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San Francisco 49ers team owner Jed York speaks at a news conference in San Francisco, Monday, Feb. 2, 2026. (AP Photo\/Jeff Chiu, File) <\/p>\nSan Francisco 49ers team owner Jed York speaks at a news conference in San Francisco, Monday, Feb. 2, 2026. (AP Photo\/Jeff Chiu, File) <\/p>\n
I have a simple request for the San Francisco 49ers:<\/p>\n
Can you go 72 hours without being the weirdest team in professional sports?<\/p>\n
Scratch that, I\u2019ll take 48.<\/p>\n
Just two days, and then you can get back to all the peculiarity that we\u2019ve come accustomed to with your brand, one of the biggest and most important in the world of sports.<\/p>\n
Because while other teams have issues, the Niners seem to constantly be dealing with crises.<\/p>\n
And I, for one, have hit a breaking point. I don\u2019t think I\u2019m alone.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d prefer to be breaking down the team\u2019s 53-man roster. James Thompson! Jacob Cowing vs. Jordan Watkins. Who is this team\u2019s starting left guard?<\/p>\n
You know, nitty-gritty football stuff. Normal stuff.<\/p>\n
Instead, we\u2019re all subjected to the nitty-gritty of real life, like when we woke up Monday to the news that team owner and billionaire Jed York was caught in a prostitution operation at a rural Ohio trailer park over the weekend.<\/p>\n
We don\u2019t even need to couch this with \u201callegedly\u201d or \u201creportedly.\u201d His case is fully adjudicated.<\/p>\n
He has already served his time in jail for his crime after pleading no contest to a lesser charge.<\/p>\n
Pair that with Kyle Shanahan\u2019s secret car crash (which somehow dragged autonomous vehicles into the conversation) and Brandon Aiyuk\u2019s daily internet spiral (which, mercifully, is already on hiatus), which led to our discovery of something the NFL calls the \u201cleft team\u201d list, and there\u2019s only one conclusion:<\/p>\n
It\u2019s all just a bit too much.<\/p>\n
As York once tweeted, \u201cHollywood couldn\u2019t script this.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s true, mostly because the real-life travails of the 49ers would make a Taylor Sheridan script look grounded and subtle.<\/p>\n
John Lynch has largely steered clear of the classic locker room rap sheets of previous 49ers eras, and yet we can\u2019t escape the controversy that radiates from Santa Clara.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s as if they made a deal with the devil, trading conventional misconduct for avant-garde absurdity.<\/p>\n
(And knowing the Niners, it was a real drag-it-out negotiation.)<\/p>\n
Aiyuk got paid a mint to catch passes and almost immediately turned into Washington\u2019s most vocal digital cheerleader from the reserve list.<\/p>\n
Shanahan had a traffic crash, and the organization treated basic facts of the incident like they deserved top-secret government clearance.<\/p>\n
Then York arranges a $140 encounter on a Sunday morning, and lands in a jail cell with a mug-shot that will never go away.<\/p>\n
If only memes had a statute of limitations.<\/p>\n
With that $140, York bought himself a lifetime of punchlines at his expense and, presumably, years of hiding from the spotlight.<\/p>\n
This level of dysfunction usually requires a half-decade on the Raiders beat just to build up an immunity. (Luckily, as Aaron Rodgers would say, I\u2019m immunized.)<\/p>\n
But things are so deeply strange with the Niners that even a minor story spirals into a full-blown conspiracy these days.<\/p>\n
For instance, when Christian McCaffrey takes a scheduled (but not publicly announced) camp breather, supposedly reputable national reporters started suggesting that it was a contract negotiation tactic.<\/p>\n
But why not guess it\u2019s something larger than some paid time off? What with the Niners is ever what it seems?<\/p>\n
And perhaps here\u2019s the craziest part: It probably won\u2019t affect the team on the field at all.<\/p>\n
Everything about this team is weird. The vibes? They\u2019re way off.<\/p>\n
But the football machine doesn\u2019t seem affected at all.<\/p>\n
The head coach is out of commission for the start of training camp? No big deal.<\/p>\n
Your highly paid receiver is melting down in public? Things remain on schedule.<\/p>\n
The owner is arrested halfway across the country? The show goes on.<\/p>\n
Brock Purdy\u2019s massive contract looks like a steal when you consider all the hazard pay he should incur for being the face of this franchise.<\/p>\n
Lynch\u2019s massive draft whiffs feel like harmless clerical rounding errors next to his good work in handling all the off-the-field stuff that lands on his desk.<\/p>\n
Other NFL teams keep scoffing and rolling their eyes. \u201cAt least we\u2019re not them,\u201d you hear them say.<\/p>\n
Folks on the strange periphery, like me, are getting motion sick from all the head spinning one must do to cover this team.<\/p>\n
And yet the players on the field are still rightly expecting to make the playoffs and compete for a title in the winter.<\/p>\n
But I am exhausted by it all.<\/p>\n
So again, I ask the powers that be, which might just be the omnipotent, mystic forces of a Santa Clara electrical substation:<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s just give it a break for a bit before this team hops on a plane to Australia to play a regular-season game nearly 8,000 miles and a day away from California.<\/p>\n
You know, that totally normal thing that will happen in two-and-a-half-weeks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"San Francisco 49ers team owner Jed York speaks at a news conference in San Francisco, Monday, Feb. 2,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":983284,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2080],"tags":[220,7,6,1161,252,2624,2623],"class_list":["post-983283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco-49ers","tag-49ers","tag-football","tag-nfl","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-49ers","tag-sanfrancisco","tag-sanfrancisco49ers"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/117159203266582762","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/983283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=983283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/983283\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/983284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=983283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=983283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=983283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}