Over on the feed, you may have seen a snippet from former San Francisco 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo on the team’s 31-year drought to a Lombardi Trophy. When asked how frustrating it would be as an owner to go 31 years without a championship, DeBartolo said it as succinctly as possible:
“I wouldn’t.”
Obviously, this has brought many of the
York/DeBartolo comparisons back into the fold, and speculation on how much better DeBartolo would have done if he still owned the team.
DeBartolo ceded control of the team after a scandal involving the former governor of Louisiana, Edwin Edwards. After being barred from controlling the team for a year, he decided to take the other part of the company, while his sister, Denise York, took the 49ers.
Eventually, her son, Jed, took over the team, and it’s the 49ers as you know it today.
Yes, it’s frustrating, and yes, we joke about the team being cursed—or in my case, waiting for something I call “The Great Disappointment” whenever the 49ers are in contention, but it’s also a much different era than it was during DeBartolo’s time. DeBartolo prided himself on getting personal with his players and taking care of them. That includes paying them top dollar and not having to worry about free agency or salary caps.
That’s the difference. The last time DeBartolo won a championship in the salary cap era (well, the salary cap we’re familiar with) with the 49ers was 1994, the first year of its introduction. The years that followed slapped the 49ers with consequences for that loaded team. The veterans hit on a good deal of their incentives, and the team had to do a ton of restructuring that put them on the path to mediocrity.
All I’m saying is that’s an appropriate response from a beloved owner like Eddie DeBartolo, but it also was in an era when he could spend money on players, and free agency wasn’t the thing it is today. Can you imagine all the free agency casualties the 49ers had over the last few years avoided because they didn’t have to worry about hitting a limit? Could they have managed to keep all those players? Who knows. Trades were more prevalent, but there was much more time to develop players and a larger window to win as a result.
I’m not saying DeBartolo is wrong, I’m just providing context that this is a different era, and it’s even harder to win when NFL teams are basically penalized for drafting well.
Then again, the 49ers could just shove all the chips in like other teams do for one year and then spend a few years in mediocrity. Personally, I would rather be in contention every year and not “buy” championships, but maybe that would be the new strategy.
Where do you come off on DeBartolo’s comments?
