Analyzing whether former San Francisco 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr. would have fired Kyle Shanahan by now.
Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:00 We often talk about the Bill Walsh era with the 49ers. It's the one of the greatest eras in any
00:06 sport and it defined this team and in the NFL in a lot of ways. And we compare Kyle Shanahan. Is he,
00:12 is it sort of like what they were doing in the 80s? Well, there was the George Seifert era too,
00:17 mostly in the 90s. And it was, it kind of gets glossed over, but it was extremely successful.
00:24 They won two Super Bowls, went to two, won both of them. I want to ask some questions about Seifert
00:29 for people who don't know him. And this, these questions come from Jesse Naylor,
00:32 co-host of Nine Inch After Dark on Wednesday, his idea. Thank you, Jesse.
00:36 What do you remember most about George Seifert? Okay.
00:41 He was very different from Bill Walsh. Bill had a very big personality. George was shy. He was
00:53 soft-spoken. He was really bright. He was a San Francisco kid. He's extremely superstitious.
01:03 Never stopped making up plays when he was defensive coordinator. I've told you that the
01:11 defensive coaches would hide on game day because he would try to talk them into doing new plays
01:18 that they hadn't even installed with the team. So he was hyper in that regard. I was told this story,
01:28 I can't verify that it's true, but I was told it by a good source. Holmgren was the offensive
01:35 coordinator under him and came to him with the offensive game plan one time. And George said,
01:43 do it over, I can beat that. That's what I was told. He was, and this is something about
01:52 the new generation of media and front office. If I was at the, you know, their headquarters,
02:03 like a Wednesday or whatever, and I wanted to talk to George at lunch. It wasn't now,
02:12 you had a production, like you're getting into the Pentagon. I would say to the PR person,
02:18 I know George is having lunch in his office now, would you call up there and see if I could
02:23 spend some time with him? Two minutes later, yeah, absolutely, I'll go up. I'd go up and there would
02:29 be no PR guy in the room. This was so wonderful. And by the way, I did this with Mariucci, Dennis
02:36 Erickson, and Bill Walsh all the time. Now you can't get near them. So I'd go into George's
02:41 office, he'd be sitting at his desk with a cup of noodles. Iggy used to kill me. Here's this,
02:47 you know, pretty wealthy coach of the Niners and he's having a cup of noodles, you know,
02:52 in the little styrofoam thing with, you know, with a fork, like a planting fork or something.
02:58 This was the coach of the 49ers and you could go in and he'd be both understood the ground rules.
03:04 We would talk, first of all, we'd have, how you doing? What's going on? Blah, blah, blah.
03:07 We would talk on the record, but then off the record. And he would tell me stuff.
03:12 They all would. You can't get that anymore. It's now it's all Adam Schefter, God love him.
03:19 But I got stuff sitting in the, with the cup of noodles. So what I felt about George was that he
03:26 was normal, decent, ethical, and one hell of a football coach. His record was 90 something in 30.
03:39 Yeah. He won two Super Bowls and killed the other teams, killed them. Yeah. So the reason I'm
03:46 bringing this up is like, again, we always compare Kyle to Bill. Like, is he on the Bill
03:50 Walsh trajectory? Well, no. Let's compare him to George Seifert. George Seifert coached his team
03:56 for eight seasons, won two Super Bowls and got fired. Kyle is entering his eighth season. He's
04:03 been to two Super Bowls, but one neither. So explain to maybe younger fans or people that
04:10 don't know, why did George Seifert get fired? Yeah. Iggy, his last season, he had a really
04:18 good record, right? 12 and four. Just 12 and four. I mean, they played 16 games. If you're too young
04:24 to remember that, he had a great record. But what happened is in the championship game, he got
04:30 beat two years in a row by Green Bay. So what happened was Eddie DeBartolo Jr., who was the
04:37 owner, who had the highest standards fired him. Yeah. It was the division around, it was a division
04:47 around two years in a row, but division around. Yeah. Yep. Sorry. Yep. They couldn't get past
04:52 Green Bay. It was Brett Favre. Yeah. Yeah. They couldn't get, get past Green Bay. And I mean,
04:59 and Green Bay was a great team with Holmgren, their guy, and they couldn't get past him.
05:04 And Eddie's attitude was, I'm not just in it to be in the playoffs. We're the New York Yankees.
05:11 We're expected, not we want to win. We expect to win and George can't do it anymore. Yeah. Thank
05:20 you, George, but you're out. And here's the thing. Eddie was very emotional and sometimes he, when he
05:30 was younger, he could have maybe acted better, but he was decisive. Now in this case, firing George
05:38 was a mistake because he followed him up with Mariucci, a very nice man, but who does not have
05:46 the football acumen of George or Bill Walsh or, or Harbaugh. So it was bad hire, but it was not
05:56 necessarily a bad fire. And, and, and when he fired him at, at it was Brian Murphy who broke
06:02 the news when he was at the press Democrat, God love Murph. And at the, at the press conference,
06:08 when he announced Eddie, that he was firing George and bringing in Mariucci,
06:14 someone, and I'm not sure who it was, it might've been Ira said, well, what's going to happen to
06:18 your offensive coordinator, Mark Trestman. And he said, Eddie waved his arm. He's gone. He's gone.
06:27 Right. Which was a very cold way to get rid of Trestman, who now is an advisor to, to, um,
06:35 Harbaugh at, at the chargers. And who's a very nice man and a good coordinator. But the point is
06:42 Eddie didn't mess around. So where are we going with this? Eddie already would have fired Kyle.
06:48 No question. Yeah. He, he fired Seifert a two time Superbowl winner and he would accept this,
06:56 this guy who twice got him in the Superbowl and gave up leads both times and didn't know the rule.
07:02 I didn't know the rules. Um, he would have fired him and what's more, I would have supported it.
07:08 Yeah. I'm not sure I supported firing George Seifert, but this absolutely I would afford it.
07:14 I would say, thank you so much for your service. You got us really to the highest level. Now we
07:20 need someone who's going to get us into the promised land. You can't come. Okay. I have
07:25 a question. So it's possible they put that Eddie pushed out Seifert at the right time. He wasn't
07:30 exactly great in Carolina. Um, they didn't hire the right guy to replace Seifert. He also may
07:36 have pushed out bill Walsh as well. Is it possible that he pushed out bill Walsh at the right time
07:43 and hired the right replacement and that the George Seifert era started exactly when it should
07:47 have? Yes. Um, here's what I think about bill. I'm loyal to bill, but I think remember he had
07:55 started older as a head coach. I think bill was there 10 years. I think he had lost the fire.
08:02 I think he was tired. I think he wasn't interested anymore. And I think Eddie and Carmen policy knew
08:12 it. And I think they did the right thing. And I think they did the right thing by hiring George,
08:17 the irony of the George hire. And when I say this, bill Walsh was a very complicated person,
08:24 more than I could ever understand. He encouraged this. I got from a coach on that team. He
08:32 encouraged, um, that the Eddie to hire Seifert, not necessarily as a vote of confidence for Seifert,
08:42 the one coach told me bill's feeling was Seifert wouldn't succeed. And bill would look, you see,
08:50 you got rid of me. I was irreplaceable. Bill had that kind of an ego. There were many wonderful
08:56 things about bill. And this was another side of him and maybe his, his competitive side,
09:03 George doing that well, surprised him. Well, think about it from bill's perspective. If
09:09 they push him out and replace him with home green, who's another offensive genius and home green
09:15 does better with the same players in the same team. Now you have to like rewrite bill's legacy
09:21 or it, it cements homegrown legacy. So replacing with a defensive coach protects bill. That's very
09:28 interesting, but I think it was interesting. Eddie had the right call. He essentially fired
09:33 bill Walsh at the right time and replace them with the right guy who was in bill Walsh's lineage.
09:40 Walsh coached him. Then they go ahead. Hold on. In addition, let's say fired parted ways. Bill
09:48 had just won the super bowl, right? Right. It's not like there was any years he had just won the
09:53 super bowl. Right, right. So they handled it, right. They didn't embarrass bill. They didn't
09:58 fire them. They parted ways and they replaced them with someone from his staff. They embarrassed
10:02 George, George Seaford. They fired him and they went in a totally different direction. And that
10:07 was to me an overreach. They had Pete Carroll as a defensive coordinator on their staff. He would
10:13 have been a better coach than Steve Mariucci, but they wanted to go a whole new direction that they
10:17 could start. And that was the downfall at the beginning. Yeah, I agree. They've never, at least
10:23 they had high standards. Yeah. Now I don't feel that Jed has the same fire in him that his uncle
10:33 did at the time. I think Jed is, is quite happy to be a runner up or a double runner up. I,
10:42 and I think that, that again explains when he met the media before the super bowl and bragged about
10:49 what it takes to be a champion. He doesn't know what it takes to be a champion and took his victory
10:54 lap when he really should have waited till after. Yep. See, it's interesting. He wants to be Eddie
11:01 so bad. Eddie was like Al Davis that, you know, Al Davis has, there's that torch burning of, of
11:07 that encapsulates Al. It would encapsulate Eddie. I mean, if it were Jed, it'd be a little candle
11:12 flickering. Sorry. And what I think his legacy that now that he's been the owner for almost 20
11:19 years, he's becoming much more like Jerry Jones and Jerry Jones isn't necessarily known for
11:28 winning. He's a promoter. He's like Vince McMahon. He gets, he generates discussion. He, he gets
11:34 attention. He, he talked, I mean, he's good for the, for the brand. He's good for the NFL. He
11:40 makes a lot of money. He just doesn't win championships. And I think that's sort of what
11:45 Jed's following. I do agree, except Jerry Jones is a lot more interesting than Jed.
11:52 Jerry Jones has a personality. Yeah. And you feel somehow that Jed's personality was stolen at birth.
12:01 Well, he was given so much before birth. Maybe that wasn't the one thing that he was, you know,
12:05 he had to work on his own and didn't get there.