Freakonomics Radio - How the San Francisco 49ers Stopped Being Losers (Update)

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

They’re heading to the Super Bowl for the second time in five years. But back in 2018, they were coming off a long losing streak — and that’s the year we sat down with 49ers  players, coaches, and executives to hear their turnaround plans. It’s probably time to consider the turnaround a success.  SOURCES:Jimmy Garoppolo, quarterback for the Las Vegas Raiders; former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers.Al Guido, president of the San Francisco 49ers.Kyle Juszczyk, fullback for the San Francisco 49ers.Bob Lange, senior vice president of communications for the Philadelphia Eagles; former vice-president of communications for the San Francisco 49ers.John Lynch, general manager of the San Francisco 49ers.Paraag Marathe, president of 49ers Enterprises and executive vice-president of football operations for the San Francisco 49ers.Victor Matheson, economist at College of the Holy Cross.Kyle Shanahan, head coach of the San Francisco 49ers.Malcolm Smith, former linebacker for the San Francisco 49ers.Joe Staley, former offensive tackle for the San Francisco 49ers.Solomon Thomas, defensive tackle for the New York Jets; former defensive end for the San Francisco 49ers.Jed York, C.E.O. of the San Francisco 49ers. RESOURCES:"49ers Overreactions: Have Shanahan, Lynch Built Team That Can Last?" by Matt Maiocco (NBC Sports, 2023).“Jimmy Garoppolo Leads a 49ers Resurgence,” Victor Mather, The New York Times (December 29, 2017).“Why American Sports Are Organized As Cartels,” Tim Worstall, Forbes (January 14, 2013).NFL History - Super Bowl Winners (ESPN). EXTRAS:"When Is a Superstar Just Another Employee?" by Freakonomics Radio (2023)."How Does Playing Football Affect Your Health?" by Freakonomics, M.D. (2023)."Why Does the Most Monotonous Job in the World Pay $1 Million?" by Freakonomics Radio (2022)."The Hidden Side of Sports," series by Freakonomics Radio (2018-2019)."An Egghead’s Guide to the Super Bowl," by Freakonomics Radio (2017).

Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. It's time for a bonus episode. As you may have heard, the Kansas City Chiefs are heading to another Super Bowl. Their quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, is starting to look like one of the best quarterbacks in NFL history. But even he is often eclipsed by the team's tight end, Travis Kelsey. Not just for Kelsey's on-field abilities, which are prodigious, but because he is dating the world's most enthusiastic new football fan, who also happens to be the world's most famous entertainer. That's

Taylor Swift. And who will those Chiefs be playing in the Super Bowl? That would be the San Francisco 49ers. If you are not much of a football fan, the 49ers might not seem to be as much of a story as the Chiefs. But there is a story there, perhaps an even more compelling one, including a quarterback named Brock Purdy, who was considered such an unlikely NFL prospect that he was the very last player taken in his year's college draft. He was the 262nd pick in the NFL. This earns you the nickname Mr. Irrelevant. If Purdy helps the Niners beat the Chiefs in this year's Super Bowl, he will probably earn a better nickname.

Several years ago, long before Purdy came along, I spent some time in California with the 49ers as they were embarking on what would prove to be a dramatic turnaround. I spoke with players, coaches, executives, and others. And that is the bonus episode you're about to hear with updates as necessary, plus additional tape and, weirdly, a brief mention of Taylor Swift. Most of the players from that 49ers team are gone, including the quarterback who was supposed to be their savior, Jimmy Garoppolo. But three of the episode's central figures, owner Jed York, general manager John Lynch, and head coach Kyle Shanahan, are still there and more central to the team than ever. By the way, the 49ers and Chiefs met in the Super Bowl just four years ago, after the original version of this episode was first published.

The Chiefs won that one. As for this year, personally, I have some friends who are big Chiefs fans, and I love watching the Holmes and Kelsey and the angry running Isaiah Pacheco from Rutgers, even the walrusy coach Andy Reid. But I would be lying if I said I wasn't a little bit hoping that the 49ers can take this one. Like I said, it's already a good story, but every really good story needs a happy ending, doesn't it? Pretend for just a second that you own a National Football League team. How awesome would that be? For starters, you would be really rich, but also you'd have a piece of the most successful sports league in history, and that makes you part of the fabric of America.

People arrange their schedules to watch NFL games. They are so passionate about your product that they routinely dress up like your employees. Think about that. You ever seen anybody wearing a UPS uniform who doesn't work for UPS? This passion translates into millions of eyeballs and billions of dollars.

So however rich you started out, now you're getting even richer. Can you imagine how great that would be? Or better than imagining, let's hear from someone who actually does own an NFL team. My name's Jed York. And let's say this team happens to be one of the most successful and valuable franchises ever. I'm the CEO of the San Francisco 49ers. Weiss has just set a Super Bowl record with 12 catches. He's in motion.

Montana. Touchdown, John Taylor! In the 1980s and 90s, the San Francisco 49ers won five Super Bowls. That's it. The game is over. San Francisco has won Super Bowl XXIII. Jed York is 44 years old. The team has been in his family for years. I rotated through every single department, and my first gig was really in the equipment room, like learning how to sew nameplates onto the jerseys and doing that stuff.

Okay, you're the CEO. I realize that's your title. That's your operational thing. Are you the owner and owner? How does the ownership work? So my family owns 90 plus percent of the team. And you know, it's split between my siblings and my parents and I, my mother is the controlling owner of the team. Why were you the kid in your family or the member of your family that ended up being CEO? And I always loved football. I mean, I love sports. I love every sport. But I was always really in tune with the 49ers, what was going on. And when my parents took over the team in 99-2000, I was a high school senior going into my freshman year at Notre Dame. And, you know, I just knew that that's something that I ultimately wanted to do.

As York was moving up from the equipment room to the CEO's office, the team's glory days were receding. They did make it to another Super Bowl, but they lost. It's hard to lose a Super Bowl and come back and try to refocus. Indeed, it was hard to refocus. The next few seasons ranged from mediocre to horrible. York did what NFL owners typically do in these cases. He fired the coach again and again. Some fans thought York should have been fired. They rented a plane, flew it over the stadium with that very message.

York's response was pretty sensible. I own this football team. You don't dismiss owners. Now, imagine at the same time all that was happening, this was also happening. San Francisco 49ers quarterback knelt during the national anthem. Colin Kaepernick's protest against racial injustice seems to be gaining traction. And that led to this. Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag,

to say, get that son of a bitch off the field right now. He's fired. He's fired! Amidst all this chaos, on and off the field, Jed York hit the reset button hard. The 49ers started the 2017 season with a new coach, a new general manager, and a roster full of new players. They began the year with pretty high hopes. After all, they are the San Francisco 49ers. San Francisco has won Super Bowl 23. Those high hopes turned out to be, uh, misplaced. Largest margin of victory over the 49ers,

going all the way back to 1980. And the new coach was miserable. When you lose a game, a lot of noise happens. When you lose two, a ton happens. Usually three's like Armageddon. Try nine. Nine straight losses to start what was supposed to be your turnaround season. Then you've got the president of the United States telling you to fire your son-of-a-bitch employees. And your very sport is increasingly thought of as too violent and brutal for the modern world. You sure you still want to own a football team? Today on Freakonomics Radio, despite some headwinds, NFL football is still one of the most popular commodities in sports history. We all know what it's like to consume this commodity, but what's it take to produce it?

Before the 2018 season began, we spent a couple days inside the 49ers complex talking to everyone, ownership and senior management, the head coach and general manager, and of course the players, including the $137 million quarterback. What's up guys, I'm Jimmy Garoppolo and you're listening to Freakonomics Radio. And we learned a lot. For instance, how the sports industry is unlike other industries. So you actually need some level of collusion just to make the product work, right? We learned how winning is everything, but that losing could be pretty great, too. When we lose, we actually get gifted better draft picks.

We'll hear how an NFL team makes its money, besides football. We went straight from Monster Truck into Taylor Swift. And you'll hear what football players do when they're not playing, practicing, or lifting weights. I know it's a lot, the hair, the bod, when you're staring at a demigod. What can I say except you're welcome? This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner. When we first thought about doing a Hidden Side of Sports series, we knew we'd want to spend one episode going deep on a single team, preferably before their season began.

Not only do they have more time to talk then, but that's also when everyone is still optimistic and tied for first place and uninjured. As for which sport, we figured we'd go straight to the top of the sports pyramid, as the sports economist Victor Matheson described it. So the biggest league in the world in terms of revenue generated is the NFL, and the NFL generates something like $14, $15 billion a year. We also thought it'd be fun to focus on a team that had a strange season the year before, like one of the strangest seasons ever, a season that ran from absolute despair

to something approaching euphoria. This set of criteria brought us to the San Francisco 49ers. What do you know? Yeah, great. So just what is this big tunnel here? Where are we? Okay, so this is the underbelly of the stadium. In May, we visited the team's complex in Santa Clara, California. They'd just begun their preseason practices, which are technically called OTAs or organized team activities. The place was incredibly busy, considering the season wouldn't begin for another few months. It was also incredibly upbeat. To understand why the entire building was so enthusiastic about the 2018 season,

you have to understand what they went through in 2017. And to understand that, it helps to go back to 2011, the start of the era of coach Jim Harbaugh. By this point, the 49ers had not been to the playoffs in eight years. So Jim was at Stanford when we hired him. That, again, is 49ers owner and CEO Jed York. And Jim is a guy that is just a huge personality. It was a personality that Harbaugh was not shy to show in public. Personally, I think that's a bunch of crap. And I think with Jim,

you know, he can certainly rub somebody the wrong way, but he's not worried about, you know, I'm going to make sure everybody gets along. Like he's he has one focus in mind. And that's, you know, how do how do I win? Thirty 33-17 is the final score as Harbaugh is a winner in his first game as a pro coach. Harbaugh turned the team around immediately. They had three excellent seasons, including that losing appearance in the Super Bowl against a Baltimore Ravens team whose coach was, bizarrely, Harbaugh's brother. It's the Harbaugh Bowl. Jim and John Harbaugh, Ravens and Niners, two of the best teams in the league. Describe to me how much it hurts to lose a Super Bowl. You know, it's weird because we've lost NFC championship games before, and it's weirdly

more easy to lose the Super Bowl because you can say, you know, we didn't have our best game, we didn't do this. So there's no ifs, ands, or buts. There's no what ifs. Not everyone in the 49ers building is as sanguine as owner Jed York. Losing the Super Bowl? Oh man, it sucked. It was, oh, that's like the worst day of my life. Thanks for bringing that up. You're welcome. That's Joe Staley. I am the left tackle for the San Francisco 49ers. I have been on the team for, this will be my 12th season coming up. So, only played here in San Francisco.

Right. And you're easily the longest tenured veteran here. And the best looking, yes. Best looking, yeah. Your nose, I have to say, leans right. It leans to the right. I've been broken a couple times. Staley finally retired in 2020. He had long been one of the best left tackles in the league. The primary job of a left tackle is to protect the quarterback on passing plays, which requires a certain heft. Six foot six, I'm about 295, three and a half. Staley was also known for his goofiness. Hakuna Matata. What a wonderful phrase. Hakuna Matata.

Ain't no passing craze. It means no worries for the rest of your days. He hosted a no-budget web series called The Joe Show that was filmed in the 49ers locker room. And our first guest is my eighth favorite player on the football team, Dakota Watson, everybody. Let's go. It pays to stay loose if you are an NFL player. It is a fairly ruthless business. There's a lot of turnover, especially when a team has a bad stretch and the 49ers had a really bad stretch. The season after the Super Bowl loss, they won just eight games against eight losses. Coach Jim Harbaugh, whose idiosyncrasies were tolerable during the winning seasons, had worn out his welcome. We just couldn't get to a place where, you know, either side was willing to continue to move forward.

On to a new coach and a new season with even worse results. Five wins, 11 losses. Then another new coach for the next season with an even worse outcome. Two wins, 14 losses. That coach was also fired, along with the general manager, who makes personnel decisions. This left Jed York as the primary target of the growing ill will. Here he is at a press conference right after the disastrous 2016 season. Jed, you dismissed your general manager and coach because they didn't reach certain performance standards.

That's part of it. Okay, let's stick to that part. Why shouldn't you be dismissed or reassigned for the same reasons? Look, again, nothing I'm going to say is going to be satisfactory. Say something. And that's when York said this. I own this football team. You don't dismiss owners. No one's happy when an NFL team is losing the

players, the fans, even, as you heard, the journalists. But paradoxically, there's one constituency that has reason to be somewhat less unhappy. Who's that? The ownership. Here's something important to know about the National Football League and the other big American sports leagues. Every team in every league, of course, wants to win, but they don't have to win to be financially successful. Consider the NFL. The league is essentially a coalition of the 32 teams. The commissioner serves at the owner's behest and promotes their interests. It is essentially a cartel with membership by invitation only. Unlike the big soccer leagues around the world,

there is no promotion into or relegation out of American sports leagues. Unlike corporations, these leagues don't face much real competition from upstarts or rivals. So first of all, we see the leagues pretty actively try to crush their competition. That, again, is the sports economist Victor Matheson. We had the NFL drive the USFL out of business in 1985, at least partially through nefarious means, partially through fairly incompetent management of the USFL, probably led at most by the owner of the New Jersey USFL team, of course, Donald Trump. You might think an economist would oppose this lack of competition.

You might think he'd consider this behavior downright collusive. Sports is really interesting in that you actually need some level of collusion between teams just to make the product work, right? So this is not Apple and Samsung, right? Apple really does want to drive Samsung out of business so they can grab the whole mobile phone market. And Samsung wants to do the same thing to Apple. But the New York Yankees don't want to drive the Boston Red Sox out of business because they need someone to play and you need to figure out how you're going to run your league so that you can make a good entertaining product. The NFL's product is

certifiably entertaining and therefore certifiably lucrative. Importantly, this lucre is equally shared among the 32 teams. Local revenues vary, but every team gets a one 30 second cut of the national revenue that includes money from TV rights, sponsorships, licensing and merchandise sales. The NFL's total national revenue is about $12 billion a year, with each team receiving $375 million. A lot of that money goes to player salaries. For the 2023 season, there was a salary cap of nearly $225 million per team, and owners generally have to spend at least 90% of the cap. But don't forget, there are local revenues coming in as well, including ticket sales,

and that $375 million check from the league, that's your share whether you win every game, win half your games, or none. When Jed York's grandfather bought the San Francisco 49ers in 1977, he paid $17 million. Obviously, the team is probably worth a little bit more than $17 million today. That is true. Forbes estimates the 49ers' value at $6 billion, making it one of the 15 most valuable sports teams in the world. And that's without having won a Super Bowl since 1995. And that's with winning just two games in 2016. What would happen if a soccer team in the English Premier League did that? They would get relegated to a lower league and their finances would crumble.

The Premier League would give them what's called a parachute payment to help them avoid bankruptcy, but they'd have to sell off their best players. An NFL team that wins just two games, meanwhile, still gets that big check from the home office. I actually joke with my English Premier friends. That's Al Guido, the 49ers president. Not only do when we lose, we actually get gifted better draft picks. They actually get relegated down and have to try to come back up. So the football business, I mean, I would love to be an NFL owner because it's a it's kind of a closed model, right? I mean, if you're in, you literally can't lose.

I mean, can you lose money in the NFL? Sure. I mean, if you're one of the lower revenue tier clubs, but it's hard. To your point, it's pretty hard. I asked Guido to describe his duties as club president. I oversee everything non-football. So if you think about the sales, marketing, GNA functions of the team, and the general administrative, so finance, human resources, legal, insurance, all of those things, land development.

Land development in particular is a big piece of the 49ers value proposition, as it is for many sports franchises. It's no coincidence that so many team owners made their money in real estate. This includes Jed York's late grandfather. He was one of the first people to really take, you know, the downtown to suburbia. And he really enclosed a shopping mall and built a great empire there.

On one level, owning an NFL team is a real estate play. Yes, the athletes are necessary to carry out the game, but athletes come and go. The stadium is the constant, and it's a cash cow on at least three dimensions. As a stage set for the lucrative TV contracts, as a venue for live events, including, of course, the football games, and as a sponsorship opportunity. In 2014, the 49ers built and moved into a $1.3 billion state-of-the-art stadium. It is now called Levi's Stadium after the jeans maker paid $220 million for a 20-year naming deal. Some of that money goes to the 49ers' new hometown, Santa Clara, which is in Silicon Valley. It's

about an hour south of San Francisco, where the 49ers had played since 1946. Jed York again. We would have loved to have stayed in the city of San Francisco. We looked at over 85 sites in the Bay Area. There's a lot of work that goes into it from an environmental standpoint, from a governmental standpoint. When it was announced that you were going to build the stadium down here, what was the general public response? It wasn't a very positive response because people wanted us to stay in the city. Right. And what were you portrayed as? Greedy? As not loyal? Probably more than not loyal because in terms of greedy, there was very, very little public equity put into the building.

A modern stadium like Levi's can generate a lot more revenue than an old stadium, thanks to luxury suites and the willingness of fans to pre-purchase season tickets. The 49ers, like most teams, don't just sell you the tickets. You first need to buy what's called a personal seat license, which then allows you to buy the tickets. When Levi's Stadium opened, those licenses sold for $2,000 to $80,000 per seat, depending on location. Al Guido again. About 95% to 96% of the building is sold out on season tickets.

And how's that rate compared to other NFL stadiums? Is that about typical or a little high? Oh, it's very high. It is. It's very high. Yeah, we are in the top quartile in team revenues inside of the NFL. Keep in mind that NFL teams only have eight or nine regular season home games each year with a couple preseason games and, if they're lucky, a playoff game or two. This year, the 49ers, because of their excellent regular season record, had two home playoff games.

Still, that is not a very efficient use of an asset as expensive as a brand new high-tech stadium. But don't worry, the 49ers are active landlords too. According to Forbes, Levi's Stadium in its first few years hosted more non-NFL events than any other new stadium. Here's Bob Lang, who was the 49ers VP of Communications when he gave us a stadium tour back in 2018. Yeah, we went straight from Monster Truck into Taylor Swift last weekend. And then now as soon as Taylor Swift got off the field, they are putting down sod because we've got a soccer match coming up shortly. So from a business perspective, the 49ers of the mid-2000 teens were doing quite well,

monetizing their beautiful new real estate investment, taking in their steady share of the NFL's billions. The only problem was that their actual football team stank. Over three seasons, from 2014 to 2016, they won a total of just 15 games. The New England Patriots won 14 games in 2016 alone, while the 49ers were winning just two games that year. That was also the season that the 49ers quarterback became the talk of not just the NFL, but the entire country. Colin Kaepernick was just a few years removed from having led the 49ers to the Super Bowl, but as the team's fortunes fell, so did his.

He was benched, then reinstalled as a starter, and then benched again. He asked to be traded, but the team refused. This sort of controversy is standard issue on NFL teams. But then Kaepernick launched an entirely non-standard controversy. It began after a spate of high-profile police shootings of African Americans. During the national anthem that's played just before every NFL game, Kaepernick sat on the bench rather than standing along the sidelines with his teammates.

He later shifted his protest from sitting to kneeling during the anthem. He said he wasn't interested in standing up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color. There's people being murdered unjustly and not being held accountable. Cops are getting paid leave for killing people. That's not right. As you are probably aware, this turned into a very big deal. Colin Kaepernick's protest against racial injustice seems to be gaining traction. Other players around the league began kneeling in solidarity with Kaepernick. The anthem protests became a political football, turning the actual football into a sideshow,

and to some degree, a casualty. A slip in the NFL's TV ratings, was attributed, in part at least, to the anthem protests. Although, to be fair, NFL ratings were down much less than most TV shows. Kaepernick himself was ultimately released by the 49ers, and he wasn't picked up by any other NFL team, despite having strong career numbers. Kaepernick accused the league of blackballing him, and he filed a collusion case. He and the league eventually settled for an undisclosed amount. I had asked 49ers owner Jed York about the Kaepernick controversy. When you look at, you know, African-Americans specifically and folks of racial minority and

sort of police shootings, there are some things that really aren't good in our country. Colin probably took a different approach than I would have taken, but he certainly brought attention to the matter. And I understand where people were upset that he, you know, took an action during the national anthem. But when I look at where Colin started

of sitting down during the national anthem, he changed his position to doing something that it's hard for me to see taking a knee like there's if you can come up with a community or society we're taking a knee as a disrespectful act right like by all means show me so I mean I feel like he tried to modify his position to be as respectful as possible during a very very you know sacrosanct moment during a professional football game. And I think the narrative sort of spun out of control. And then you've got something that five years ago no one could have predicted. Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag,

to say, get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Talk about that, your communication with the White House, if there was any, and how that affected you. So we didn't have any direct communication with the White House. The NFL legal office may have, we didn't. The position that we took was, whether you're for or against somebody taking a knee during the national anthem, you have the constitutional right to be able to do that. Now, that doesn't mean that you are immune from having backlash because of your actions, but you have every right to make that action and take that action. Coming up, how the 49ers started to turn things around. I'm Stephen

Dubner, and you are listening to Freakonomics Radio. Between the Kaepernick saga and their worst season in many years, the 49ers were ready for big changes. Just hiring a new coach every year wasn't working out. So they realized... What might be best is to start from scratch and do a full reboot because doing half of it each time wasn't always giving us the right answer. That's Parag Marathe. And so the best way to do it is to build it up from the bottom again.

Marathe is unofficially Jed York's right-hand man. And officially? I am president of 49ers Enterprises and EVP of Football Operations. Marathe has been with the 49ers since 2001. Before that, he worked as a management consultant and at the sports agency IMG. His MBA is from Stanford, his undergrad degree from Berkeley, and he grew up nearby in Saratoga, the child of Indian immigrants. His dad was an engineer who, when Parag was 10, decided he wanted to start a family business. The American dream, right? Start a new business. And we put it to a

family vote. My dad was gas station. My mom was party store. My sister and I were pizza. So we bought a pizza restaurant. And you were eventually kind of running the place, I gather. I was running the place by the time I was 12 or 13. But it was fun. I had hired a lot of my friends. We all worked there.

We managed a pizza restaurant. What labor laws? What child labor laws? Exactly. So I delivered pizzas, too, as a high school kid. So I know literally every street in Saratoga. In fact, if you gave me a home address, I would probably tell you the phone number or vice versa. Seriously. the analytics department. When the team bottomed out in 2016, he and Jed York acknowledged that they needed to hire yet another new coach, the team's fourth in four years, but they also needed a new general manager. That's the person responsible for deciding which players to get and which ones

to get rid of and what kind of contracts they could afford within the salary cap. They also realized they had to rethink the alliance between coach and GM to make sure they were rowing in the same direction. So we've done a lot of research on successful organizations and what made them work and what didn't. And one of the things that was of paramount importance is, first of all, having a head coach and a general manager that were in the same life cycle of their career. So one's not thinking about saving their jobs and one's not thinking about trying to prove themselves, right? And another thing was, you know, you have different structures across every club.

Sometimes the GM's on top and the head coach is underneath. Sometimes it's the other way around. We wanted to set it up where they were partners and they complemented each other on what their respective skill sets would be. And then we went out and we looked at all sports and thought about, all right, what are the key attributes of a head coach that we're looking for? What are the key personality traits and the key skill sets? Same thing at a GM.

We gave each candidate a list of 10 skills of a head coach or a GM. We said, we want you to rank these uh one to ten not on how important they are but on how good you are at them and by the way you have to be one out of ten on something and you have to be ten out of ten on something right and it wasn't the answers so much that we cared about as like how they arrived at it and how they talked about it afterwards not able to put down one so many guys did one did one, two, three, four, and then six-way tie for five, right? Because they couldn't be worse than anything, right? And so it's just that conversation that they couldn't consciously allow themselves to be bad at something.

But the 49ers eventually did find someone who knew his own limitations. I'm always assuming, all right, this bad thing's going to happen. What do we do to prepare ourselves? And that is... All right, Kyle Shanahan, head coach, 49ers. Shanahan is still only 44 years old. When the 49ers hired him, he'd never been a head coach, but he had been a wildly successful offensive coordinator for a few teams. And not unimportantly, he is the son of a wildly successful NFL head coach, Mike Shanahan.

Now, growing up, you know, I was around football my whole life. Mike Shanahan won two Super Bowls as head coach of the Denver Broncos. He was also the offensive coordinator for the 49ers back when they won their last Super Bowl, which meant that Kyle Shanahan went to high school here in the San Francisco area. In fact, when he was a kid, and this is apropos of nothing, but it's too cool to not tell you, when Kyle Shanahan was a kid, he would go for pizza at the pizzeria run by another kid, Parag Marate, the man who would eventually hire Shanahan to coach the 49ers. You've done your homework. In early 2017, as the 49ers were deciding to give Kyle Shanahan his first head coaching job, he was pretty busy as offensive coordinator of the Atlanta Falcons, who were preparing to play in the Super Bowl against the New England Patriots.

Parag Marathe and Jed York, however, really wanted Shanahan's input on who they should hire as GM. They're like, can you meet with this GM? Can you meet with this guy? I'm like, no, I'm getting ready for a playoff game. I'm getting ready for the Super Bowl. And so it got very stressful for me. And then, out of the blue, Shanahan got a text from someone, a former NFL great who was now a football broadcaster and who was a huge fan of Kyle Shanahan. I always thought he was one of those guys that was one step ahead of the competition. And that is... Okay, my name is John Lynch. For years, I thought your actual first name was Hard Hitting, because it seemed like they could never say John Lynch without Hard Hitting John Lynch.

Lynch retired as an NFL player in 2008 and was now calling games for Fox. I had a good career going in the broadcast world, and they were great to me. And I loved every second of it. But you missed the competition. I did. I did. You know, everybody, I think, at certain points at the year's end, you do a little self-evaluation and say, oh, gosh, my life's really going well. I got a great family. I'm proud of my kids. I got a great marriage. Love and broadcasting. But what's my win-loss record? Yeah, exactly. And there was always a but that was a little unfulfilling. When Lynch heard that Kyle Shanahan had been offered the 49ers head coaching job, he called to congratulate him. And I had seen something the day before that he was struggling finding someone he wanted to work with as a general manager.

And I just kind of threw out there at the end of our conversation. I said, hey, you know, maybe maybe I'd do it. And he was very polite about it. And he goes, if you already got a guy, just don't even worry about it. But I just want you to know I'd be very interested. And I went downstairs and I remember telling my parents, who know John, because my dad coached him. And he's like, what did Lynch have to say? And I was like, he said he wants to be a GM. My dad's like, oh, what do you think of that?

I'm like, I think I really like that. And it took a lot of anxiety away because all I want is someone who loves football, who's smart and capable of doing it, and someone that you can work together with. John Lynch as GM was a bit of a stretch. He'd never been a football coach or executive, but he had been a great player and he was smart. He played his college football at Stanford. There was one more thing going for smart. He played his college football at Stanford. There was one more thing going for Lynch. He's just a presence. Parag Marathe again.

He has such amazing presence. You just, you're around him for half an hour, and it makes you want to be a better version of yourself. And so it came to pass that in early 2017, a few weeks after firing their previous head coach and general manager, the 49ers had their new leadership duo, an up-and-coming young coach and an inspiring first-time GM. Now all I had to do was get the kind of players who could win them some football games,

like this guy. Solomon Thomas, I play defensive end for the San Francisco 49ers. Thomas now plays for the New York Jets. He was born in Chicago, then his family moved to Australia for several years, and then to Texas. He was a big kid, so naturally in Texas. Someone was like, why aren't you playing football? And I was like, I really don't know what football is. And so we signed up, did the Pop Warner football thing, and first practice, just going out there,

was tackling this guy in front of me because I didn't know what to do. I didn't know you were supposed to tackle the guy with the ball. But Thomas figured out the game pretty quickly and was eventually recruited to play at Stanford. If you've begun to think there's a bit of a Stanford mafia within the 49ers organization, you might not be wrong. It also might not be a total coincidence.

In one of his first classes at Stanford, Thomas recognized an older guy sitting up front. And like, who's that? Oh, crap, that's John Lynch. And like, kind of a little starstruck. Hard-hitting John Lynch, now in his 40s and in his broadcasting phase, had gone back to Stanford to complete his degree. A couple years later, as the brand new GM of the 49ers, the first player Lynch drafted with the third overall pick was Solomon Thomas. It was just like a total dream come true. And he's like, this is your former classmate, John. Was it him or Shanahan who called you? John called me first and he said, hey, classmate. And then, yeah, it was pretty insane.

Thomas was one of the key young players the 49ers were rebuilding their defense around. The offense, meanwhile, that was Kyle Shanahan's specialty. The offense needed even more help, especially a quarterback. I mean, it's the toughest, to me, position in the world. And there's 32 teams and there isn't 32 people who can play that position at the level needed. I mean, if you look at the AFC, I think over the last 17 or 19 years, it's basically been three quarterbacks. That's 49ers president Al Guido again talking about quarterbacks who've led their team to a Super Bowl win. So it's Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Ben Roethlisberger sprinkling a few Joe Flacos,

and that's it. You could now add Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes to that list. With Colin Kaepernick gone, the 49ers' best quarterback options were C.J. Bethard and Brian Hoyer, neither of whom were very good options. But Shanahan and John Lynch and the whole organization knew it'd be hard work to turn things around. And if there's anything Kyle Shanahan is really, really, really good at, it's working hard. During the season, you know, Mondays, I'm usually in about 5.30 every day. I leave on a Monday at 11, on a Tuesday at midnight, on a Wednesday at midnight, on a Thursday at 9.30, and on Friday, I leave at 2.30. Friday is like my weekend where I get home at about 3.30, and that's the night I

kind of hang out with my kids. Saturday, I'm in at 5.30. We usually are traveling somewhere, or we have meetings and a walkthrough. I go home for two hours and go to the hotel. You spend the night at the team hotel on Saturdays? Yeah, everyone does. And then on Sundays, I'm over at the stadium very early in the morning. You hear these stories forever about coaches, you know, literally sleeping in their offices, working these hours that you described. Like, I think anybody listening to this, those hours sound totally nuts. And my thought is always like, does it really have to be that? Like, what is like for people who don't know the game or care about it? And they hear like, does it really have to be that? Like, for people who don't know the game or care about it,

and they hear, like, wait a minute, you're a football coach. Why do you need to be working 18 hours? I don't, what are you doing? All right, well, just on a Monday, all right, as a head coach, I need to watch the game for myself, which is offense aside, defense aside, special teams. It's rewind, fast forward, sideline copy. And so there's three clips before we get past one play on one side of the ball.

Then I've got to watch it with the coaches. And then when that's done, I've got to get the whole team together. And I've got to watch certain clips of the team from a head coach standpoint. Anyways, it takes all Monday. It takes all Monday. And now we've got to start watching Seattle, who we play that next Sunday. For the next several minutes, Shanahan describes in exhausting detail the rest of the week. Well, I teach the pass game from 8 to 9.

Then we teach the run game from 9 to 10. Then our special teams coach comes in from 10 to 10.45 to teach special teams. Then we go out on the field and we have to walk through all the new stuff we learned. Then we come back in and we eat lunch. Then we go out and have a real practice. Now tomorrow. We got to go study third down Yeah, there's study short yardage goal line. We got to draw it off the plan put them on cards How we're gonna practice tomorrow. We only do red zone on Thursday night. So Friday same process Eleven guys versus eleven guys It's infinite how many different things you can do. And if one guy is off, the play doesn't work on either side of the ball.

And if that play doesn't work, it could be a hurt quarterback. It could be a touchdown. That could be the reason you're telling your second grade daughter that she's moving next week. Yeah, there's not many other ways to do it. I know it's embarrassing. We're not doctors. We're PE teachers. But like, it's, I don't try other ways to do it. I know it's embarrassing. We're not doctors. We're PE teachers. But I don't try to explain to people much because it's laughable.

Has anybody ever tried? Has any coach ever said, you know what? Maybe all those hours that we're working, if we slept more, we'd be sharper and try to make up for it that way. Has anybody ever tried a totally different approach? Yeah, totally. And those are no longer coaching in the league. Yeah, guys, you would never know their name because they don't last long. And I mean, it's okay if we're tired and we barely can function. We don't have to perform the play. It's us wearing our brains out all week to put our players in the best opportunity possible for them to be successful.

Coming up after the break, just how successful was the 49ers turnaround effort? I mean, your wife hears the radio all day. She reads stuff. She eventually gets home and everyone's been saying that their husband sucks so bad. She wants to know why. But then, believe it or not, something magical happened. See you later! Touchdown, San Francisco! It's not like Jimmy was the savior, right?

It's the whole team. That's coming right up on Freakonomics Radio. In September of 2017, the year before we first put out this episode, the iconic San Francisco 49ers franchise was ready for their renaissance. They had a new coach, new general manager, many new players, a gorgeous and relatively new stadium, and seemingly all sorts of wind at their back. And then they played their first game. They got crushed by the Carolina Panthers, 23-3. Kyle's fine. This team will be fine. It's in good hands with John Lynch.

They're young and new. They're going to get better as the season goes on. But things didn't get better. The 49ers lost again. Touchdown, Arizona! Cardinals win! And again. It is good, and the Colts have won it in overtime. And again and again. Six straight losses to open the season. Amazingly, the last five were all by three points or less. I mean, that's hard on a head coach.

John Lynch, the rookie general manager, was worried about his rookie head coach, Kyle Shanahan. Everybody brings different qualities to the table, and positivity is something I just have always had. I feel like that's the way you should live your life. And so I think there's places where Kyle really picks me up, and there's other places I pick him up. And I think a big part of my job the first year was being a psychologist to him. You've waited your whole life to do this. And now all of a sudden in a historic fashion, I mean, we lost five games by three points or less. It had never been done in this league. How should you interpret those five close losses? Were the 2017 San Francisco 49ers still catastrophically bad, or were they really close to turning the corner? The next few games answered that question.

Largest margin of victory over the 49ers going all the way back to 1980. The 49ers had begun their supposed turnaround season 0-9. This affected everyone in the building and their families, including Al Guido's 9-year-old daughter. So the kids will either make fun of my daughter, right, or if she wears a 49er, she'll be like, 49ers stink, you know, what's your dad doing type of thing. But what I find is fans generally understand the cyclical nature of sports.

What they don't understand is when they don't understand the vision, they're not communicated to, they don't feel like things are transparent. And so for us, I think that's what we try to do a good job at. I mean, when you lose a game, a lot of noise happens. It's Coach Shanahan again. Not just from media members and talk show hosts, but from family members, from anybody. When you lose two, a ton happens. Usually three is like Armageddon. Try nine. And it happens to where, I mean, your wife hears the radio all day. She reads stuff. Eventually you get home and everyone's been saying that their husband sucks so bad.

She wants to know why. And eventually you say, it wasn't me. It was this position. And she eventually says that to another wife. And that's how teams get torn apart. And so you've got to constantly just focus on worrying about what you can control, which is trying to get better every day and blocking out all that stuff because it is bull crap.

Whether it's accurate or not, it's not real. It's not going to help you. You've got to get better so we can win a game. And I think we had the right guys who did that. We had a bunch of young guys who I think didn't know any better and they had to. I think that helped us weed out the guys that weren't really going the right direction. I've never lost so many games before, like in the season or over maybe my career, and so that was different.

That was defensive end Solomon Thomas, and here is the linebacker Malcolm Smith, who left the 49ers after the 2018 season and retired from the game a few years ago. No, I was miserable. I was miserable. And I actually wasn't playing. I was on injury reserve. Oh. So it was like.

Threw you out all last year. Helpless, yeah. I'd say I was taking it harder than some of the guys on the field because you're watching, you feel like you can't do anything. Joe Staley, the now retired offensive lineman who sings, he was hurt that season. Staley played through it, didn't miss a game, but he did start to talk about quitting football when the season was over. I was in year 11. I was on my sixth heavy coach. We were, I think, at this time, like 0-7 and was just like, you know, I had mental lapse of weakness there where I was just, you know, the adversity kind of got to me. Definitely super frustrating.

Not how we expected things to start. But you'd be surprised just how positive things stayed around here. It was pretty incredible. That is the fullback Kyle Juszczyk, who played his college football at Harvard. He is still with the 49ers. And in the conference championship game that got them to this year's Super Bowl, he made a toe tap catch that didn't look like something any fullback should be able to make, and certainly not someone from Harvard. During that losing streak, he was also hurt. He had gotten a concussion in the third game of the season. So we were playing the LA Rams, and we were on the goal line,

and smacked my head with their linebacker, and just had a really, it was really weird. It was almost like a bell just ringing. I remember feeling like a tuning fork. I'm pretty shook up, but I'm sitting in the huddle, and I'm like, I'm definitely messed up, but, like, do I sit down and, like, wait for the trainer, or do I, let's just run this next play, and then I'll figure it out after that. Well, it all happened so quickly, I stayed in, and I ran the next play,

and it was the worst decision. Same thing, ran into the linebacker and that one you know finally put me out where i was you know unconscious for a second and then had to you know get taken in by the trainers and all that kind of stuff wow you regret it sounds like you regret the decision second play definitely yeah i um i should have taken myself out but things happen so quickly well how much of it is also just, you know, macho? There's a little bit of pride in there, which is stupid because there shouldn't be. That's changing, I gather, in the NFL?

It definitely is changing. Like, there's no shame in, like, taking yourself out in that situation. Like, your brain is way too important for this kind of stuff. And I think guys are starting to understand that a lot more. But it's still, I think, so ingrained in all of us that there's a little bit of that pride that still keeps guys in there. As Juszczyk was recuperating from his concussion, the 49ers season kept getting worse. And yet, he says, Kyle Shanahan managed to keep his 0-9 team from turning on each other or on themselves. Nobody was walking on eggshells here. We were still very confident that we were moving in the

right direction. And, you know, every week Kyle would pull up some clips to show like we're making progress. I swear, guys, like just stick to it and it's going to turn around. And I have to say that just sounds like exactly the opposite of what lay people think about football coaches. We think like you could have a pretty good game and then they call you and show you this is the block you missed and so on. That definitely exists. And I've definitely been a part of that too. Um, but I almost feel like it's more of a kind of a new age thinking of this more positive feedback and I know it definitely resonates with me um you know I've never gotten much from a coach that's just screaming at me and telling me how terrible I am I don't know that just doesn't work for me Kyle and I kept

saying to each other like we can go in there and throw a fit and throw water coolers general manager John Lynch again but those guys were giving outstanding attitude each day. And here's Kyle Shanahan. We took over 2-14 team. We knew we had a long way to work. We didn't expect to be 0-9, but we're going to keep working and not reinvent the wheel. And I will not read a comment. I rarely will read an article. I'll check the headings on pro football talks so I can see what other people are saying in the league or just so I keep up with it but like I don't want it to make me feel better about myself you encourage players to do something similar same thing and that's just through my own through my own experience is that if it makes you feel good about yourself then you're it's

going to make you feel that bad and we don't do this to impress we do this one to support our family and two because you love to do it And those are the reasons I do it. I love football, and I love what it did for me growing up. I love that I can support a living for my family. I do not do it so I have someone say something good about me or bad. We've heard from everybody in the building that it was a remarkably positive locker room, and most people attribute that to you. So I'm curious to hear what you did specifically to

make that happen. I don't know if I did a good job. It was my first time in that situation. And I think every situation is different. I mean, people act like there's like a book or something to handle situations. You got to adjust to what the situation is and you don't know that till you're in it. One big reason the 49ers were in that situation is that they didn't have a quality quarterback. And as Shanahan told us, I mean, it's the toughest to me position in the world. And there's 32 teams and there isn't 32 people who can play that position at the level needed.

But remember, in the NFL, as in all the big American sports leagues, the worse a team's record is at the end of the season, the better position they'll be to draft the best players from college. We were 0-9. I knew we were going to be in the position to have a high draft pick. A lot of quarterbacks were coming out that we knew were going to go in the first round. But there was a quarterback already in the NFL who Kyle Shanahan and John Lynch thought could be a good fit for the 49ers. Yeah, Kyle studied them out of college.

I studied the heck out of them coming out of college. He was one of the guys who kept showing up on Kyle's teach tapes in terms of the quick release, the accuracy of the traits you're looking for in quarterbacks. This quarterback was in his fourth season in the NFL, but he barely played at all. And that's because he was the backup to one of the most successful quarterbacks in history, Tom Brady of the New England Patriots. Brady had just turned 40 years old, but he had declared that he did not plan to retire anytime soon. And this declaration apparently made the backup quarterback, the heir apparent to Brady, expendable.

Here's 49ers owner Jed York. You know, it's hard to see into somebody else's building and know where they are and what they're doing. But when you have Tom Brady and Tom says he wants to play another four or five years, that's a very, very difficult decision to make for the Patriots. I asked Shanahan and Lynch how surprised they were to learn that a quarterback they coveted had suddenly become available for trade. I was surprised just because we checked earlier in the year and he wasn't then, and then it happened just a day or two days before the trade deadline. You know, we called the Patriots about him. We quickly got shut down.

They were not interested in getting rid of him, and I don't blame them. And something changed, and we were the beneficiary of that. And people call it genius if that's genius. I don't know. We got lucky. This quarterback's name is Jimmy Garoppolo. What's up, guys? Garoppolo's agent, who happens to also be Tom Brady's agent, called to tell him he'd been traded to the 49ers, but Garoppolo didn't pick up.

I took a nap, woke up. Just about 100 text messages, 100 missed calls. How long was your nap? Well, it wasn't that long, I swear. You go through so many emotions initially because you don't know what's going on. I've never been in this situation before. And so your emotions are going wild. But next thing I knew, I was a 49er and, you know, the rest is history.

Garoppolo wasn't expected to play right away, maybe not even until next season. He had to learn the 49ers' offense from scratch. And Shanahan saw no reason to rush their quarterback of the future and maybe get him hurt. And then, in the 10th game of the season, the 49ers finally won behind quarterback C.J. Bethard. But the following week, they were getting beaten badly. And then, Bethard got hurt.

There was no way to salvage the victory. Shanahan sent Garoppolo in anyway. Garoppolo moving to his left. Looking towards the end zone.

He throws! Touchdown! We're walking off the field and the crowd's like cheering and we just got blown out and our fans were excited. Okay, so now the 49ers are 1-10. In the next game, Garoppolo gets his first start. Garoppolo over the middle, caught by Taylor.

First down and more. The 49ers beat the Chicago Bears 15-14. Here's Solomon Thomas. It was just, a win felt so good, and it's something we didn't want to take for granted, and something that we always wanted to keep feeling. The next game, Jimmy Garoppolo passed for 334 yards, and the 49ers won again.

And we got in the roll, and, you know, Jimmy came in, was doing incredible, you know. That motivated the team as well, and it was pretty special. With Garoppolo leading the way, the San Francisco 49ers won five straight games, including three against playoff-bound teams. And they finished the season at 6-10. See you later! Touchdown, San Francisco! What are the odds of a team losing their first nine games and then winning their last five?

You can't count that high. It's not like Jimmy was the savior, right? It's the whole team. Parag Marathe again. And every single player played better, had more confidence, and saw the culmination of their hard work and patience that they had towards the vision sort of come to fruition. Jimmy was the catalyst, like the first spark plug, but it really ignited the whole team. Here's Joe Staley. I mean, it was huge for our

team last year to finish the way we did. You know, Jimmy coming in really made a huge difference for us. And Kyle Juszczyk. I think you really got to give Jimmy a lot of credit. You know, Jimmy coming in really made a huge difference for us. And Kyle Juszczyk. I think you really got to give Jimmy a lot of credit. I mean, he put in serious time after practice with the coaches by himself. I mean, he was here all night just trying to learn this playbook. And Jed York, the owner. I mean, it was very clear that Jimmy was a guy that, you know, took everybody's attention on the field. Like, the guys gravitated towards him,

and he's a natural leader. As a reward, Jimmy Garoppolo, having sat on the bench for four seasons in New England and then started a grand total of five games for San Francisco, Garoppolo signed a five-year contract worth $137.5 million. It was, at that point, the richest contract in NFL history.

You know, for the most part, I just go out and do my thing. You know, all the outside noise is, it's just noise. You get caught up in all that stuff, you're going to have a tough time. NFL's hard enough as it is. From everything that we've heard from everyone on the exec side and on the player side you're some combination of like ya tittle and superman and jesus christ like people just gather around you and love you it's a pretty good combo yeah i think you know i've never really tried to fake it or you know be uh i don't know someone that i'm not because you know guys i mean especially in nfl locker room they see right through that they're not dumb so you just have to be yourself uh I don't know I've always thought of myself as one of the guys and I think that plays a big part in that it had been a bizarre season for the 49ers the deepest gloom replaced almost overnight by the brightest of futures. But now there's a question.

What exactly are the San Francisco 49ers? Are they the best 6-10 team in history, the team that won their last five games? Or are they, well, a 6-10 team? Teams that go 6-10 one year are not very likely to win the Super Bowl next year. Although sport being sport, crazy things do happen. That's one reason we like it. When we visited the 49ers before the

2018 season, I had asked York and everyone else to predict how the team would finish that year. Their answers were, to me at least, remarkable. And they probably said a lot about what kind of mindset you need to run a team and the mindset of a working athlete. Here's how the executives, York, Guido, Lynch, and Marate, answered when I asked about their expectations. I think you never know what's going to happen in an NFL season, but it's really about getting better each and every game. I don't have any predictions on wins or losses.

I don't want to put a number on it. I do know we're a much better football team in terms of talent. I think we've really improved our talent level. Are we a perfect roster? No. But I don't think those really exist in salary cap football. You're going to have holes in your team, but we're much better and further along than we were last year. That we continue to stay on the path.

Like, you know, if we were still building towards something and it didn't necessarily lead to wins, that's okay if we're on that path that we're all believing. I think you'd agree that the executives are the definition of noncommittal. And here are the players. And they, I think you'd agree, are anything but noncommittal. Here in order are Solomon Thomas, Malcolm Smith, and Joe Staley. You know, our goal is to win it all. And I feel like we have the potential to do that.

The ultimate success would be the Super Bowl. I'd always just think of it as a Super Bowl. Those players never did win a Super Bowl with the 49ers. But fullback Kyle Juszczyk will have another chance this year. Juszczyk came to the 49ers as a free agent in 2017, the same year his coach Kyle Shanahan arrived. Got a sense that San Francisco was really interested and the idea of coming out to California, the idea of playing for Kyle Shanahan, definitely knew who John Lynch was, remembered him as a player, and just liked the idea of playing for Kyle Shanahan definitely knew who John Lynch was remembered him as a player

and just liked the idea of a former player running the organization so then when they when you first heard that they were interested in you did you have pause about the Niners considering that they'd had some rough years I try to kind of spin it in my head to think about it as like how cool would it be to be part of that that class, almost, that turns it around. You know, it's almost like going to that college and being part of the first recruiting class for that head coach that turns the whole thing around. And that's how I kind of looked at it here. We were kind of Kyle's first free agent class that, you know, hopefully you can get this thing turned around. Well, it has been turned around, but having been close now several times during the Shanahan-Lynch regime, the 49ers will be very disappointed if they lose this year's Super Bowl.

Who do you think will win? Who do you want to win and why? Let us know. Our email is radio at Freakonomics.com. And if you want more football in your life, check out our episode called When Is a Superstar Just Another Employee? It is about the first ever survey of workplace conditions in the NFL conducted by their players union. We heard about clogged showers, rats in the locker room, as well as some helpful insights for those of us who don't play football. That is episode number 557. We will be back soon with a regular episode of Freakonomics Radio.

Until then, take care of yourself and, if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app or at Freakonomics.com, where we also publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Anders Kelto, with help from Derek John. This update was produced by Anders Kelto with help from Derek John. This update was produced by Ryan Kelly. Special thanks to the 49ers and especially Bob Lang, their former VP of Communications. Our staff includes Alina Kullman, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, Julie Kanfer, Lierich Baudich, Morgan Levy, Neil Carruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilly, and Zach Lipinski. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers. Newark Bowditch, Morgan Levy, Neil Carruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilly, and Zach Lipinski. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers. All the other music is composed by Luis Guerra.

As always, thank you for listening. How's your golf game? I'm guessing it's deteriorated a little bit with the new job or no? I was at an event last night and there's all these fabulous San Francisco golf club, all these members, and I said, come on out. I said, I've played golf twice since I've taken this job. The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything. Stitcher.