Nobody Around the League Is Whispering About the Yorks Anymore

The people who run other teams have started saying it out loud, and what they are saying has nothing to do with the depth chart.

I've spent about fifteen years defending this ownership to people at work and I'm starting to run low on material. Not because of the record. The record has been fine, better than fine, four straight winters where January meant something. It's the other stuff. The stuff that has nothing to do with football and keeps landing anyway.

There's a sentence going around the league right now that I can't get out of my head. Something is off there. They are slipping. That's a guy who runs another football team saying that about us, not a radio caller, not somebody with a podcast to feed. When the people whose whole job is evaluating other organizations start saying that in the same week, it isn't noise anymore.

And the scouts have their own version of it, which is simpler and colder. Old at the premium spots. That's the phrase. Edge, tackle, corner, the places you pay for, and the honest read from outside the building is that we're a year or two past the peak there. I don't fully agree. I also can't tell you they're wrong, and that gap is where I've been living since August.

Then August happened to Jed.

I'm not going to do the moral column. Plenty of people already did. What I'll say is what a fan actually thinks about at two in the morning, which is that the owner of my football team got arrested in a sting in a small town in Ohio, pleaded it down, paid his fine, and went back to running an organization worth somewhere north of eight billion dollars. The football part of me wants to file that under none of my business. The other part of me knows exactly how that plays in a building where two hundred people are supposed to take direction from him.

Somebody who used to work there put it about as bluntly as you can. It's ugly inside the family right now. They're scrambling. And the part that stuck with me: there was weird stuff going on before any of it hit the news.

The item that actually scares me is the least dramatic one on the list. Paraag Marathe is gone from the football side.

Not fired. Not disgraced. He walked over to the soccer holdings, which is a real job and a growing one, and on paper it reads like a promotion in a different direction. But that man ran the cap, ran the contracts, ran the negotiations that let us keep a roster together that by every rule of the modern salary cap should have come apart three years ago. Twenty plus years of institutional memory in one head. When that leaves, nothing breaks on Sunday. It breaks in March. It breaks in a June restructure nobody notices for two seasons.

So you've got an owner with a personal crisis, a family that's reportedly at each other's throats, the most capable operator in the building moved off football, and a roster that outside evaluators think is aging at the exact positions you can't be old at. Any one of those, fine, every franchise has one. Stack them and you understand why other teams are talking.

My dad texted me one line about it. Ask who's actually in charge. I still don't have a clean answer for him and I've been paying attention full time.

The thing I keep coming back to is that dysfunction at the top never shows up when you expect it to. Nobody drops a pass because ownership is a mess. It shows in who you don't sign, in a coach who has to spend Tuesday managing sideways instead of managing his defense, in an agent who tells his guy to take the other offer because that building feels unsettled right now. That's slow damage. You only see it in the standings two years later, when the reasons are impossible to trace.

The word slipping is the one that got me, honestly. Not failing. Not broken. Slipping. It's the word you use for a place that still looks the same from the parking lot.

And Thursday we open the season on the other side of the planet at a cricket ground against the Rams, before dinner, and I'll be on the couch at 5:35 with a plate on my knee pretending none of this is in my head. It will be. Kyle's got the season he needs and everybody knows it, the bodies are in the roster and depth chart, the whole run is on the 2026 schedule hub, and the rest of it is on the 49ers hub.

I want to be wrong about this one. I've never wanted to be wrong about something less.

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