or the drafting of Mike Dunleavy Jr.–and trumpeted THOSE AND ONLY THOSE THINGS as obvious signs that greatness was right ahead.
And greatness never arrived, because Cohan and Rowell were lying to themselves and their fans about the actual significance of random basketball things, and because they never really had a deep desire to win, just to trick fans into buying their product.
The sales pitch: Just disregard all the losses piling up right now, and in the recent past, and tomorrow and the next tomorrow and the many tomorrows after that. Meaningless because it’s a Great Time Out!
The 49ers comparable: The Yorks installed Jim Tomsula as the interim coach to finish the 2010 season after firing Mike Singletary, and decided that the team’s victory under Tomsula in Game 16 proved that he would be a great coach.
They hired Harbaugh in January because York knew they needed a big name to jolt everybody and get the stadium effort fully engaged, and that they had to figure out who the QB was going to be, which was a Harbaugh specialty.
But once Harbaugh got them going, got the QB position secured, started battling with Baalke, and the Yorks got their stadium… the Yorks pulled out the Tomsula card.
They told themselves (lied to themselves) all along that Tomsula was a better coach than Harbaugh, not based on all of Harbaugh’s victories but just because Tomsula was nice to them, players liked him, and he had that 1-0 record that proved everything.
Oops.
The same kind of thing happened last season after the 49ers won in Chicago to go… 4-8… and the Yorks were hugging everybody in the locker room and Jed Tweeted “very fun win.”
They told themselves that victory proved everything. It didn’t.
The 49ers followed that with a despairing loss in Cleveland, hit the inevitable dead end, and the Yorks had to fire Tomsula.
Now they might be heading into a similar trap-door with the Chip Kelly tenure–the Yorks love keeping familiar lieutenants like Baalke (and like Cohan kept Rowell), and if the team loses, those lieutenants need to blame others, and for the Warriors that meant Mullin or whoever else was available.
It might be Kelly for the 49ers now, who knows. Or it might take a while longer.
But the 49ers are not set up for long periods of stability, and certainly not for sustained success, because they are a magnified mirror image of the Cohan Warriors, and it’s impossible not to notice.
