What on earth has happened to the 49ers? There is very little about the current team which resembles the Super Bowl team from two seasons ago.
As he does every week, Steve Young joined the Tolbert, Krueger and Brooks show on Wednesday to break down all things 49ers. He brought some insight with him courtesy of Jerry Rice to try and explain what’s wrong with this team.
Young said he asked Rice at his Forever Young charity event what the thought about the 49ers’ struggles this season and received and interesting answer.
“I go, ‘What do you think?,” Young said. “He goes, ‘There’s no dogs.’ And I got to interpret that. There’s no dogs on there. You watch the team go on, go off, everyone’s like, ‘okay.’…
“I’m talking about a leadership committee that happens naturally, it’s organic. And there are certain personalities that it’s made up of, ‘over my dead’ body kind of guys, the guys that have the grit, that have the moral authority to turn, at anytime as a group or individually, to the rest of the 50 guys and declare the truth.”
Young said that he believes in the 49ers’ two most recent Super Bowl runs, the locker rooms were “best in the league kind of locker rooms” and that’s clearly been lost.
“There’s nothing wrong individually,” Young said. “Great talent, great people, all that stuff, but as a group, as a collective, they’re missing that thing that pulls everyone… When they went to the Super Bowl, Tom, it was because of the locker room. You can say, ‘Oh it’s because of the great play calling, it was because of this great pass rush.’ Yes and yes, but mostly about the people.”