Originally posted by LottOfDefense:
This is only going to get worse not better since there still is free agency. I never expected them to resign Iupati or Crabtree but now I think they are going to loose Cox and Culliver too. No doubt Smith retires. Gore is gone, he deserves better. I think they may even trade Willis to start Borland which is going to piss off Bowman. Paraag is the real GM of the team and he is pulling the strings on Baalke. My guess is he get paid escalators for how much profit the 9ers make.
You don't just cut 90% of your coaching staff for less quality of coaches to save some change and not start cutting cost on player personal too. Bottom line the York's never have cared about winning. Come September this will not be a Superbowl roster. Who will be the 9ers elite players Bowman, Aldon, may be Staley. All huge question marks, and with less talent and worse coaches there is only one way to go.
Although I don't want to get into the speculation game of who holds power and in what form in the FO, this post otherwise 100% represents my own take on our prospects. Too many people are repeating the mantra that "this is a SB calibre roster". For me we have been mostly coming down from the 2012 peak, talent-wise. Everyone knows about all the FAs we have this year, and much as we want to rationalise it we are almost certainly going to lose our starting LG, one of our main WRs, our bellcow RB for the last 8 years, our best Dlineman, 2 starting DBs (one of whom overperformed anyway). Our two All-Pro MLBs are coming back from IR, one of them from a b***h of a nagging injury ("turf toe" sounds so innocent but it's not), the other from an almost catastrophic one and will not have played a real game for 21 months next opening day. Our backup RB has lost most of two seasons with two of the worst injuries in sport, in a position with a short lifespan for a pro and when his comparative advantage had been speed. Does Kendall have any speed left? Aldon MAY have reformed (like Josh Gordon "reformed") but he may have not and we end up losing him. On top of that we are strapped for cap space, which should see Brooks and who knows who else cut or traded.
Yes, everything may fall into place, and we may hit a homerun in the draft and get another batch of second tier FAs to massively overperform for us like Rodgers, Cox and Bethea have done in the past. Perhaps Tomsula gets everyone to buy in his vision. Perhaps Geep only needed the stifling presence of Harbaugh and Roman to be removed so that he can show us all what an innovative OC he is. Perhaps Mangini is not the overrated egocentric d**k every insider report makes him out to be. Perhaps like in 2011 the team starts pulling off victories out of their collective behinds and gets back into the winner mentality. More likely however I see us with an aging, expensive core of players, an inexperienced staff who have already been put on the defensive from the inept manner the FO has handled the transition to them, and a Raider-like reputation of being dysfunctional to deter FAs from coming here.
7-9 is my prediction, and most of those 7 wins in the garbage end of the season after we are well out of the running for the playoffs.
