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How 49ers CEO Jed York has Differentiated Himself from Eddie DeBartolo

Each took over the team as young men, but DeBartolo had lots of success early on while York has yet to win his first Super Bowl.
How 49ers CEO Jed York has Differentiated Himself from Eddie DeBartolo
How 49ers CEO Jed York has Differentiated Himself from Eddie DeBartolo

For nearly 20 years, Jed York has tried to live up to the legacy of his uncle Eddie DeBarolo Jr.

Each took over the team as young men, but DeBartolo had lots of success early on while York has yet to win his first Super Bowl. Every year it seems he's on the verge of winning one, but then he doesn't.

And that's his legacy. York is the owner whose team gets to the Super Bowl and loses -- the 49ers are 0-3 in the Super Bowl under York. They lost once with Jim Harbaugh and twice with Kyle Shanahan.

As opposed to DeBartolo, whose teams got to the Super Bowl and won -- the 49ers were 5-0 in the Super Bowl under DeBartolo. They won three times with Bill Walsh and twice with George Seifert.

When DeBartolo was the owner, his teams were prepared and professional in the Super Bowl. With York as the owner, the 49ers don't even know the playoff rules for overtime.

This past offseason, 49ers analytics guru Paraag Marathe compared DeBartolo's 49ers to a lemonade stand in order to illustrate how much the organization has grown since those days. And in a way, the organization has grown, because these days it cares more about money than championships.

DeBartolo would spare no expense, and he mostly likely would have fired Kyle Shanahan by now -- remember, DeBartolo fired Seifert after two Super Bowl victories. York is happy simply because the money is rolling in and the 49ers are relevant.

DeBartolo would be out of his skull after giving away another Super Bowl. That's the difference between them.


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Grant Cohn
GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.

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