I worry about the San Francisco 49ers this season.
Jim Harbaugh, who was not welcomed back by the 49ers and went to the University of Michigan after last season, pushed that San Francisco team hard. Here's what San Francisco guard Alex Boone had to say about it, on HBO's "Real Sports."
“He does a great job of giving you that spark, that initial boom,” Boone said, via Pro Football Talk. “But after a while, you just want to kick his (behind) ... He just keeps pushing you, and you’re like, ‘Dude, we got over the mountain. Stop. Let go.’ He kind of wore out his welcome.
“I think he just pushed guys too far," Boone said. "He wanted too much, demanded too much, expected too much. You know, ‘We gotta go out and do this. We gotta go out and do this. We gotta go out and do this.’ And you’d be like, ‘This guy might be clinically insane. He’s crazy. ... I think that if you’re stuck in your ways enough, eventually people are just going to say, ‘Listen, we just can’t work with this.'”
It's not a bad thing that Harbaugh was demanding. He came to a team that hadn't been to the playoffs in eight consecutive seasons. His first three seasons they made the NFC championship game, winning once. Was he a tough coach? I'm sure he was. You know what else Harbaugh was? Extremely successful. Boone knew this. He said so last September.
“So what’s the problem? I’m confused. Is winning not good? Is business not a’booming right now, boys?" Boone told 95.7 The Game last September, via CSN Bay Area, when asked about possible locker room issues with Harbaugh.
“As a matter of fact, I know for a fact that everybody loves Harbaugh,”
And no, the 49ers did not get "over the mountain," as Boone said. They got very, very close, losing a Super Bowl to the Baltimore Ravens when a fourth-down pass fell incomplete. That would probably drive a competitive person to push very hard, to actually get over the mountain.
Here's the problem I have with the 49ers going forward: They seem to value nice and easy working conditions over what Harbaugh brought to the facility every day. Why else would you get rid of a coach with a 44-19-1 record (again, eight seasons without a playoff appearance before he arrived)? Probably because they got sick of him being hard to work with. Harbaugh didn't deny any of that, to "Real Sports."
“It must be true, yeah,” Harbaugh said, via PFT. “Sometimes I’d wear out my welcome.
“They just don’t want to be around you after a while."
Jim Tomsula is in a no-win situation now. As the new coach, having just seen his old boss get run out for being too demanding, how hard do you think he'll be on the players? Not too much, if he's into self preservation. If you want to make the argument that NFL players, who are all grown men, don't need to be pushed hard that's fine. But then it's also a coincidence that things happened to turn around for the 49ers at the exact moment the hard-charging Harbaugh got there.
Tomsula feels like a substitute teacher for the 49ers. One of the 49ers' best players is saying the old coach was "clinically insane" for how he pushed them. It's a guarantee that life will be different around the 49ers now.
Without Harbaugh around, the 49ers are going to have a much calmer workplace environment. Whether that translates to more wins than they had with Harbaugh, well, maybe that doesn't matter as much to them.
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Frank Schwab is the editor of Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at shutdowncorner@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @YahooSchwab
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