Which 49ers player are you still upset with for signing elsewhere?

Originally posted by Geeked:

Originally posted by NinerGM:

Wesley Walls. Niner killer and was the heir to Brent Jones.

That was my number two. I'm glad you brought him up. I remember when they drafted the Greg Clark because he LOOKED like Brent Jones, but Walls actually PLAYED like Jones. He left in the expansion draft, which was right about the time things started to go wrong for the 49ers' personnel department.

I hated it when he made plays against us in the playoffs, wish we kept him , he became a big part of that Panthers offense

Originally posted by Niners816:
I think the biggest loss in the off season after 1994, was shanahan to Denver. Trestman screwed up our offensive profile and we became too pass heavy.

I rank 1994 losses as

1- shanahan
2- Deion
3- Watters

Loville while not as good as Watters put up similar production 1400 total yards 13 tds vs Ricky's 1600 total and 11 tds. We had no real replacement for Deion and have been chasing an elite cb ever since. I hated what trestman turned the offense into, went from almost 50/50 balance to an almost run n shoot balance of 60% pass.

Trestman did an outstanding job, not sure how you can blame him for making the offense "pass heavy" when they had no running game to speak of at all..............Trestman was the scapegoat for the front office dropping the ball big time.


The biggest loss by far IMO is Watters, with Trestman and no running game, the 49ers still had the #1 or #2 offense in the NFL. I don't buy that the playcalling was the issue, especially not when the 49ers went into Dallas and knocked off the Cowboys with Grbac at QB that year. The Packers basically dared the 49ers to run the ball, a gimpy one handed Adam Walker ended up getting a carry and 49ers fans were like:

I know it's been said but Watters loss was huge. The details have been covered there.

A close second has to be Deion. Thinking about him against Favre would have been huge. I always hate that the packers rise began exactly when we lost two pieces in Watters and Sanders which would have clearly tipped the scales in our favor.

Originally posted by Phoenix49ers:

Trestman did an outstanding job, not sure how you can blame him for making the offense "pass heavy" when they had no running game to speak of at all..............Trestman was the scapegoat for the front office dropping the ball big time.


The biggest loss by far IMO is Watters, with Trestman and no running game, the 49ers still had the #1 or #2 offense in the NFL. I don't buy that the playcalling was the issue, especially not when the 49ers went into Dallas and knocked off the Cowboys with Grbac at QB that year. The Packers basically dared the 49ers to run the ball, a gimpy one handed Adam Walker ended up getting a carry and 49ers fans were like:

We are just gonna have to agree to disagree on Trestman. While the production was really good, there was no need to totally ignore the run the way he did. When you factor in total plays including sacks, we ran the ball on only 38% of the plays. This really made no sense because in 1995 we still aveaged 3.6 ypc which was only .3 off what we were in 1994 with Ricky. IMO, that not a big enough drop off to seemingly ingnore the run and to me running less than 40% is ignoring it. This is pretty much a run and shoot style pass/rush profile.

Now I not trying to say the run game was good by any stretch, but attempts are still important to at least make the defense respect the play action. I agree that were should have passed more due to the running personnel we had but when you are getting into that 60%+ range that is way too much. There really is little wonder that this is when Steve started to have some durability issues. You had an aging OL, refusal to attempt runs in any sort of balance way, and we didn't use any shotgun formation to give any extra time(I know steve didn't like the gun, but if trestman wanted to tweak the offense maybe installing some shotgun would have helped the situation). Steve had 462 attempts in a full 1994 season and despite missing 5 full games in 1995 he had 447.

I would have gladly sacificed 20-25 ypg total offense, to have a more reasonable 45% or so running attempts per game. Perhaps, this could have taken some heat off of steve. Again, I didn't hate Trestman but I think the whole lets throw the ball almost 650 times was a bit much, especially in 1995. Our defense was way too good in 1995 to feel like we had to chase points and totally ignore the running game.

Speaking of the Dallas game in 1995, We threw the ball 30 times and ran it 32 times. Now I know we were protecting a lead for the entire game, but still I think losing Steve at least temporarily made trestman run the ball a little more.