S.F. Examiner: Things just keep going south for 49ers

By Art Spander
San Francisco Examiner

It has to do with saints, and that’s not the New Orleans franchise, but the ones after whom the two cities were named.

The 49ers were fine when they played in the city of St. Francis. Six appearances in the Super Bowl, five victories. Everything’s come apart since they moved to the city of St. Clare, even though she’s, yes, the patron saint of television.

Read the full story here.

© 2015 The San Francisco Examiner 

S.F. Examiner: Baseball bubble isolates from football foibles

By Art Spander
San Francisco Examiner

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz — We’re in a bubble down here, Sesame Street with Saguaro.

The Niners are coming unglued. Bruce Miller arrested? What next? Jim Harbaugh coaching third for the A’s?

Read the full story here.

© 2015 The San Francisco Examiner 

Harbaugh’s best was always appreciated

By Art Spander

SANTA CLARA — The announcement, lacking explanation, carrying no emotion, was delivered within moments of Jim Harbaugh’s last words to the media. The 49ers and Harbaugh had “agreed to mutually part ways.” 

Just like that? Not if you were tuned in, and the Bay Area, as well as Ann Arbor, where the man supposedly will take up residence, never tuned out.

The story, the agony, the questions, have been bubbling for weeks, printed in the dailies, carried on radio and TV, on Internet sites.

Harbaugh and the Niners were done when the season was done, we were told, and told again, and Sunday, with a 20-17 victory over the Arizona Cardinals, at last it was done.

Thus, after four seasons, most wildly successful, three trips to the NFC championship, one to a Super Bowl, so was Harbaugh as Niner coach.

We knew it was coming, knew it was inevitable, knew the people at the top didn’t like Harbaugh’s pushy, demanding style — although they did like the victories, of which appropriately there were a total of 49, including playoffs.

And yet in this world of social media and screaming headlines, where there are no secrets, Harbaugh and Niners management, meaning president Jed York and general manager Trent Baalke, attempted to hide it until the last second.

Then on the final day of the regular season of 2014, when it could no longer be ignored, the Niners delivered the news as they might have done about another empty seat at Levi’s Stadium.

Oh, by the way, kids, there will be a new coach next season. Thought you’d like to know.

Here’s the shame of all this: That on what most likely will be the final game for another memorable 49er, Frank Gore, who ran for 144 yards, giving him his eighth season of 1,000 or more and a career total of more than 11,000, the performance becomes a sidebar.

For the Niners, who came in at 8-8, the only non-winning reason of Harbaugh’s four, the main story is Harbaugh and the departure that was forecast for weeks.

Jim is a demanding guy. The way he’s turned teams into winners (at Stanford, he took over after a 1-11 season and, whoosh, coached the Cardinal to 12-1, leading to the Niner job), he can afford to be. But he gets to the egos of those who pay his bills, an independent cuss whose loyalty is to his players rather than the bosses.

When the Niners went to the Super Bowl two seasons back, facing the Baltimore Ravens, coached by brother John Harbaugh, Jim thumbed his nose at protocol. It’s tradition the Friday before the game that each coach shows up at media headquarters in coat and tie for a final press conference. John wore a suit. Jim wore the clothes he wears on the field, black sweatshirt, chinos.

Basically what Jim Harbaugh does is wear on others. Play a few bars of Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.”

Now it’s the highway. Or a private jet to Michigan, where he’s getting an offer worth millions to coach his alma mater. Of course, when Harbaugh became Stanford coach before the 2007 season, he said Michigan admitted “borderline guys” and steered athletes (student-athletes?) toward softer majors than the rest of the kids.

What he said Sunday standing at the podium in the stadium auditorium was he felt great with what he and the team accomplished during his short reign.

“I leave on good terms with Jed York,” said Harbaugh. While there were skeptics among us, York and Harbaugh embraced after Jim walked out of the locker room pregame.

Later, soaked by a Gatorade as a farewell gift from his players, Harbaugh left the turf carrying a game ball, handed to him by safety Craig Dahl, whose interception in the final moments locked up the win.

“It’s like the song ‘Time of My Life,’” said Harbaugh. “That’s what it’s been. The relationships remain along the way. That’s what a team is. As I’ve said all along, it’s been a tremendous four years, my pleasure to work with this organization, this football team.

“This win meant a lot. There have been a lot of great moments.”

Harbaugh thanked the fans — many of whom remained to give him a last hurrah — as well as the media, the team.

“These were signature years in my life.”

As, Frank Gore said, they were in his life.

“He’s a great coach,” Gore said of Harbaugh. “My best years were with him as a team. He was here, and we won. I just wish him the best. I know whatever team he goes to, whether it’s the NFL or college, he’s going to be fine. He’s going to get it done.”

The decision on Harbaugh and by Harbaugh has been made. The decision on Gore, a free agent, is pending. Does he also depart? “I wish we can get things worked out,” said Gore, who cried before the game started, considering past and future. “But I also know it’s a business.”

So does quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who in Harbaugh is losing not only the man who drafted him in 2011 after the two worked out, but the one who as a former NFL quarterback himself nurtured him.

“He has been a huge part,” said Kaepernick, “but I’m playing football nevertheless.

“He helped develop me, not only as a quarterback but as a person. He made sure you took care of your family and your teammates. But he sill pointed out what I needed to do to get better as a player.”

He’ll be advising some other quarterback now on some other team.

“You start something,” Harbaugh said about the grind this year, “you finish it. We battled. You do your best. People may look at it as not enough, but you do your best. If your best isn’t appreciated, then you do your best anyway.”

Jim Harbaugh’s best was always appreciated. If only for too brief a time with the 49ers.

Niners couldn't quell the noise, or the Chargers

By Art Spander

SANTA CLARA — This was the 49er year in microcosm. And in memoriam. A season that might have been unwound painfully in a game that should have been. And wasn’t.

After all the chaos, the rumors, the questions, the Niners had a chance to quell the noise, if only for a few days, and no less significantly end their losing streak.

That they could do neither seemed appropriate in their next to last game of a season that will climax for the first time since 2010 without a winning record.

And possibly, since they now are 7-8 and play one more, with a losing record.

The Niners lost Saturday night. Again. Lost on a 40-yard field goal by Nick Novak in overtime. Lost to the San Diego Chargers, 38-35. Lost after leading 21-0 in the second quarter and 35-21 in the fourth quarter.

Lost after setting a team rushing record of 355 yards. Lost when for the 15^th time in 15 games they failed to score a touchdown in the final regulation period. Or in overtime.

For a while, it seemed the Niners would have one last hurrah, a shout to echo through the dreadful silence of bewilderment, of wondering where Jim Harbaugh would be coaching, or asking why general manager Trent Baalke and team president Jed York couldn’t patch together the differences that in part turned a Super Bowl franchise into a supreme disappointment.

But a team that had a reason to win, the Chargers, chasing a playoff spot, found a way — or ways — to beat a team that already was eliminated from the postseason, had no particular reason. Except pride.

“We kept fighting,” said Harbaugh. “We did the best we could.”

There’s that one game left for the Niners, here at Levi’s Stadium, the $1.3 billion home for what evolved into a two-bit team, Sunday against Arizona.

After that Harbaugh, whose arrival in 2011 gave San Francisco the lift and the direction to become winners, will depart.

Where, to another NFL team — the Raiders? — or his alma mater, Michigan, only he knows. What everyone knows is the Niners have slipped from the their perch near the summit, and their fall could be a tumultuous one. 

Already below Seattle, they could drop below Arizona and St. Louis, an also-ran with aging linemen and a quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, apparently more qualified to use his legs than his arms.

Kaep rushed for 151 yards, including a spectacular 90-yard touchdown run, the second longest by a quarterback (to Terrelle Pryor’s 93-yarder) in NFL history. Frank Gore, 31, whose time is nearly finished in San Francisco, picked up 158. 

But for a fourth straight game, the Niners couldn’t pick up a win. Even after a great beginning.

“There’s no way to explain it,” said Bruce Miller, the Niners fullback.

To the contrary, there is.

The Niners, because of their numerous problems — only Wednesday, defensive lineman Ray McDonald was terminated because he was being investigated for sexual assault — their frequent injuries and their well-publicized dysfunction, were in survival mode from the start.

And they were unable to survive, whether the game Saturday night where the less-than-capacity crowd was less than effusive, or the full schedule. Losing to the one-win Raiders a couple of weeks back should have been the indication that the Niners were a mess.

Football is a sport of emotion as well as strength. People can say what they wish, but deep down a player must be driven. A bad break here, a tough call there, and everything comes apart. It did for the Niners Thursday night. And in other games.

Gore, who was returning after a concussion, had his finest game of the year. “There’s a man,” said Kaepernick of his main running back. Absolutely, 158 yards on 26 carries, highs for 2014.

Yet, the man wasn’t given a chance in so many other games. And now the end as a Niner is near.

The Niners' strength had been on defense. But NaVorro Bowman had a knee torn up in the NFC Championship a year ago and never played. Aldon Smith was suspended for legal troubles, including firearm violations. Patrick Willis missed the last month with turf toe. The strength became a weakness.

“I’m going to try and forget it,” defensive tackle Mike Purcell said when someone asked him if he would remember the game.

Niner fans will seek to do the same.

“We just didn’t finish,” said cornerback Parrish Cox. “We want to finish the season strong. But I don’t know what it is.”

Harbaugh may know, but he wasn’t talking.

“It doesn’t feel like there’s a lot to say right now,” he said after his penultimate game as coach.

Except, in a few days, goodbye.

Harbaugh: Somewhere, Bo’s up there smiling

By Art Spander

SAN FRANCISCO — Time had gone backwards, unlike the persistent runs of Frank Gore. There we were, back in the 20th century, the fans at Candlestick Park doing the wave — in this final year of the old stadium, anything is acceptable — the 49ers employing a pound-it-out, eat-up-the-clock offense.

A fourth-quarter drive that covered 89 yards and nine and a half minutes, old-fashioned but wonderfully effective, as 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh agreed.

The sort of drive, with eight straight runs in one sequence, that Harbaugh’s coach at Michigan, the late Bo Schembechler, would have loved.

“Yes,” said Harbaugh, “he would have. He would have loved it very much. Somewhere, he’s up there smiling.”

And then Harbaugh, already feeling good after the Niners on Sunday won their third in a row, defeating the Arizona Cardinals, 32-20, began to smile himself.

“It was a huge win,” he said gleefully. “Grinded some meat, playing tough, hard-nosed football, grinding out the running game.

“That was a line coming off the ball, and Frank was determined, and the whole unit, they were determined to move the football and keep the defense off the field that had played so well in that ballgame.”

The Niners ran for 149 yards against the sixth-best rushing defense in the NFL.

They were playing smack-you-in-the-chops football that made Schembechler and Woody Hayes winners in the old Big Ten, a style defined as three yards and a cloud of dust.

Harbaugh, sure, was a quarterback, at Palo Alto High, at Michigan, with the Chicago Bears and Indianapolis Colts. But he despises finesse football. It is his nature. It is his training.

"When I got my first coaching job at the University of San Diego, I called Bo Schembechler and told him,” Harbaugh has explained. “Before he said congratulations, he said, 'Jimmy, tell me you are going to have a tight end that puts his hand in that ground on every snap. Tell me that you are going to have a fullback that lines directly behind the quarterback, and a halfback in the I-formation.'

"'Yes, coach, we will have that.' 'Good, congratulations on getting your job.'"

Now, with the Niners, Harbaugh also has a quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, who can run (18 yards on four carries) as well as throw (16 completions for 252 yards and two touchdowns).

He has a tight end, Vernon Davis, who doesn’t necessarily put his hand in the dirt on every snap but certainly puts his hands around the ball (eight catches for a career-high 180 yards and two TDs).

And most of all, in crunch time, Harbaugh has Gore, who carried 25 times in all, for 101 yards, and seven of the 18 plays on the drive, five of those in succession. That Kendall Hunter powered the final six yards was fine with all concerned, especially Gore, who doesn’t worry about personal statistics.

“Three years with Frank,” said fullback Bruce Miller, “and I just feel he’s getting better and better. He has a passion for the game. He loves the game. He loves the team.”

He definitely enjoys dashing through the gaps or going around the edges, whatever is needed to pick up yardage.

“It felt good,” said Gore of the drive and his contribution. “Especially when their defense knew that we were coming to run the ball at that moment, and we did it. Our O-line made good blocks, our fullback made a good block, the receivers outside made good blocks, and I ran hard.

“When I get in rhythm, I just feel like I can do whatever I want.”

Early on, the Niners couldn’t do what they liked or wanted with the Cardinals, who came into the game with a 3-2 record, as did San Francisco. The Niners, without a first down until there was only a minute left in the first quarter, and then only on a penalty, led only 22-20 into the fourth quarter.

Then 9 minutes 32 seconds and 18 players later, they had the touchdown that meant the game.

“The score was 22-20,” said Darryl Washington, the Arizona linebacker. “We had a chance to get that momentum. We were stopping the run, getting pressure on Kaepernick, but those guys made more plays than we did at the end of the day.”

Kaepernick threw an interception, a tipped ball. Kaepernick lost a fumble when he was sacked. But when required — dare we call it crunch time in the sixth game of the season? — everything worked, especially on that long drive.

“It was huge,” said Kaepernick, a bit more talkative than he's been recently. “We drained the clock on that drive. We had a lot of third-down conversions, had the big fourth-down conversion (a yard by Miller). We said in the huddle, we have to go down and score right now.”

They did. Only in this situation, "right now" means 9 minutes 32 seconds.