KNBR 49ers beat writer Kevin Jones made his weekly appearance on KNBR 1050’s The Audible Wednesday morning, and got into a testy discussion with host Kevin Frandsen regarding Colin Kaepernick and the culture of the 49ers locker room.
Jones began by arguing that Colin Kaepernick’s comment this week saying the 49ers can mount a turnaround next season by changing the culture, does not reflect well on head coach Chip Kelly.
“Colin Kaepernick’s comment about the culture is not good for Chip Kelly, because obviously the culture starts from the top with the owners, but culture is really a head coach thing,” Jones said. “You’re supposed to develop a brand of football, get people to buy into it and believe. You really can’t set up a culture unless you’re winning football games.
“Chip Kelly does this whole bit on the podium, ‘you know we take everything week by week’…that works when you’re winning. If you compartmentalize things when you’re losing, if you don’t take a big picture view, the media is not going to believe you, and I don’t know if some of your players and team are going to believe you. When Kaepernick said the culture has to change, that was not a good comment for Chip Kelly’s future.”
Frandsen responded by arguing that Kaepernick is the one responsible for negatively affecting the locker room early in the year due to his protest. Jones wasn’t having any of that, playfully calling Frandsen a ‘Kaepernick hater,’ and denouncing the narrative that Kap fractured the locker room in any way.
“I think the narrative that Colin Kaepernick destroyed this locker room…you’d have to walk into this locker room and you could tell that’s not the case at all,” Jones said. “He’s a leader, people come up to him, people talk to him. Obviously you know more about locker room culture than me, but I’ve been around four or five different NFL locker rooms now. This locker room is not torn apart at all.”
Jones then added that Kelly should be more vocal about the limited tools Trent Baalke has given him to work with.
Frandsen disagreed strongly.
“He doesn’t need to do that in the media,” Frandsen said. “He just needs to do that behind closed doors. He doesn’t need you to tell him what a culture is. He doesn’t need (Brian Muphy) to tell him what a culture is. He doesn’t need that! What he needs is to tell Baalke what he needs, and he doesn’t need to let you in on what’s going on.”
Jones finished the discussion by arguing that culture is multi-faceted, and that while he’d keep Kelly for 2017, Kaepernick’s quote is a red flag.
“Kevin, culture has a hundred different little cutlets that add to it,” Jones said. “There’s certain things that Chip Kelly has done, where you could say listen, this team is a tight team, they haven’t turned on him. He is not fully at fault here. But the comment that Kap made, he didn’t have to say that. He was asked, ‘what do you do to mount a turnaround in 2017’, and he said we need a few pieces but really the culture needs to change…I thought that was a telling quote.”
Listen to the full interview below.