Jed York: ‘Our bottom line has been hurt much more by bad coaching hires and decisions by me.’

The San Francisco 49ers find themselves firmly in a rebuilding process, and team CEO Jed York seems to finally get the patience that is going to be necessary to get this done. He spoke to the local media on Thursday, and followed that up with an interview on KNBR last night.

The first half of the interview was mostly about the NFL meetings and the player message amidst the protests. At the 11:30 mark of his interview, the hosts asked York about how it is affecting the 49ers bottom line. In response, York just about nailed the response.

“We certainly heard some of that from people. But I’ll say in full honesty, our bottom line has been hurt much more by bad coaching hires and decisions by me than anything that has happened [with the protests].”

Tom Tolbert asked him what he would write in a journal about how the past four years have gone. Eric Branch transcribed that entire portion of the segment, and the whole thing is worth a read if you don’t want to listen to it.

York said the most important thing he learned is the need to be on the same page as your head coach and general manager. He talked about the importance of collaboration, and cited the Golden State Warriors as the gold standard right now.

He went through the past few coaching decisions, although his comments about going from Jim Harbaugh to Jim Tomsula were the most interesting to me.

“[Y]ou look at Jimmy T. He’s a great guy. He did a lot of great things for us as a defensive line coach. I think it was the opposite personality of Jim Harbaugh. And it’s easy to sort of make that jump and say ‘OK we want to hire this guy because he’s different than the last guy.’ That it was difficult at times to get along with, and you can have tension in the building with players, with the general manager — So, let’s hire Jimmy T. And it didn’t work.”

That’s about as close as we’ll get to an acknowledgment about all that went down during the Jim Harbaugh era. The comments don’t change what has happened the past four years, but it’s at least a little bit refreshing to hear him own up to some of the problems. It seems like he has learned his lesson, but only time will tell if that’s the case, and how the John Lynch/Kyle Shanahan era plays out.