San Francisco 49ers: New Head Coach Jim Tomsula a Tough Sell for Jed York
This is what the San Francisco 49ers have decided: Whenever you can fire a coach who has sent you to the NFC Championship Game for three seasons in a row and replace him with a coach with a career 6-4 record in NFL Europe, you have to make that change.
The 49ers have decided that Jim Tomsula, their defensive line coach, will be the next head coach of the franchise, as first reported by ESPN's Adam Schefter. Tomsula was the choice after Mike Singletary was fired in 2010 to serve as a one-game interim head coach and is the choice once again now that Jim Harbaugh has been “mutually” released and sent back to college.
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While I’m certain the 49ers will have page after page of glowing reports praising Tomsula and pointing out reasons why he won the job after an exhaustive search, the PR here doesn’t end up looking good for Jed York or the franchise.
It doesn’t feel like a hiring based on “class and integrity”, as Jed York said in a prepared statement. It looks like the 49ers opted to fire a difficult but fantastic head coach in order to replace him with a loyal company man—Tomsula has been with the 49ers since 2007.
The 49ers had two major alleyways to go down when making their head coaching decision. They could either play to their strengths by trying to maintain their top-five defense or try to fix their weaknesses by hiring an offensive coach.
Instead, it feels like they’ve harmed both sides of the ball with this hire.
Tomsula’s not an offensive guy, and there’s no sense to what sort of offensive coordinator he might bring in. Unlike any of the other candidates, Tomsula doesn’t have an NFL history outside of the 49ers, so we have no idea who his connections are around the league. The team is left in the same position it was in before Tomsula’s hiring—wondering what on earth will happen to the offense.
As for the defensive side of the ball, there were already rumors that Vic Fangio was considering leaving if neither he nor Mike Shanahan were named head coach, as first reported by NFL.com's Michael Silver.
Now, we have a situation where Fangio has been passed up in favor of one of his subordinates—a subordinate he didn’t even hire, as Tomsula was a holdover from the Mike Nolan era. I know, personally, if someone was promoted over me, I’d look to see what opportunities I had elsewhere; it would be a clear indicator as to what my employers thought of my potential.
So, hiring Tomsula doesn’t fix the offense, and it destroys continuity on defense. Perhaps Tomsula tries to repair that by promoting secondary coach Ed Donatell to the role of defensive coordinator, but losing Fangio would be a terrible blow to this defense.
None of this, by the way, is an attempt to slight Tomsula. Tomsula is a very well-respected position coach around the league.
He has unbridled energy, and he is precisely the "teacher" type that Jed York insisted upon in his press conference after Harbaugh’s firing. His defensive lines have been outstanding, as his linemen have included Bryant Young, Marques Douglas, Isaac Sopoaga, Justin Smith, Aubrayo Franklin, Ray McDonald and Glenn Dorsey.
Still, though, Tomsula has no NFL coordinator experience. He has no college head coaching experience. His only head coaching experience comes in the old NFL Europe, where he had one season in charge of the Rhein Fire. Only three current NFL coaches were never NFL coordinators—Kansas City’s Andy Reid, Philadelphia’s Chip Kelly and the New York Giants’ Tom Coughlin.
Kelly, of course, was a head coach in college before getting the Philadelphia job. Coughlin and Reid had previous NFL head coaching experience, but Coughlin was also a college coach before he got his first NFL job, and Reid was at least the assistant head coach on the Green Bay Packers before the Eagles picked him to be their coach.
In fact, of the 10 former position coaches who have coached a game in the NFL in the past decade, only four had as few credentials as Tomsula does. Andy Reid, Herman Edwards, Tony Sparano, Mike Singletary and Rod Marinelli were all assistant head coaches, and John Harbaugh was a special teams coordinator.
That leaves Mike Tice, Mike Munchak, Jim Zorn and Raheem Morris as the only previous examples of coaches who were promoted directly to head coach without some higher experience.
None of them finished their tenures with a winning record, and they have a combined NFL record of 83-110, or a .430 winning percentage. In fact, of the 10 position coaches, only two have a career winning record: Reid and Harbaugh.
That’s a lot of history for Tomsula to buck if he is to become a successful head coach; though, to be fair, the 49ers are more talented than any of the teams that those other names took over.
If this is going to work, Tomsula is going to have to serve as a sort of team manager. He’ll likely need to have specific people running the offense, defense and special teams. I can’t imagine he’ll be calling plays on offense or defense.
Perhaps he can work as sort of a grand delegator, putting the best people in place to run their own little fiefdoms in the 49ers’ kingdom—an offensive specialist to work with Colin Kaepernick, a defensive specialist to manage the stable of linebackers and so forth. He’ll be a CEO, in other words, as opposed to managing the play-to-play team.
This actually isn’t that unheard of. Only a handful of coaches call their own plays, so it’s not like the 49ers are trying to re-invent the wheel here. The issue is, however, that it makes the decision on who will be coordinating each platoon incredibly important. As I said, there is no information available for whom Tomsula will even be looking at, much less who would agree to work for him.
Tim Kawakami of the San Jose Mercury News is reporting that Oakland defensive coordinator Jason Tarver and former Chicago Bears head coach Marc Trestman are the names at the forefront for coordinator duties. Neither is exactly the most thrilling hire in the world, though I think both could work.
This is a very, very hard sell to 49ers fans. This feels like the Singletary hire all over again—a charismatic player’s coach who is a great interview but who could never get the most out of those players on game day. A successful Tomsula regime would buck all recent historical trends—it’d be almost unheard of.
If I’m a fan of the Seattle Seahawks, Arizona Cardinals or St. Louis Rams, I’m applauding the move Wednesday. The 49ers are replacing their head coach, offensive coordinator and defensive coordinator—that’s hard to phrase as a “reload,” as general manager Trent Baalke put it during a 49ers press conference. That’s a complete overhaul of the entire management staff.
It’s entirely unfair to Tomsula, as well, whom I thought would have been an interesting and exciting choice for defensive coordinator if Fangio had gotten the head coaching job. Tomsula, with no experience in the NFL outside the 49ers, now has to outcoach Harbaugh for this hire to be considered a success. Anything less than an NFC Championship appearance has to be considered a failure.
Had they given Tomsula the head job after the Mike Singletary era, of course, expectations would have been much lower. At that point, if the 49ers had gotten to 8-8, people would have been thrilled. Instead, now Tomsula has the highest expectations put upon him for any new coach this season, except perhaps whoever takes the Denver Broncos job. The least experienced coach in the NFL now has the toughest job in the NFL.
Tomsula’s next order of business is finding an offensive coordinator who can get the most out of Colin Kaepernick, so 49ers fans can expect another long feeling-out process of interviews before they can get a clear picture of what their team will look like in 2015.
The 49ers’ next order of business is somewhat tougher—convincing Niners Nation that Tomsula was the best man for the job, and not just a “yes man”-style internal hire. Tomsula is a well-respected position coach around the league, but he has a lot to prove if he’s going to make York and Baalke look good on this decision. The gut reaction is, and has to be, that the 49ers have made a mistake.
Bryan Knowles is a featured columnist for Bleacher Report, covering the San Francisco 49ers. If Tomsula does lead the 49ers back to the NFC Championship Game in 2015, he’ll write a full retraction of this article. Follow him—and hold him to that, in case he forgets!— @BryKno on Twitter.
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