Jim Harbaugh will make his 49ers coaching debut against and old nemesis – Pete Carroll and the Seattle Seahawks.
The two NFC West rivals will open the season – pending the resolution of the NFL labor discord – Sept. 11 at Candlestick Park. Harbaugh and Carroll developed quite the college rivalry when the former was at Stanford and the latter at Southern Cal.
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While things remain warm and fuzzy in the Arizona desert for our World Series champions, the forecast has turned stormy on the offseason horizon for our can’t-get-a-break 49ers.
Without boring everybody about who’s right or what’s what in football labor speak, the consensus says the rest of this NFL offseason is going to be one wild scramble. And it appears like the 49ers wind up on the short end of the lockout stick.
When football resumes, teams in transition — like the 49ers are with new coach Jim Harbaugh — figure to be at a disadvantage.
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Brian Sabean, the man who helped build the Giants into champions, said San Francisco has become a baseball city. Unquestionably. Yet, it is no less a football city, as we were reminded the other evening.The 49ers came first, a Bay Area original in 1946. The 49ers won first, at least in San Francisco, as their Super Bowl victory in 1982 came after titles by the A’s and Raiders.
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It would be a cruel joke on San Francisco 49ers fans if NFL owners locked out players just as the 49ers appear to be getting their house in order.Newly appointed general manager Trent Baalke seems to be organizing the front office well.Baalke and his assistants can proceed much as they would in any year because their chief job now is preparing for the April draft, which involves college players who are not yet part of the NFL Players Association.
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If there is an NFL lockout this season, it probably won’t have the same effect as the 1994 baseball strike, says marketing expert Adam Hanft, president and CEO of Hanft Projects, whose clients include Time Warner, AOL, Viacom and AT&T Wireless.
“Baseball fans are different from football fans,” said Hanft in a telephone interview. “Baseball fans are into numbers and statistics, and a strike upsets them because it messes with the numbers. Football fans don’t care so much about the numbers. They just want to see the games.”
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Enough already about this Aaron Rodgers-Alex Smith-oh-what-could’ve been debate.
There’s just as good a chance the 49ers would’ve ruined Rodgers just like they’ve damaged Smith. Six years of offensive coordinator musical chairs. The pressure to win games the 49ers had no chance to win.
Who’s to say how it would have unfolded for Rodgers?
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If the 49ers want to become serious playoff contenders again, they’d do well to study the teams in the Super Bowl. For different reasons, they illustrate how organizations build champions.
With the Green Bay Packers, it was a combination of good decisions and courageous ones.
The first decision was to hire Mike McCarthy as coach. Packers general manager Ted Thompson liked the work McCarthy had done in helping develop top quarterbacks, including Brett Favre during a stint as the Packers’ QB coach, and made a good decision.
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When the Green Bay Packers take the field next Sunday for Super Bowl XLV, they will be the 10th different NFC team to play in the last 10 Super Bowls. The 49ers are not on that list.
In fact, for the franchise that owned football’s biggest game for a decade and a half a generation ago, it’s been 16 seasons since the 49ers last played on football’s grandest stage.
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It’s one of the most iconic photos in sports history: a bloodied, helmetless Y.A. Tittle kneeling dejectedly on the field at old Pitt Stadium after throwing an interception in a September, 1964 New York Giants loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers. Tittle, who suffered a concussion and a cracked sternum on the play but didn’t miss a game in what would be his last season, was so moved by the picture he put it on the back cover of his 2009 autobiography. True grit. You don’t quit.
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Forgive the fan of the 49ers who is skeptical.
It’s been so long since anything worked for this franchise that when anything appears to go right, a certain percentage of the faithful are looking for a banana peel.
In 2005, Mike Nolan rode in as the answer. He arrived with an impressive resume, heralded as one of the game’s most-highly regarded defensive coordinators. Sadly, Nolan slowly disintegrated into a quirky, questionable figure who raised eyebrows at every turn.
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