Jim Harbaugh never stood a chance with the San Francisco 49ers in 2014, and a leaky locker room didn’t help. The Niners had to attempt to remain focused in a tough NFC West division while countless stories about Harbaugh losing his locker room surfaced. Who was the rat?
One theory is that 49ers GM Trent Baalke and owner Jed York may have planted most of the negative information about Harbaugh. After all, they needed to have a reason to part ways with a head coach who went 44-19 in four seasons, reached the NFC Championship Game three times and the Super Bowl once.
As Harbaugh said farewell to his former team on Sunday, he asked Tim Kawakami of the San Jose Mercury News if he knew who the sources were who leaked all the nasty stories.
He told me he was proud he didn’t get involved in the “off-the-record battles” this season, and asked if me if I knew who those “off-the-record people” were.
I told Harbaugh that I think we both know who they probably were. He said I should write a story on this, and I told him I pretty much already have.
But I’ll say it here again: I believe York and Baalke are the most likely people to have leaked so often and so bitterly about Harbaugh through all of this season.
Even if Baalke and York did leak some stories, they probably weren’t responsible for all of them. At one point, Baalke even said publicly that rumors of friction between him and Harbaugh were completely untrue.
Stories like this one may have even come from Harbaugh’s former players, as some of them are said to have not agreed with his “college mentality.”
In any event, winning was not enough to keep Harbaugh around in San Francisco. And with Harbaugh set to be introduced as the next head coach at Michigan, many feel he has accepted the position he was destined to hold.
