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Those Moneyball 49ers
The Prairie War raging in baseball between the Statheads and the Seamheads leaped into the world of football over the weekend as the Chron's Ira Miller and Ray Ratto tag-teamed the SF Weekly over its cover suck up on the Niners' Billy Beane Wannabe, Paraag Marathe. Marathe is the Niners' Director of Football Operations and would be Public Enemy #1 to Niner fans if it weren't for the fact John York got that well-deserved assignment years ago.
What makes Marathe the center of the debate is because he is a big rectangular box in the Niners organizational flow-chart and he is most definitely not a football guy. What he is is a 28-year-old ex-consultant with an MBA from Stanford and not a lot of football background. He also has a name that reminds no one of Knute Rockne, Jack Hamm, or Dick Butkus. What he is, however, is a Moneyball guy NFL style, somebody who supposedly can crunch the numbers and run some spread sheets in order to see something the football guys can't see.
Ratto, usually the crankiest Chron writer, didn't attack the gist of the article, just attacked it for the penny pinching ways Marathe's and attitude seem to suggest. Billy Beane, after all, claimed his fame for drawing blood for an extremely cheap stone. Miller, however, wasn't so nice and let it rip, calling the article both a parody and an "April Fool's Day joke."
Image of Paraag Marathe from James Sanders in the SF Weekly
Like the debate in baseball, the conflict here is as much over philosophy as it is a debate on how to run a team. Seamheads (Helmetheads?) think it should be done by hiring football guys, something the Niners have none of and which Miller (and Ratto) have spared no expense in trashing the Niners over. The article in the Weekly argues the Stathead argument, that Helmetheads are Grandpa Simpson-like creatures, scared to death of new fangled ideas and things like computers and numbers and spreadsheets. Marathe isn't a football guy but something new, something cutting edge, something innovative that just might change not just the team, but football. Miller and Ratto, however, say piffle to all that and to hire somebody named Nagurski or Nitzschke.
We shall see.
We loved the story in the SF Weekly and thought it great, something the Chron should have written when the season began and Marathe first started appearing on the scene. We would like to point out, however, that since he's been involved with the team, the team hasn't done much more than suck, although that's probably more the fault of John York and consummate "football guy" Terry Donahue than Marathe. Color us skeptical. The Niners should do what Miller and Ratto say and hire some football guy. Just someone who listens to Marathe when he has something to say.