Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Hate Wednesday: The San Francisco Forty-Niners

We all LOVE the Packers: “Hate Wednesday” is a continuing series wherein I expound upon my deep-seated hatred of other NFL football teams. I’m a Packer fan and Packer fans have long memories. Sometime it’s very simple and sometimes it’s complex. You may have other reasons to hate these teams. These are mine…

For the entire tenure of Joe Montana and much that of his successor Steve Young, the Niners were the team to beat, not only in the NFC but in the NFL as a whole. As the Packers were struggling to keep from falling into complete irrelevance in the 80’s, San Francisco seemed to be in a football class unto themselves. Guided by the late, great Bill Walsh (NFL pappy and grand-pappy to so many coaches you’d have a hard time listing them but this Wikipedia graphic does it justice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Walsh_Coaching_Tree3.png), SF was the birthplace of his experiment called the West Coast Offense that continues to dominate the NFL like his teams did thirty years ago. When the Packers played the Niners, there was no real question of how that game would end, just how bad the beating would be. Walsh’s legacy even allowed his team to continue their dominating ways into the 90’s, long after his retirement following the 1988 season. Except for one memorable game in 1989, the Packers would always struggle against San Francisco in the 80’s and early 90’s until they would run the table over them in the playoffs from 1995-1997. The humiliation of a loss in 1998 on Mike Holmgren’s last game as a Packer coach (in a game that almost single-handedly created the push for the booth review system we now have, thanks to a Jerry Rice fumble on the winning drive that was botched by the refs) was another painful blow but the memory of almost fifteen years of futility is reason enough to HATE the Forty-Niners.

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