Why 49ers Fans Hate Mediocre Quarterbacks

It's fair to want a great quarterback. Or at least a Pro Bowler. The 49ers haven't had a Pro Bowl quarterback since Jeff Garcia in 2002.
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49ers fans have high expectations.

Not only have the 49ers won five Super Bowls, but they modernized NFL offenses and had two of the 10 greatest quarterbacks of all time. So their fans are hard to please. They demand another dynasty AND another great quarterback, and they've been waiting since the '90s.

In one sense, their expectations are unrealistic, because dynasties don't exist in the Salary Cap Era. Look at the Rams -- last season they won the Super Bowl, this season they stink. The lifecycle of an NFL team is short. The closest thing we have seen to a dynasty in the past 25 years was the Patriots, but they're nothing special without Tom Brady. Brady's ability to win Super Bowls with many different rosters only proves his greatness. No one else has been able to do what he has done.

Most 49ers fans understand all of this already. Most 49ers would be more than happy with one more Super Bowl -- forget a dynasty. And most 49ers fans understand that to win that Super Bowl, they need a great quarterback.

It's fair to want a great quarterback. Or at least a Pro Bowler. The 49ers haven't had a Pro Bowl quarterback since Jeff Garcia in 2002 when Steve Mariucci was the head coach. Mariucci wasn't a great coach, but he was hired by Eddie DeBartolo, and worked under Mike Holmgren, and understood the importance of passing.

Since the Yorks took over the team, fired Mariucci and ran Garcia out of town, they have hired an endless string of head coaches who want to run the ball. Who don't seem to value the passing game or the quarterback position. It's as though the Yorks, who are from Youngstown, Ohio, want the 49ers to play Midwest Football, where it's cold and difficult to pass in the winter.

But the 49ers play in California. And their fans grew up rooting for Joe Montana and Steve Young, and have spent the past two decades begrudgingly cheering for game managers such as Alex Smith and Jimmy Garoppolo. 

Lots of fan bases would be happy to save solid, steady game managers such as those two. Not the 49ers. The 49ers are the franchise that showed the world in the '80s that football is a quarterback-driven sport.

How long will it take the Yorks to figure out what they should already know?


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Grant Cohn
GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.