49ers win the new Harbaugh way in thorough thrashing of Packers

Through his two seasons as the San Francisco 49ers' head coach, Jim Harbaugh has espoused a theory of offensive football that seems to go against the NFL grain. While many teams were heading in a pass-first direction, Harbaugh stuck to his guns, believing that a team with a dominant offensive line, a brutal rushing attack, and a stifling defense did not need to put too much on the shoulders of its quarterback. He won 13 regular-season games with Alex smith at quarterback in the 2011 season, just missing out on the Super Bowl in a close NFL Championship game loss to the New York Giants. The plan in Year Two was to stick with Smith -- at least after the 49ers finished second in the Peyton Manning sweepstakes. And that plan worked well to start. Smith was the league's most efficient passer through the first half of the 2012 campaign. But an injury in what became a tie with the St. Louis Rams in Week 10 led to the emergence of Colin Kaepernick, who Harbaugh selected in the second round of the 2011 NFL Draft. Immediately, the 49ers became a different kind of dangerous team -- still full of the fundamentals key to any Harbaugh squad, but now able to spread the field with Kaepernick's...