1. He's doing a hell of a lot of work for someone who supposedly already has his mind made up. He's spending hours upon hours interviewing candidates when he could easily have just promoted Baalke like his father did with McCloughan and proclaimed that the problem lay with the coaching and not management.
2. Jed is no dummy and he knows Niner fans are not dummies either. I'm sure he knows that the good PR he created when he announced that he was going to do a thorough search for a GM is going to be more than doubled by the bad PR that would result in not following through on his promise.
3. The Yorks are trying to build a new football stadium. If you want to get a publicly funded football stadium built it's beneficial to have a good team and generate as much positive PR as possible. If you have a wining team people will want you. It behooves them to do the best they can to put that together.
4. Eddie D has personally vouched for Jed on numerous occasions. Why would Eddie give his word if he knew Jed wasn't really serious? I'm pretty sure Eddie is still on bad terms with the York's so what benefit would he gain if he were to be in on it as well?
Regardless of whether you believe Jed's talk about wanting to bring a championship to San Francisco, it just makes logical sense for him to be taking this seriously. I can't think of any advantage to be gained from just going through the motions and just picking the inside guy. Whether he is knowledgeable enough to pick the right guy is another story.
