End of a quarterback, birth of an icon, as captured by AP.
Colin Kaepernick’s collusion case against the NFL is now one for the record books, though no numbers have been reported. Such is the way with private settlements. My uncle said he probably got $40 million. I think he got at least twice that. The NFL isn’t merely buying his silence in a suit that he may well have won. They’re saying adios to an activist player.
Read MoreAn unsettling, if not upsetting, sports days with trade rumors swirling about the San Francisco 49ers sending quarterback Colin Kaepernick to the Philadelphia Eagles or the Chicago Bears or the Martians. General Manager Trent Baalke was quick to deny it, so you know it must have some validity.
More about this in a minute but first, What would The New York Times do without Roger Federer? Last year, The Times couldn’t bother writing about World Tennis Day at Madison Square Garden, which was too bad, because Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray put on quite a show. This year, however, Feddy Bear and Grigor “Baby Fed” Dimitrov are slated to square off March 10, and I predicted there would be a huge article in The Times to advance it. Christopher Clarey didn’t disappoint with the kind of piece that could’ve been written by Mirka, Feddy’s wife. The article was long on how the Feds travel the world with two sets of twins and – surprise, surprise – several nannies. But not even the cleverest of journalists can turn a subject into something he is not. One of the great pleasures of any Fed article is his blithe unawareness of his own self-centeredness. (Though it would seem counterintuitive, self-centered people never understand how others see them, or they wouldn’t be self-centered. It’s what makes pseudofedblog.com so funny.)
Anyway, here’s Fed on traveling the world en famille:
“The girls enjoy it, and I love being with my family, and so does Mirka. She loves being with me….”
I’m sure she does. ...
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Well, we’ve heard more from San Francisco 49ers’ owner Jed York and general manager Trent Baalke about why they parted ways with coach Jim Harbaugh. Which is not the same as saying we’ve learned more about what happened.
There was talk at the Dec. 29 press conference about “philosophical discussions,” which usually refer to differences on the field. Here, however, those differences seemed to have centered on what happened off it.
The Niners had six men who were arrested 10 times – six men, 10 times. Here’s York on that – sort of:
“The NFL is made up of players that have mixtures of personality. We need to find a way to get to the guys that are potentially on the edge, that have the ability to really be good guys . . . And that's when you get to the teacher to make sure that you find a way to reach those guys instead of going to the other side, keeping them on the side of the road that fits with our core values."
Uh-huh. What does this mean? ...
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Well, it’s official: Jim Harbaugh is off to coach at the University of Michigan, ending a successful if stormy tenure as head coach of the San Francisco 49ers.
Harbaugh’s departure – or dismissal, the breakup may not have been mutual – proves what I have long suspected about the workplace: It’s less about what you do than how well you relate to the boss. Sure, the 49ers had a mediocre season (8-8) that kept them out of the playoffs for the first time in three years. But if mediocrity or worse were the real standard, Tom Coughlin wouldn’t be staying on as coach of the New York Giants. And Rex Ryan would’ve been gone from the New York Jets years ago. Instead he and Harbaugh are both exiting at the same time.
There’s also been talk that Harbaugh “lost the locker room,” particularly in his eagerness to get rid of former Niners’ quarterback Alex Smith. But it was clear after the team’s 20-17 victory over the Arizona Cardinals that the Niners went all out to win one for the Gipper, so to speak – to end their season and Harbaugh’s tenure on a high note. Nor would a team led by a temperamental coach who is said to be even more emotional in the clubhouse be likely to award that coach the game ball or shower him with ice water after the game if the members weren’t fond of him. Football players are not actors.
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It’s with a heavy heart that I speculate about the future of my San Francisco 49ers.
How is it that a team that was so strong could become so lackluster with virtually the same personnel that went to the Super Bowl in 2013 and lost to the Seattle Seahawks in the playoffs this year – a game that many considered the real Super Bowl given how badly the Denver Broncos would play against the Seahawks in the actual Super Bowl?
But that was yesterday, and that is sport, as Novak Djokovic likes to say. In life, you’re only as good as your present success, and that’s never truer than in sport where teams mystifyingly rise and fall, sometimes within a season.
What role has Coach Jim Harbaugh played in all this – he of the dad corduroys and the heart-on-his-sleeve temperament? The seeds of his exit may have been sown in 2012 when he sought to get rid of quarterback Alex Smith – at first surreptitiously and then overtly after Smith suffered a concussion and was replaced by Colin Kaepernick, who took the team all the way to the Super Bowl.
Oh, the ironies: The Niners originally chose Smith over his high school rival Aaron Rodgers, who, miffed, went off to the Green Bay Packers – and legend. What if they had chosen Rodgers instead? Would I even be writing this post?
Colin is a mystery even to people like me who adore him. Brilliant, beautiful and hostile to a media that alternately fawns over and taunts him, he spent the off-season giving TMZ ammunition for a false date-rape charge by the company he kept. His curt responses to the local beat reporters, who try to ingratiate themselves as their job success depends in part on the team’s good will, do him no credit and will no doubt earn him no sympathy now that his season has headed south.
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Am I the only one who is seriously disturbed by the rumblings that came out of the recent meetings between NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and his 32 bosses, uh, owners of the league’s teams?
Apparently, the league is considering the assignment of disciplinary actions to an outside committee, even though Goodell says his primary responsibility is to safeguard the integrity of the game. So wouldn’t the safeguarding of the game’s integrity require taking responsibility for disciplining miscreants? (An aside: This is a misuse of the word “integrity.” Goodell really means the game’s honesty. All integrity means is wholeness. The league could be wholly good or wholly bad. Either way it would still have integrity.)
English lessons aside, the real problem here is the absence of leadership. NBA commissioner Adam Silver had no trouble getting rid of former Los Angeles Clippers’ owner Donald Sterling after his racist remarks. So why should Goodell have trouble executing the new personal conduct policy the league is going to come up with? ...
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Who needs the Bard when we have the San Francisco 49ers? Talk about your drama.
From quarterback Colin “I’m not the baby daddy” Kaepernick to defensive end Ray McDonald, arrested but not yet charged with the abuse of his pregnant fiancée, the stories are endless if not always entertaining.
The latest narrative centers on teensy-bit-excitable Coach Jim Harbaugh, who may or may not be steering the team next year, even if the Niners win the Super Bowl. Harbaugh has already been to the dance, so to speak, where he and his miners lost to the Baltimore Ravens, who are coached by his brother, John. (You can’t make this stuff up.)
So Harbaugh, Jim, is pretty good at what he does. But there are rumors, and here you can take your pick: He’s too hyper, contorting his face on the sidelines like something out of “Chicken Run”; he treats the guys in the locker room like the college kids he once coached at Stanford; he did wrong by then-Niner QB Alex Smith by secretly courting Peyton Manning when he was a free agent. (Ultimately, Smith would go to the Kansas City Chiefs after losing his starting job to a concussion and Kaepernick,)
Enter SF CEO Jed York, who only fanned flames by tweeting that the team is trying to win a Super Bowl, not a personality or popularity contest. Translation: “Yeah, Harbaugh’s a jerk, but he’s our talented jerk.” ...
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