The 49ers are searching for their fourth coach in four years and just axed general manager Trent Baalke, so could there be an issue with the franchise’s higher ups? Nope, says owner Jed York.
After firing Baalke and coach Chip Kelly at the conclusion of a 2-14 season, a reporter asked York if he should also be dismissed for falling short of performance standards. The exchange (which you can see right here) got a bit contentious, with York responding like this:
“Nothing I’m gonna say is gonna be satisfactory,” York said. “And again, we’re gonna be judged on what we do and what we accomplish. We haven’t accomplished enough. I own this football team. You don’t dismiss owners.“
The reporter was The Press Democrat’s Lowell Cohn, who penned an anti-York column Sunday diagnosing the 36-year-old owner as the franchise’s main problem and calling him a “rich kid whose parents gave him a team.”
Cohn has also compared PED users to murderers and once started lecturing Kelly during a press conference regarding Colin Kaepernick’s activism.
Beforehand, another reporter had asked York if he was competent to lead the searches for a new general manager and coach. York did not quite answer in the affirmative as he danced around the question.
“Look, nothing I’m going to say is going to be a satisfactory answer,” he said. “We need to make sure that our success speaks for itself. Our actions have to speak for itself. I’ve done it before. We’ve put together a team that’s had three NFC Championship runs. That was in the past. I can’t live on the past. I need to make sure anything I do is backed up by the results on the field.”
About Jesse Kramer
Jesse is a writer and editor for The Comeback. He has also worked for SI.com and runs The Catch and Shoot, a college basketball website based in Chicago. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Follow Jesse on Twitter @Jesse_Kramer.