Jed York, please don’t compare the 49ers to the Warriors

To all owners of professional sports teams: don’t think you can “replicate” what the Golden State Warriors accomplished in the past year.

Don’t think you can just fire a respected, successful coach, replace him with a man who has little to no coaching experience and expect to win a championship the next season.

Yes, I’m talking to you, Jed York. Just because you followed the same steps as Joe Lacob — firing a respected, successful coach and replacing him with a man who has little to no coaching experience — does not make the San Francisco 49ers equivalent to the Warriors.

(And, by extension, I’m also talking to the hundreds of other sports owners out there who may be thinking about masquerading an unwarranted firing as a “change in culture.”)

York to MMQB on replacing Jim Harbaugh with Jim Tomsula:

"“Culture is huge. That’s the difference between a championship-caliber team and a championship team. You look at the Golden State Warriors. They were the dumbest team in the NBA for letting Mark Jackson go, who won the most games in the franchise’s history. How could you be so dumb? They bring in Steve Kerr, who has been around the game for a long period of time but has never coached before. Kerr changes the culture, comes in with a different perspective, and look what happens.”"

There’s also a difference between championship teams and teams spiraling deeper into the abyss with its maligned owner grasping at metaphorical straws.

Kerr was the Warriors’ guy from the start. They didn’t want Mark Jackson. They wanted Kerr, they pursued him, and they got him.

The 49ers pursued countless candidates, got none of them, had one of them take the job only to back out because of the meddling front office, and in the end they were left with a no-name assistant who did this in his introductory press conference:

Embarrassing first impressions aside, Tomsula’s “culture change” does not compare to Kerr’s task. Kerr took an up-and-coming team whose core had been together for years and took it to the next level. Tomsula has to deal with a slew of key players retiring coming off a mediocre season and an uncertain future.

What’s more, Jed, it’s difficult to make a culture change when your new coach has been in the organization for the past eight years. Nobody is gushing over the hiring of Tomsula. The reason why no one is setting high expectations or speaking of championship aspirations like people did when the Warriors hired Kerr is because Tomsula was a “huh?” hire on so many levels.

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So we’ve established the 49ers are not a championship-caliber team. We’ve established that Tomsula’s situation is entirely different from Kerr’s. We’ve established that York has no idea what he’s talking about.

Here’s another fact: Kerr is a five-time champion. He’s played the game. He he’s served as a GM and excellent broadcaster. His reputation, pedigree, and preparation allowed him to slide right in like he’s been coaching for years.

Tomsula, meanwhile, is a relatively unknown figure. Only after research will you find out that he’s coached the 49ers defensive line since 2007 after a stint in Europe and the college game, that he lived out of his car while serving as an unpaid assistant. While that’s a fascinating and amazing journey, Tomsula has to virtually earn every ounce of his reputation, taking over a team in apparent turmoil.

Thus, it is unfair for York to throw Tomsula into the fire and ask him to do for the 49ers what Kerr did for the Warriors. What Kerr accomplished is near-incomparable. You don’t just walk in to a locker room steaming over the firing of a popular coach, get the entire team to completely buy in, win 81 percent of your regular season games, and clinch the championship. This is catching lightning in a bottle, the perfect storm at the perfect time.

Jun 11, 2015; San Francisco, CA, USA; San Francisco 49ers head coach Jim Tomsula looks on during minicamp at Levi

We could all be wrong. If Tomsula ends up being a genius, and the 49ers win Super Bowl, then York can gloat all he wants. I can’t help but compare York to Lacob after trading Monta Ellis — if York made a halftime speech at the 50-yard line of Levi’s Stadium in the season opener, boos would almost universally rain down — and maybe over time, York gets redemption if everything comes together.

But that’s a long ways from now, and now is not the time to be throwing out lofty comparisons to champions, even though we’ve come to expect this non-sensical blubber from York.

In the words of the man himself, “How could you be so dumb?”