Jim Harbaugh is a tough guy to get along with. He is intense, abrasive, competitive, and a go-with-your-gut kind of guy. Trent Baalke (49ers general manager), on the other hand, is meticulous, calculating, and extremely analytical. You can see how these two might not get along. But isn’t that how greatness is achieved, through conflict?
So this begs the question, does this Jim Harbaugh drama have any legs? Was the 49ers front office actually entertaining trade offers for him? After all, Harbaugh has been to one Super Bowl and three NFC Conference Championship games in his first three years in the NFL.
Just the thought of trading him or letting him walk once his contract is up seems silly. But every report out there, even dating back to his childhood, claims that Harbaugh wears on people.
Jim’s brother, John, once said about Jim in 2011, “He would alienate the other kids, so I was really the only friend he had. We joke that dad’s profession was the perfect profession for Jim, because after two years, he’d be like, ‘It’s time to move, dad. I’ve lost all my friends.’ We were in Iowa one time and dad felt bad because we were leaving for Michigan. He tried to break it to us, and Jim goes, ‘Just in time, dad. I just ran out of my last friend.’”
Much later in Harbaugh’s life, the same theme seemed to still be there. After he left the Stanford Cardinal for the NFL, there was talk that they weren’t too broken up about him leaving. People had said he wore that staff down and got to people. He is a hard person for people to handle. He is the kind of guy, as his brother John recalled one time, that during a little league baseball game drilled a girl right in the back because she was crowding the plate.
Does all of this get excused with a resume like Harbaugh’s? Doesn’t winning cure everything? Yes and no. I don’t think there is much to these reports about potential trades involving Harbaugh. From everything being put out there (none of which you can believe 100%) it sounds as if the Cleveland Browns front office called the front office of the 49ers and made some kind of offer. Some reports say that the offer didn’t even include a single first round pick. This was promptly declined by Jed York, 49ers CEO, not even entertaining the thought for a minute. That seems to be the extent of that. If you are a 49ers fan, I would not worry about a trade.
What I would worry about is the lack of a contract extension (he has two years left on his current deal going into the 2014 season) and the 49ers letting him walk.
Harbaugh and his agent feel as though he should be getting paid like a Super Bowl winning coach while the 49ers front office feels he should not because, well, he is not a Super Bowl winning coach. While Harbaugh and his camp feel they have most of the leverage in these negotiations, it seems the 49ers might take a page out of the Cardinal playbook and just let him walk.
If the 49ers feel that Baalke has been the primary factor in building this roster and Harbaugh is getting on the collective last nerve of the entire front office (including Paraag Marathe, who is the team president and an enormous advocate of advanced analytics), I do not see them budging and making Harbaugh one of the highest paid coaches in the league.
Their front office is notorious for assigning everyone a value and sticking to that value when it comes time to negotiate a contract. Why would that change with their head coach? Although it is apples to oranges, it certainly does not help that Stanford has still been a perennial powerhouse even after Harbaugh left and most of his guys have graduated or moved on to the NFL now.
Speaking of Stanford, if Harbaugh’s camp holds their stance on getting paid like a Super Bowl winning coach, don’t be surpised if the 49ers look to bring in David Shaw, current head coach of the Stanford Cardinal and the man Stanford brought in to replace Harbaugh back in 2011.