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December 16, 2002 John Shrader / Sports Journal Steve Mariucci is a good coach, but may not be good enough to last another season in San Francisco. It doesn’t appear as though he’ll survive the expectations; survive the injuries; survive the team’s lack of depth; survive the perception that he’s no Bill Walsh (though the times are so different Walsh would have trouble putting together consistent Super Bowl contenders). Going into the final two weeks of the season, the confidence in Mariucci’s ability to get this team through the playoffs is at what seems an all-time low. No votes of confidence from ownership – none asked for and none offered. The chances that he’ll be offered a contract extension by York, short of a run to the NFC title game, are about as good as the chances Mariucci will work next year on a lame-duck contract. How the spin-masters of the club will work out the departure is anyone’s guess. He most likely won’t be fired. The owner is too cheap – and the General Manager, Terry Donahue and the Consultant, Bill Walsh are too savvy to axe a coach with a winning record, after a season in which half the roster has been hurt at one time or another. Conventional Wisdom says Mariucci will be given permission to interview for another job, and this time around he’ll be hard pressed to say no. Mariucci may not be the second coming of Bill Walsh, but look what happened to Mike Holmgren when he left the nest of a true personnel genius, Ron Wolf. Tom Coughlan keeps his job in Jacksonville despite evidence, anecdotal at least, that he’s a tyrant, a mediocre coach and a bad general manager. Let’s face it, this is all relative. All the coaches in the National Football League are good, some are better than others. Mariucci happens to be better than most, but not good enough for Walsh, or the Yorks, or the fans who think this is still the late 1980’s, when a team could load up on talent, unrestricted by a salary cap. The days of Bill Walsh and Jimmy Johnson fielding a team with a first-string and a second-string better than most, and then coaching the hell out of them, partly through intellectual stimulation and partly through fear, are long gone. Mariucci enjoys neither the personality of those two men (and that’s partly good), nor the absolute iron-fist with which both of those coaches ruled. Terry Donahue is loading his side of the operation with “his guys” and the presence of Walsh is everywhere, partly now through a relationship with John and Denise York and partly because of his legendary status in the game; status he is happy to exploit at every turn. I’m not suggesting Mariucci doesn’t have his faults. The play-calling tends to be conservative and worse yet, predictable. His appearances in front of the media tend to be saccharine, well-rehearsed, and occasionally disingenuous. In his sixth year, Steve Mariucci has probably done as good as job as in any of his seasons. He inherited a very good team and won 25 games in his first two years. Then he inherited a refugee from the Canadian Football League, Jeff Garcia, and in two years they were back in the playoffs, and Garcia was in the Pro Bowl. Few coaches – in the span of six years – get the chance to coach a really good team and a really bad team and survive it. But the end of the road appears to be closer than ever. Not because Steve Mariucci hasn’t done a good job, but because he hasn’t won a championship. In these parts, good isn’t good enough. |
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