San Francisco 49ers coach Mike Nolan brings style and accountability back to the five-time Super Bowl champions 

Three years ago, the San Francisco 49ers finished the 2004 season with a record of 2 wins and 14 losses. Team management was in disarray. Head coach Dennis Erickson, with a helping hand from general manager Terry Donahue, had managed to turn a once-proud franchise into a holy mess. Erickson was fired and Donahue soon followed him out the door. Not only were the 49ers one of the weakest teams in the NFL, but their poor drafting and lack of personality made them the bottom-dwellers of the Bay Area sports scene.

Enter Mike Nolan. 

Hired as head coach on the same date his father took the job 37 years earlier, Nolan has transformed the organization from top to bottom, and infused the team with a no-nonsense, winning attitude that has caught the attention of the 49er Faithful as well as the NFL.

The 49ers open the 2007 season on Monday Night Football at home against the Arizona Cardinals on September 10.

“It’s important, it’s exciting. It’s real exciting for the fans,” Nolan acknowledged during an interview at team headquarters in Santa Clara. “We have some home games that are nationally televised – four games in all that will have a national audience. That’s a recognition by the league; what they think of you, which is great. But at the same time, I also recognize that many teams see we’re improved.” Nolan continued that there are also “the very best of teams who say, ‘All right, when you can take us on, then we’ll talk.’ So you still have to earn the respect of the very best team.” 

Getting to that level means being savvy on draft day. In his first year with the club, Nolan and the 49ers had the No. 1 pick and selected quarterback Alex Smith from the University of Utah. Smith certainly took his lumps in the first season, but showed signs of development in the last two games of the year, leading the team to consecutive victories over the St. Louis Rams and the Houston Texans, giving the 49ers momentum heading into the 2006 season.

The two season-ending victories doubled the win total from the previous regime, and while 4-12 is 4-12, the Niners were back on the road to respectability.

Riding the improvement of Smith, the development of draft picks Frank Gore, Adam Snyder, Vernon Davis, Manny Lawson, and Michael Robinson, and the production of some key free-agent signings, the 49ers were much improved in their ’06 record, going 7-9.

The head coach makes no bones about the fact that the quarterback is the most important player on the field, and his development has been essential.

“I think Alex made great strides between his first and his second seasons,” Nolan said.  “I think it is important to note it was for a lot of reasons.  It was due to his maturity and the maturity of the cast around him.  I think it was the addition of guys like Vernon Davis and Larry Allen – solid guys like that. Also, the addition of [offensive coordinator] Norv Turner was big for us last year, and it will remain important because the foundation has been laid.  We needed a coordinator to put it all together, and that was good for us."

Smith's future looks bright.

“I look for Alex to have the same progress this year,” Nolan continued.  “Alex is going to keep getting better and better all the time because of what his strengths are.  A guy like Michael Vick came in at a very high level because of his individual talent, but it has not peaked near what some people would have liked. Whereas Alex will peak and surpass anything Vick has done because Alex, for all the right reasons, is going to utilize all the people around him. That is a strength of his.  Some guys it’s the strength of themselves.  With Alex, it’s the knowledge of everything around him.  That’s what a quarterback does.”

When Nolan talks football, you can feel his passion for the game and the fun he has around the people and players in the league.  His dad, Dick Nolan, was a professional player for the New York Giants, where he met a skinny defensive back named Tom Landry.  After Nolan’s playing career ended, he went to the Dallas Cowboys as an assistant to Landry and helped to mold the Doomsday Defense of America’s Team. 

It was in this environment that Mike Nolan grew to love the game.

“We moved to Dallas in 1962, and I would say my earliest memories were about ’65 or ’66 when I was 6 or 7 years old – the Cowboys playing the Green Bay Packers in the Ice Bowl, and things like that,” Nolan recalled.

(The 1967 NFL Championship Game between the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys, known as the Ice Bowl, is widely considered one of the greatest games in league history.  Due to the extremely hostile conditions it was played in, the importance of the game, the rivalry between the two teams, and the dramatic conclusion, the game is part of NFL lore. Played December 31, 1967 at Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin, it remains the coldest NFL game on record. The official game-time temperature was minus 13 degrees with a wind chill around minus 48.)           

“I remember those games,” Nolan continued.  “I remember going over to the training camp quite a bit in Dallas, and on Saturdays in particular, on the day before the games when the players would have kind of a warm-up type of practice – getting to know guys like Don Meredith and a lot of other players.  Hanging out in the locker room as a little kid; that was a lot of fun because the guys had great personalities, and they were great with little kids. They would pick ’em up, put ’em on their shoulders and walk around. 

“As I said when I took the 49er job in my interview, the guys that really gave me the love for the game were all those guys, and then coming to San Francisco in ’68 [when his dad was named head coach] was kind of the same thing.  They kind of took me under their wing, the Charlie Kruegers and those kinds of guys who treated me right.  They were guys you looked up to as players who were also good men, so I had great examples.  That was really where the love of the game came to me  – it wasn’t the game, it was the people, and that’s what makes the game special.”

While Nolan has led a charmed life, and lived the dream of every kid in America, he related wistfully that his dad has contracted Alzheimer’s disease. 

“I would say about a year ago it started to hit him,” he said.  “I hope a cure for it happens because it does kind of go along family lines, and it is hereditary, or at least it seems that way.  My two grandparents on my father’s side had it, his sister currently has it, but my dad has four siblings who do not.  But again, it kind of follows that chain.  I hope something does get done, but I’m not up on it.”

Times are tough for father and son.

“Our communication right now is, well, he’s still trying to figure out who I am sometimes, so we don’t talk too much,” Mike said.  “For the longest time we talked, but we never really talked X’s and O’s in football – we always talked about people.  The first thing I always list that’s important in this occupation, or any, is the people you surround yourself with.

“He impressed that upon me time and time again, even in his best of years here when they might have said he was a genius football coach or this or that, he always said it’s about the people you surround yourself with.  If you make good decisions in that area, you’ll get what you want, if that is winning games.” 

The Nolan household remains as busy as ever, and not only because Dad is the face and brains of the franchise. 

“My wife and I have four children, two boys and two girls," Nolan said. "My oldest is 23, then 21, 19 and 15, so I have three in college, and one is down at Valley Christian [High] in San Jose.  We’ve moved nine times since we started having children – most of the time was spent on the East Coast.  The last 12 years were on the East Coast [with the New York Giants, Washington Redskins and Baltimore Ravens as defensive coordinator], but we have a lot of family out here in California, so we would come out every other summer, whether up here, or in Oregon where my wife is from.

“I think the thing that makes it work is I have a great wife, a great coach's wife.  She’s very flexible with us moving and doing things we have to do.  She actually enjoys meeting new people and doing all those things.  We have made an awful lot of good friends over the years, and it’s hard to keep up with all of them because we’ve lived so many places.  But at the same time, my wife is a people person.  I know how important people are, but I’m not near the people person she is.”

The 49ers will make this year's draft selections on Saturday, April 28, and Nolan has made it clear that the team will only draft players with great character who can be impact players.

“I am continually reinforced in my thought process about the importance of smart, tough guys,” Nolan relayed.  “Character is a given to me.  It’s a given.  You can complain and you can talk about the glass being half-empty, but to me it’s half-full all the time, and it’s even more than that.  The NFL is made up of a tremendous amount of good kids, and we don’t entertain drafting them if they’re not.

“There’s accountability in everything we do and we’re under a microscope.  When we get on the field on Sunday, if somebody thinks that what we do all week long doesn’t relate to Sunday, then they don’t belong here.  Because everything we do relates."

Nolan was getting warmed up.  “Teamwork is about chemistry and accountability and all that.  It’s not about camaraderie.  I love camaraderie, everybody does.  Go bowl with the buddies, have a beer.” But what Nolan would really ask of his players is that they be accountable in everything they are to the team. “Because if that’s the case, it will take into consideration a lot of things that will help us win.  If the guy next to you can count on you to do your job, we’re pretty good.  If I had 11 guys lined up and they all said, ‘I know the guys around me will do their job,’ look out.  Not necessarily like ’em, this buddy-buddy stuff, but if they say I’ve got a good one next to me and they’re accountable for it, they will learn as much from teamwork and as much from being a team as anything we teach them.”

Nolan likes the way his team is shaping out and the dedication of his players.

“We’ve probably got as good an attendance to the off-season programs as any team in the league," he assured.  "For those reasons, we have playoff expectations.  With the addition of some key guys through free agency, and with those players paying the price like they do every day in the weight room, we have playoff goals.”

Nolan went on, evoking memories of the greatness of the 49ers.  “Bill Walsh tried for many years – you build a standard of the way you do things, and we are in the process of doing that.  That’s the difference.  They were in the process at one point, and they established it.  And then they had to maintain it, and they did for about 15 years.  We’re in the process of putting it together, and you have to establish it.

“If we make the necessary improvements from ’06 to ’07, our expectation should be to make the playoffs – what capacity, win the division or not, I don’t know.  But that ought to be a realistic expectation for us.  That puts some added pressure on our football team, but you go out there every Sunday with pressure on you, and it’s about winning and when you don’t, you ought to feel bad.  So I don’t have a problem with it.  I really don’t. 

“If I go down swinging, that’s fine.  I’d rather have a quality three years than a bogus five.”

After the turbulent pre-Nolan years, San Francisco 49ers fans agree wholeheartedly.