There's no question that Jim Harbaugh wore out his welcome with the San Francisco 49ers.
Despite an enviable run of success which included two first-place finishes in the NFC West, three straight NFC Championship Game appearances and one Super Bowl berth, by the end of the 2014 NFL season, rumors were running rampant that Harbaugh's intense, grating personality had worn on fellow members of the Niners organization to the point where his dismissal was all but assured.
Once it finally happened, there was little surprise or frustration.
Harbaugh is now happily making a new name for himself as the head coach at the University of Michigan, and the Niners are set to embark on a new era of football under former defensive line coach-turned-head coach Jim Tomsula.
What we've yet to hear to this point are any first-hand accounts of what actually went on behind the scenes in San Francisco last year.
Thanks to long-time Niners guard Alex Boone, who sat down with Andrea Kremer for an interview recently, via a short teaser from Peter King of Sports Illustrated, we now know a bit more.
Boone revealed to Kremer that despite the fact that Harbaugh brought a spark when he arrived in 2011 that immediately helped turn the franchise around, his personality eventually became too much to bear.
"But after awhile," Boone tells Kremer, "you just want to kick his ass."
Continues Boone: "He just keeps pushing you. And you're like, 'Dude, we got over the mountain. Stop. Let go.' He kinda wore out his welcome. I think he just pushed guys too far. You know, he wanted too much, demanded too much, expected too much ... And you'd be like, 'This guy just might be clinically insane. He's crazy.' "
As King notes, Niners owner Jed York was seeking a harmonious front office atmosphere that Harbaugh simply seemed incapable of fostering. Rumors of tensions between Harbaugh and GM Trent Baalke persisted for some time, and it seems, despite the consistent success that came along with Harbaugh's difficult personality, the human aspects of the situation became too much to ignore.
"The players have nothing to do with him getting fired," Boone says to Kremer. "I think that if you're stuck in your ways enough, eventually people are just gonna say, 'Listen, we can't work with this.'"
Boone, in these short excerpts, paints a picture very much like what many suspected when discussing the potential of Harbaugh's dismissal - a notion which at first seemed beyond ludicrous but became more and more plausible as reports of Harbaugh's agitating manner continued to surface.
When you're forced to operate in close proximity with the same group of Type A personalities on a daily basis, no matter whether you're running a small business or a multi-million dollar NFL franchise, the way you handle yourself and how you treat those around you remains the most important factor when determining whether a future can be built and maintained together.
