San Francisco 49ers: Why Jim Harbaugh Is the Second Coming of Bill Walsh

Like most 49ers’ fans in their twenties, I was raised in the Bill Walsh era, which meant I dined on the NFL equivalent of filet mignon every season. 

As a result of my well-defined palate, being force fed the Salisbury steak collection of coaches that have tramped through Candlestick the last decade has been especially hard to swallow. 

It remains to be seen what cut of coach Jim Harbaugh ends up as, but he’s got the best offensive pedigree of any 49ers head man since Walsh, which is reason to rejoice if you’re a 49ers fan. 

Watching your team lose is always unpleasant, but watching your team lose and be awful on offense is especially painful. 

If you look at the men who have been leading the red and gold, the offensive fall from grace shouldn’t be that surprising. 

Following Walsh’s departure after the 1989 Super Bowl, the 49ers have been coached by George Seifert, Steve Mariucci, Dennis Erickson, Mike Nolan, Mike Singletary, and Jim Tomsula.

For the purposes of this discussion, we will exclude Seifert and Tomsula, because one inherited Joe Montana and Jerry Rice, the other coached one game. 

With the remaining four coaches, it’s as if the franchise made a concerted effort to take a step backward in offensive acumen with each new hire.

It all culminated in Singletary, whose idea of offensive ingenuity was alternating between running off-tackle right and off-tackle left.   

The end result of this truly offensive, offensive football, has been eight straight years without a playoff berth and a QB search that’s taking longer than Flavor Flav’s journey to find love. 

In Harbaugh the 49ers finally have a head man with the skillset to right the 49ers’ sinking offensive ship and rekindle the excitement amongst the Faithful that was lit by Walsh three decades earlier. 

Harbaugh has orchestrated winning offenses from under center, he spent 15 years as an NFL QB, and from the sideline, both University of San Diego and Stanford finished 11-1 in Harbaugh’s final season as head coach. 

Harbaugh also has a proven track record of finding and developing quality quarterbacks.  UCSD QB Josh Johnson went from the Pioneer League to competing for a starting spot with the Buccaneers, Cardinal quarterback Andrew Luck will likely be the No. 1 overall pick in next year’s draft. 

Harbaugh’s rapid ascension up the coaching ladder was also aided by Walsh himself. 

According to multiple sources, Walsh endorsed the hire of Harbaugh at Stanford in 2007 and the two men spent time together on the Farm prior to Walsh’s death later that year.  

CSN reported that among Harbaugh’s first acts as 49ers head coach was to order a truck load of videos from NFL films of Walsh’s early days coaching in San Francisco. 

Perhaps these are the delusional ramblings of a victory starved 49ers fans, but there’s a nice sense of symmetry to the idea of Harbaugh, one of Walsh’s final pupils, restoring glory to the franchise Walsh grew into a dynasty. 

It’s clearly too early to anoint Harbaugh as an elite NFL coach, much less a legend of Walsh’s caliber, but Bill Walsh liked him and that’s enough for me.