San Francisco 49ers Coach Jim Harbaugh Turned Alex Smith Around How?

The fans of the San Francisco 49ers have watched Alex Smith’s progression from community pariah to his now near hero-hood. How did he get from there to here?

In the past several years of Alex Smith’s career he had become the butt of jokes, the target for fans to spit out venom and bile at and the center of the blame for the 49ers poor performances.

The gold-digging group of guys were left with dirty faces and hands from their failure to find winning gold. A couple of good men but misguided coaches left them the joke of the NFC West. 

It was solidly believed he would be traded before the start of the 2011 season in favor of practically any rookie or backup quarterback traded for or bought up in the free agent market. Rumors swarmed like the swallows of Capistrano. It was agreed by a great majority of people who cared about San Francisco football that he would be gone by the start of the pre-season.

Then a rookie coach, from a fans' point of view seemingly naive about the pitfalls and requirements of professional coaching in the NFL, a man without any NFL coaching experience, a person who should have known better, dropped a bombshell.

New coach Jim Harbaugh announced that the San Francisco 49ers would have Alex Smith as a quarterback after the lockout of 2011 ended.

Pundits rushed to their keyboards to announce his ignorance and foolishness. Fans went into apoplectic snits. People excoriated both Harbaugh and Balke for such a poor decision. Everyone, yours truly included, hopefully predicted another losing but building season.

And yet, six games and a third of the way through the 2011 season, the 49ers have an astounding 5-1 record. As they go into their seventh week bye they are rated by various pundits as the fourth, fifth or sixth rated team of the 32 teams in the NFL.

How in heck did this happen?

Coach Harbaugh is sly and smarter than fans and pundits gave him credit for being.

He was experienced with two major areas of NFL coaching: He’d been a quarterback himself and knew the position from behind the eyes of the guy under the NFL’s highest pressure. And he’d coached college quarterbacks who also were initially under-rated into bowl-winning quarterbacks of dominating teams.

He instinctively felt he had the key to coaching Alex Smith: Compliments along with competent and constant teaching, a mentoring if you will, would bring out the best Alex had to offer. 

This method of handling a heretofore jittery and mistake-prone quarterback has worked to produce a very good manager of the offense. That left the defense to limit opposing teams to scanty scores. 

All Smith needed to get his career back on track was some positive reinforcement. The horse-whisperer method is very persuasive.

And the 49ers have a season record of five wins and one very close loss.

I would be very surprised if Alex Smith progressed to top the quarterbacks in all of the statistical and thrilling heights of Brady, Brees and Rodgers. But he works well for a team coming out of the doldrums and into the national spotlight.

And I and the other pundits and many fans have been wrong before.

He has earned a good contract with any NFL team when he becomes a free agent at the end of this season and many teams would be happy to have him.  I wonder if he’ll accept a contract elsewhere or whether he will be content to stay in San Francisco as the backup to the emerging Kaepernick?

So now you know how Harbaugh turned Alex Smith’s career around. Stay tuned for the rest of the season. This story is not over yet.