Oh, how the mighty have fallen: the 49ers, once synonymous with success in the NFL, have hit rock-bottom

Football Digest, Jan, 2005 by Dennis Georgatos

STEVE WALLACE DOESN'T GO around bragging about his past association with the San Francisco 49ers as much as he used to. Nowadays, the former 49ers offensive tackle says there's just not much to brag about as the 49ers struggle through some rocky times.

"It's hard to watch when you had so much pride in the team," said Wallace, a member of three Super Bowl-winning teams in his 11 years with the 49ers from 1986 through '96. "It's very disappointing. I'm hanging my head down a little bit."

The once-mighty 49ers are slogging through another losing season. They've been plagued by a series of injuries to key players, including a season-ending Achilles tendon tear to star linebacker Julian Peterson. The organization also has been handicapped by persistent and massive salary cap problems that make a quick turnaround seem unlikely.

"As bad as things get around here, you just got to hope that we are learning something," says 49ers defensive tackle Bryant Young, who is the only player remaining on the roster from the last Super Bowl-winning team in 1994. "We are going through growing pains."

The 49ers lost their first four games of the season, a skid that matched their worst start since 1979, when Bill Walsh ended his first season as 49ers coach with 2-14 mark. The season-opening losing streak included a 34-0 blanking against the Seahawks at Seattle that ended an NFL-record scoring streak. The scoring streak had spanned 420 regular-season games over nearly 27 years.

"It's frustrating, very frustrating because it's such a proud franchise," says former 49ers linebacker Gary Plummer, who is an analyst for the team's flagship radio station. "It's a hard time to be a 49ers fan. But the one thing you can say is, it's been the easiest team to be a fan of over the last 20 years. So just like anything else, you've got to be able to take the good with the bad."

It's been a lot more bad than good for the 49ers this year. Even when the 49ers finally collected their first win of the campaign in Week 5 with a stirring 31-28 overtime win over the Arizona Cardinals, there was a sense of loss because Peterson and backup fullback Jasen Isom both went down for the year with Achilles tendon tears during the game. Pro Bowl center Jeremy Newberry, cornerback Mike Rumph, and defensive end Andre Carter are among starters who have gone down for extended periods because of injuries.

"I never could imagine where we are right now," says Steve Young, the only other 49ers quarterback besides Joe Montana to lead the team to a Super Bowl rifle. "For 20 years, it was just Super Bowl or bust."

Now it's 10 years and counting since the 49ers last Were in the Super Bowl. The drought is the longest for the franchise since the 49ers began one of the NFL's greatest runs of success in 1981, when they won the first of their five league championships. The central figures in their winning ways--Walsh, Montana, Jerry Rice, George Seifert, Steve Young, and Rounie Lott, among others--became household names, not just for the 49ers Faithful but for football fans all across the country.

"For years, we were at the top or near the top, and the effort it took to stay there was a huge chore and a privilege," Steve Young says. "So to see the team's current problems, it's unusual for me. I'm sure the guys that have been there the last five years, it's different. It's a different mindset. It used to be, 'We're going to the Super Bowl, or it's a bad year.' Times have changed. I don't know that any team can really say that now. There's just too much transition. There's free agency and throwing teams together every year. It's just a different era in the NFL."

In a way, the 49ers have mirrored the upheaval in the NFL, which in the age of parity has seen teams routinely make dramatic climb--and drops--in the standings from year to year. The 49ers' long-running dynasty crumbled in 1999, when Steve Young suffered a career-ending concussion and age, injuries and a first wave of salary cap problems dragged the team down to a 4-12 record.

The downturn also coincided with a stormy ownership change, as Eddie DeBartolo, after getting caught up in a gambling fraud probe in Louisiana, turned over day to day control to his sister, Denise DeBartolo York and her husband, John York.

Walsh rejoined the 49ers in 1999 as general manager to help shepherd the franchise through a massive transition. The team said goodbye to such stars as Steve Young, Rice, Tim McDonald, Ken Norton, and Merton Hanks and welcomed young, new talent through the draft. Occasionally, the Niners added to the roster by grabbing a player off the street, most notably in the case of Jeff Garcia, a Canadian Football League refugee who succeeded Young and developed into a Pro Bowl quarterback.

After the team went 6-10 finish in 2000, coach Steve Mariucci had the 49ers back in the playoffs in 2001 and 2002. But Mariucci was fired soon after the team's playoff loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2002 for reasons that remain murky to this day. Owner John York has said the two had philosophical differences.