The "Great Rebuild" Myth

Despite media fiction, the Niners never fixed their salary cap mess

July 19, 2003 (NHS) -- Here's a lovely piece of prose for you, penned by ESPN.com's John Clayton:

"The 49ers of the late '90s recovered from salary cap hell and set the standard for how to navigate through those tough times. After two playoff seasons, Mariucci and the Walsh camp went through the tough decisions caused by being $28 million over the cap after the 12-4 season in 1998.

Walsh's hard personnel decisions and Mariucci's upbeat style of coaching enabled the 49ers to go from a 4-12 cap-starved team to a playoff team in 2001. The 49ers won the NFC West this season. It was a magnificent success story."

Yes, it is a magnificent story, Mr. Clayton -- the key word being story. Like most of what ESPN.com writes about the 49ers' supposed success, it is a magnificent fiction. Because while Clayton and the rest of the media would like you to believe the last few years have been salary cap hell, Dante would tell you that the 49ers never did quite reach the lowest depths of the Inferno in dealing with their salary cap mess.

The complete story would include that the 49ers: (1) caused their salary cap hell by their own stupidity; (2) didn't do anything extraordinary to get out of it; and (3) are still up against the cap so tight that they can't even afford one decent free-agent this offseason, a critical time before a pivotal season that will define whether the 49ers are a franchise on the rise or on the decline.

The 49ers are today, almost five years after their big crunch, still barely able to meet the salary cap. They are just $700,000 under the cap according to a May 2nd figure. So while all we hear is how amazing their rebuilding turnaround has been, a more realistic description of the 49ers' salary cap "solution" is that they sidestepped every tough decision until it was too late, then when it hit the fan, Walsh and his cronies scurried for cover under the comfy umbrella of the "salary cap hell" and injury excuses.

For the Bandwagon, these excuses easily explained away why they became a 5-11 team in 1999. But since then they've still spent more than almost every other team. While the Bandwagon wants to use the distant past as an excuse and create an image of the 49ers being a young, feisty team grabbing a lot of wins on a bare-bones budget, fact is the 49ers had the fifth highest payroll in the NFL last season. Certainly part of this money was old "dead weight", but part of it was thanks to recent terrible salary decisions.

For example, in 2000, Walsh proclaimed Junior Bryant as "one of the premier defensive linemen in football" and signed the pedestrian Bryant to a lavish contract. To say Walsh is a moron for signing such a mediocre player for so much money is an understatement, but Walsh compounded the issue by structuring the deal as a classic "49er special", the salary spread over seven years to dilute the cap effect. Bryant, of course, suffered a career-ending injury just months later, and because of the way the contract was structured, the 49ers couldn't release him or else the hit on their cap would be too great. So they carried a guy who would never play again on their roster/physically unable to perform list for three years, his salary as "dead weight" against the cap, until finally cutting him this year at a final cost of $665,000 against this year's cap, three years since he last played a down. And remember, this all happened after their supposed "salary cap hell".

Fact is, the 49ers didn't make any explicit strategy changes to end their "hell". Their cap came down mostly because (a) the salary cap itself rises every year on its own thanks to fatter TV contracts; and (b) their cap spending naturally came down when their multitude of over-aged, overrated and overpaid players who were stupidly still on the roster were released. The retirement of Steve Young's mega-million dollar sham contract, for example, and cutting other high priced idiots like Merton Hanks, Tim McDonald, Ken Norton, and so on, shaved millions off the cap when the effects of their shortsighted "cap friendly" contracts eventually dissipated.

That's it. That's the "genius" behind the 49ers' rehabilitation of their cap. Why this should masquerade as "setting the standard of navigating salary cap hell", as according to ESPN, is baffling. Where exactly is the "hard personnel decision" involved in releasing an ineffective, over-the-hill, overpaid, overrated player? Every team does the exact same thing -- and most do it much more intelligently by making one or two tough cuts every year instead of putting them all off so they hit the cap all at once. But for the Niners, it's been allowed to define their down years and has basically excused them away to the point that most people don't even consider those years failures for the Niners.

What has the media fooled, of course, is that the 49ers quickly returned to their gaudy win-loss totals these last two years. Yet every legitimate fan knows that those records were not due to an improved salary cap situation, but because of the same old factors we're all too familiar with: a pathetic schedule (just six games against winning teams) and the cozy NFC Worst division (especially considering the Rams collapse in 2002).

Perhaps what's most shocking is that despite the doomsday cap crunch that forced the 49ers into the supposedly Draconian dark ages, Walsh and the 49ers learned no lessons and haven't really changed their stripes. If they really had been committed to "tough choices" over the past few years, their cap figure should be comfortably in the black by now. Instead, they're still teetering on the red because they've been playing the same contract-restructure games all along, which, again, helped push their payroll to the fifth-highest in the NFL last year. This offseason, for example, they played their same old game of restructuring the contracts of at least seven players in order to slide under the cap. And it's not like these seven are irreplaceable -- heck, given the 49ers talent depth, you could replace virtually every player with a freshly drafted rookie -- the 49ers didn't have to restructure, they chose to do so.

In short, the incompetence in managing the cap beginning with Carmen Policy and now inherited from Walsh hasn't changed, it's just that these 49ers are younger so a bit less overrated, and the dollars aren't as high, so the effect of poor decisions on their cap isn't as bloated as in the mid-'90s. Still, all it would take is another injury involving one of their restructured players -- to the overpaid Jeff Garcia, for example -- and millions of dollars of dead weight would once again hit the cap.

The kicker to this story is that if Walsh and the 49ers had indeed lived up to their hype and had made those "tough decisions" that the media pretends, the 49ers would be sitting pretty right now. Their schedule and the NFC Worst are as easy as they've ever been, the Niners already have a free pass to the playoffs, so all it would take is two or three veteran free agent signings to push the 49ers into the realms of starting to think about legitimacy in the postseason. But since they wussed-out of making any real decisions, they are handcuffed from making any big free agency moves, and the 49ers look more like a team headed for another fall than ready to move up the ladder.

All in all, the image of the 49ers performing an amazing turnaround vis-à-vis the stranglehold of the mean old salary cap is mostly just that: image. The reality is they screwed their cap in the late-'90s and haven't really changed their philosophy towards it that got them in trouble in the first place. All that the 49ers have done in their "best ever" rebuilding effort is replace old overrated thus overpaid players with new overrated yet not quite as over-paid-yet players, allowing their cap problem to naturally fall back to where it was in 1995. They are still crafting and restructuring "cap friendly" contracts, mortgaging their future every year, once again inching towards an inevitable crunch.

This isn't a solution, it's a fiction that reminds one of the fiscal responsibility you find in Congress' approach to the deficit. The 49ers don't deserve credit, they deserve blame. They certainly don't deserve the lavish praise of the sort by Clayton at ESPN.com. Of course, it's not like we'll ever get the truth from the media. They still haven't apologized for their idiocy of years of hailing Policy as the "Master Capologist", when it was his bungling and cheating that is at the root of this issue.

Yet Policy, Walsh, and all the other "best evers" of the past will be long gone and escape any blame once their continued salary cap ineptitude finally catches up to 49ers yet again in the near future. The 49ers lack talent and depth, can't sign any free agents, and probably can't afford to keep all their overrated guys like Terrell Owens, Julian Peterson and Ahmed Plummer beyond this last year of their contracts, which will of course anger the Bandwagon. And it's all being set up to be the fault of the new "tightwad" 49ers regime -- with fall guys Dr. York, Terry Donahue and Erickson -- to preserve the precious image of the past icons that "set the standard" that nobody else can ever possibly reach.

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