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Jim Harbaugh and the vagaries of the workplace

December 30, 2014

Well, it’s official: Jim Harbaugh is off to coach at the University of Michigan, ending a successful if stormy tenure as head coach of the San Francisco 49ers.

Harbaugh’s departure – or dismissal, the breakup may not have been mutual – proves what I have long suspected about the workplace: It’s less about what you do than how well you relate to the boss. Sure, the 49ers had a mediocre season (8-8) that kept them out of the playoffs for the first time in three years. But if mediocrity or worse were the real standard, Tom Coughlin wouldn’t be staying on as coach of the New York Giants. And Rex Ryan would’ve been gone from the New York Jets years ago. Instead he and Harbaugh are both exiting at the same time.

There’s also been talk that Harbaugh “lost the locker room,” particularly in his eagerness to get rid of former Niners’ quarterback Alex Smith. But it was clear after the team’s 20-17 victory over the Arizona Cardinals that the Niners went all out to win one for the Gipper, so to speak – to end their season and Harbaugh’s tenure on a high note. Nor would a team led by a temperamental coach who is said to be even more emotional in the clubhouse be likely to award that coach the game ball or shower him with ice water after the game if the members weren’t fond of him. Football players are not actors.

The winter of the Niners’ discontent

December 21, 2014

It’s with a heavy heart that I speculate about the future of my San Francisco 49ers.

How is it that a team that was so strong could become so lackluster with virtually the same personnel that went to the Super Bowl in 2013 and lost to the Seattle Seahawks in the playoffs this year – a game that many considered the real Super Bowl given how badly the Denver Broncos would play against the Seahawks in the actual Super Bowl?

But that was yesterday, and that is sport, as Novak Djokovic likes to say. In life, you’re only as good as your present success, and that’s never truer than in sport where teams mystifyingly rise and fall, sometimes within a season.

What role has Coach Jim Harbaugh played in all this – he of the dad corduroys and the heart-on-his-sleeve temperament? The seeds of his exit may have been sown in 2012 when he sought to get rid of quarterback Alex Smith – at first surreptitiously and then overtly after Smith suffered a concussion and was replaced by Colin Kaepernick, who took the team all the way to the Super Bowl.

Oh, the ironies: The Niners originally chose Smith over his high school rival Aaron Rodgers, who, miffed, went off to the Green Bay Packers – and legend. What if they had chosen Rodgers instead? Would I even be writing this post?

Colin is a mystery even to people like me who adore him. Brilliant, beautiful and hostile to a media that alternately fawns over and taunts him, he spent the off-season giving TMZ ammunition for a false date-rape charge by the company he kept. His curt responses to the local beat reporters, who try to ingratiate themselves as their job success depends in part on the team’s good will, do him no credit and will no doubt earn him no sympathy now that his season has headed south.

The NFL’s new conduct policy: You’ll need a scorecard

December 11, 2014

The NFL has announced its new conduct policy, and frankly, I’d rather study nuclear physics or the tax code.

The penalties will be tougher for violations, of course, including domestic violence. But they won’t be implemented by commish Roger Goodell, even though the NFL will rely more on policing itself. No, there will be a special counsel to implement the conduct code, which goes into effect immediately even though the special counsel has yet to be appointed.

And there’s a new conduct committee as well, made up of owners, among others. I guess the committee will help implement the policy, which the players’ union didn’t see before the announcement. The union was a little miffed about that, as unions are wont to be.

Does anyone else’s head ache? What a load of hooey: The NFL is taking on more policing of its own organization, which it should’ve done in the first place, but Goodell – who is in effect the NFL’s CEO, as in chief executive officer, as in the person who chiefly executes – can’t implement the policy. You need three more layers of bureaucracy. Geez Louise, this makes Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner who immediately canned the bigoted misanthrope Donald Sterling, look like Eliot Ness. ...

A seat of our own

December 8, 2014

With all of the talk about race in the aftermath of two high-profiled cases – one in Ferguson, Mo.; one in New York City – in which grand juries declined to indict police whose actions resulted in the deaths of two black men, few have considered that this may be as much a problem of gender as it is of race.

Looking at the leaders and experts who sat with President Barack Obama recently during a discussion of the explosive events in Ferguson, you saw white faces and black faces. What you didn’t see – or at least what I didn’t see – were many female faces.

Why is that? Studies have shown that female cops are better at diffusing difficult situations without resorting to violence or even one-upmanship. I hate to reduce the world to hormones, but I do think testosterone and the “mine is bigger than yours” mentality it fosters play a crucial role in male police officers’ responses to male suspects. Sure, education, racism, poverty, media stereotypes – these are all factors. But at the end of the day, women are generally – emphasis on the word “generally” – better at dealing with volatile moments.

That doesn’t mean that every incident can be handled with kid gloves. Nor does it suggest that it’s always easy to discern the situation in which force is necessary or the one in which discretion is truly the better part of valor.

But it does point to the need for women to add their voices to the decision-making process, as Ali Torre observed when I talked to her recently about the Safe at Home Foundation that she and husband, former Yankee manager Joe Torre, founded to end domestic violence.

We need more women. We need more women in the NFL, not only to help the league sort out its domestic violence issues but also to tell young players like Colin Kaepernick, going through a bad stretch, that you don’t shove a cameraman out of the way because you’re having a lousy day at the office. That’s not going to improve your circumstances. Indeed, culling ill will is one way to cloud them.

Colin Kaepernick, Roger Goodell and a lack of leadership

December 1, 2014

Am I going to have to hop on a plane for San Fran to straighten out my Niners? Because I gotta tell you, I’m ready, willing and able to do it. They are foundering. Their 19-3 loss to their arch-nemesis, the Seattle Seahawks, on Thanksgiving night proved that the biggest turkey wasn’t the one on the table. Geez, Louise. Although Thanksgiving football is its own curse. Remember the Jets’ game against the Patriots, in which then- Jets’ quarterback Mark Sanchez had his head up some player’s butt?

Sanchez is now part of the winning Philadelphia Eagles. So there’s hope, Colin Kaepernick. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, then you know that I’m a huge fan of the 49ers’ QB. But I love my favorites with a view. Colin failed to score a touchdown Thanksgiving night after scoring at least one in each of the previous 18 games. He was intercepted twice. Worse, he cemented the notion that he can’t win against his archrivals, can’t close the big game, with the Hawks looming again on the schedule.

The wrap here is that he’s making too slow a transition from being a galvanizing running QB to a traditional pocket passer. Transitions take time. But in the meantime, he needs to become more of a traditional team leader. Don’t wait to be told to address the team before the game. Speak up. Lead by word as well as deed.

This isn’t a hopeless situation. It’s a work in progress and I believe progress and success will be the end result. ...

RG III sacked

November 26, 2014

Big pre-Thanksgiving sports news: Robert Griffin III is out at quarterback for the Washington Redskins’ Nov. 30 game against the Indianapolis Colts and Colt McCoy is in.

Head coach Jay Gruden, who has publicly lambasted RG III, made the announcement Nov. 26, so this is not a surprise. But it is a shame. When he blazed across the draft in 2012 – in the same QB class as the Colts’ ascendant Andrew Luck – RG brought an excitement and promise to the beleaguered Redskins. Maureen Dowd even compared him to Mr. Darcy – perhaps the highest compliment from we women of a certain vintage. But now injuries and the sense among some of the team’s Powers That Be that RG has hit a wall have made the Baylor University star’s stock plummet.

I have to laugh – bitterly, but laugh nonetheless. When I was plotting my forthcoming novel “The Penalty for Holding” – the second in my series “The Games Men Play” – I wrestled with how psychologically acute it was to create a coach who has no confidence in the team’s quarterback, my main character. I guess I now have my answer. It turns out you can’t make this stuff up.

Adrian Peterson gets his day in (NFL) court

November 26, 2014

The NFL, which suspended Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson for the rest of the season for taking a switch to his 4-year-old, will hear his appeal Tuesday, Dec. 2. I must admit that I feel sorry for Peterson. It’s a terrible thing to be deprived of your livelihood, of doing the thing you’re good at, maybe the only thing you’re good at. It’s particularly terrible when you realize that Commissioner Roger Goodell – who seems to be making up punishments as he goes along – came down hard on Peterson, because he initially didn’t come down hard enough on former Baltimore Raven Ray Rice after he cold-cocked his wife in a casino elevator.

Regardless, Peterson did a terrible thing. And the fact that he and his supporters don’t really get that is troubling, not only because it perpetuates childhood violence but because it shows that there is a segment of our society that doesn’t think clearly.

Understand that this is first and foremost about the protection of children, which all of us in society have a hand in. Whether we have children or not, or even like children, we as members of a civilized society have an obligation to see the next generation come to healthy, happy fruition. No one’s trying to mind Peterson’s business. No one’s denying that different cultures have different ideas about child-raising and that traditionally taking a switch to a child in black culture may have been a “cruel if only to be kind” way of keeping a rebellious child from suffering worse at the hands of white authority.

But choices have consequences. And private choices often have public consequences, particularly when you’re famous. ...