Fooch’s note: People are behaving like children so I have turned off the comments here.
There is very little to be found on San Francisco 49ers GM candidate Terry McDonough when you search his name on Google. You can discover that he is currently the vice president of player personnel for the Arizona Cardinals, that his father was a television reporter and columnist for the Boston Globe, that his brother Sean does play-by-play for ESPN’s Monday Night Football with Jon Gruden and that his brother Ryan is a GM for the Phoenix Suns. You also can find out that he has previously worked for the NFL franchises in Cleveland, Jacksonville and Baltimore.
There has only been positive press about both 49ers general manager candidates McDonough and George Paton who is currently assistant general manger of the Minnesota Vikings. While my personal research has turned up only positive opinions of Paton, what I am hearing from multiple sources is that McDonough is not well liked in Arizona. In fact, there were no positive reports about McDonough at all.
McDonough has been called “hard to deal with” and “not a good guy.” So much so that Arizona started a positive campaign for him over the last season just to get him out of the building.
Pandering off your unwanted with a positive spin happens regularly in business. It saves face for the two original parties involved, but it’s tough luck for the third party. A variation of it happened in college football when Steve Sarkisian was hired as the USC head football coach. His alcoholism was well documented in the Seattle area but Washington didn’t offer up details and USC didn’t do a good enough job vetting their candidate. We all know how that ended for USC.
There are always going to be negative and positive opinions of every candidate. What raises red flags, however, is when a person falls into the extreme. Hopefully the 49ers do their due diligence preventing what could potentially set the franchise back further.