Where are they now, 49ers karma edition

Not that any of us has a deep emotional connection to the 49ers, but I am always fascinated by these crash-and-burn situations.  To recap:

• Alex Smith's Chiefs have now won nine straight, and clinched a playoff spot today.  
• Colin Kaepernick, the man who replaced Smith and led the team to a Super Bowl, is now injured and a laughingstock, and unlikely to play for the 49ers again.
• The 49ers are now 4-11.
• Harbaugh is out of the NFL.

In January David Neumann wrote a thoughtful article on the traits of a successful head coach in the NFL.   He struggled to find any definitive set of attributes for success, but he did notice that there were two pretty clear markers of future problems: 

•  There have been just 14 position coaches to make the jump to head coach in the salary cap era. On average they have produced a Pythagorean win percentage of .451, well below coordinators (.492), head coaches (.509), or college hires (.516).
• The other move that seems to generally be a bad idea are internal hires. Twenty-one of the coaches in our sample were internal hires and their .421 Pythagorean win percentage was the worst split I looked at by a wide margin. Sorry, Jim Tomsula. Being a head coach just might not be your thing. 

So the 49ers have managed, in just over three years, to discard two competent quarterbacks, and replaced a competent head coach with a first-time no-hoper.

The football gods will not be kind, nor should they be.