San Francisco has been hot. So hot that it’s measurable. So hot that 2014 was its warmest recorded year. So hot that the first month of 2015 has been even hotter, its warmest start in recorded weather history. Just like the asphalt that sits on the Embarcadero and the cement of Coit Tower, San Francisco professional sports have been hot.

The Warriors are the hottest team in the NBA’s version of a poorly reviewed Will Smith film, the Giants have been hot for half a decade and the 49ers woke up from a period of cryogenic freezing.

As their teams heat up owners and GM’s can stop worrying about the seat below them warming up or idiomatic kitchen heat. In a huge market like San Francisco they can instead bathe in the cool green flow of cold hard cash. Ticket prices go up, beer becomes the golden commodity most likely to replace the dollar, and glittering billion dollar stadiums are built. The front office can permanently move themselves to a suite, crank the AC up, and in comfort continue to make the well founded decisions that have led to their success. (Unless you’re Dan Gilbert, in which case you lock yourself in your home’s safe room and write three emails a day. One to LeBron thanking him for coming home, one to David Stern for giving you three number one picks in 12 years, and one to Gloria James for raising her son in Akron.)

Success though breeds confidence and sustained success buys you the benefit of the doubt. Brian Sabean and Larry Baer could build a team that finished 62-100 and they would still be the guys that delivered the San Francisco, not New York, Giants their first World Series. Steve Kerr to a lesser extent has built that will up, he’s blessed with an incredible roster that Joe Lacob, Bob Myers, Jerry West, and the like have built, but the Warriors now have some leniency.

Certainly then in the new digs down in Santa Clara Trent Balke and Jed York must feel that they have built rosters that give them some leeway. They have taken the team back to the promise land, back where it belongs among the NFL elite. But they have a problem, and that problem is five-fold: 1981, 1984, 1988, 1989 and 1994. The Giants had never won in San Francisco, the Warriors have not won a title since 1975 and apart for one Baron-Davis-sized-blip and the current team they have been mostly terrible since. The 49ers on the other hand are an institution and were a juggernaut. Fans of teams that don’t lose much are spoiled, in the 49ers case extremely so. While the fans endured the 1999-2010 decade of futility, the return to prominence meant a return to the way it once was. That’s what appeared to be happening, 10 win seasons, NFC Championship, and hey Eddie D’s blood is even running the show. As long as they kept winning though they could be the heroes, the ones that restored the West Coast monolith of football, and why wouldn’t they? They had one of the five best coaches in the league a top five defense and a young talented quarterback. They should have been able to coast to champagne showers and ribbon cutting ceremonies and be ready to make room on their key chains for a great big key to the city.

Something happened though, they walked out of that air conditioned suite. Plastered their names on the side of the building and flew a plane overhead pulling banner with a giant middle finger to the fans. They fired their mercurial coach, a source of much of the heat that the team had shown over the last four years, fired the architect of one the best defenses in the NFL in Vic Fangio and then hired one of his position coaches to lead the team, Jim Tomsula.

Firing Jim Harbaugh, and let’s not confuse the issue, he was fired, was objectively a terrible decision. In his first four seasons in the NFL he went 44-19-1 good for a .695 winning percentage the 5th best all-time. He went to an NFC Championship in his first year after a strike shortened off-season and then for good measure went back the next two years. He took a quarterback that had started 9 regular season games to within five yards of a Super Bowl win. He transformed a former number one overall draft pick from bust to perennial playoff quarterback. He did all of this with a franchise that had not been over .500 in 11 years. But hey people make poor decisions every day, so why do we need to single out those behind this one?

Take it back for a moment to last summer. There was a report that the 49ers almost traded Jim Harbaugh. Most 49er fans dismissed this as the Browns simply trying to sow discord in the happy valley south of the Bay. It turns out that the Browns were actually responding to overtures from the front office. As the year progressed it was reported that the locker room was in chaos and the players were tired of their coach. The world was falling down around Jim Harbaugh and his personality was the purported reason. Something though has not added up, since he was let go there hasn’t been one player that has publicly rejoiced at his departure. Maybe that 53 man roster is just the biggest collection of, stand-up-never-say-anything-bad-about-other-people, guys ever assembled. Or maybe as Ocam’s Razor dictates it’s much simpler, they didn’t have a problem with Jim Harbaugh. Maybe they even, gasp, liked him. Maybe someone spread rumors to sour the fan base and collective consciousness of the NFL, so that when he was fired people could say “Oh he was a great coach, but he was so hard to work with it was inevitable.” There have been rumors that Jed York himself was behind the leaks that plagued the 49ers over the last year. While there is nothing to prove that this is true the mere fact that it’s being discussed shows just how poorly the whole situation has been handled. It would seem then that York and possibly Balke decided to rid themselves of Harbaugh last summer and went about discrediting him as much as possible. York called out the team’s effort publicly after Thanksgiving, informed Harbaugh two weeks before the season was over he would be fired then told everyone that they were “parting mutually.”

Hmm let’s look at an interview that Harbaugh gave last week, from Tim Kawakami’s transcript of his podcast “The TK Show”:

Q: There’s been so much comment from Jed York that it was a mutual separation between you and the team, that you mutually agreed you wouldn’t be the coach. Is that true? Or were you told that you wouldn’t be the coach any more? -HARBAUGH: Yes, I was told I wouldn’t be the coach any more. And then… you can call it ‘mutual,’ I mean, I wasn’t going to put the 49ers in the position to have a coach that they didn’t want any more. But that’s the truth of it. I didn’t leave the 49ers. I felt like the 49er hierarchy left me. -Q: Were you told this the Monday after the game in Seattle? -HARBAUGH: Yes.

So we have Harbaugh refuting York’s very public declaration of mutual parting. Shortly after that came the report from ProFootballTalk that the 49ers could have hired Broncos Offensive Coordinator Adam Gase but got tripped up because he wanted to retain Vic Fangio.

Wait what? He was not hired because he didn’t want to fire the guy that built a consistent top five defense?

There is a lot to unpack here but the line of thinking that works best is that for an undisclosed reason they felt they had to promote Jim Tomsula, he would have to be the Defensive Coordinator. Understandably he balked at the idea of his coaching staff be dictated and probably at the fact that they inexplicably did not want to keep a great coach. Tim Kawakami has a theory:

There was a whisper campaign vs. Singletary through most of 2010 and one vs. Harbaugh in all of 2014. Same coach replaced both: Jim Tomsula. — Tim Kawakami (@timkawakami) February 16, 2015

I'm not saying Tomsula was part of the campaigns, but I certainly believe it's no coincidence York keeps promoting him post-whispers. — Tim Kawakami (@timkawakami) February 16, 2015

Baalke saying 49ers offered HC job only to Tomsula skips over the point that Gase was told he could have the job if he made Tomsula his DC. — Tim Kawakami (@timkawakami) February 18, 2015

So to say it in as few words as possible,

Jed Y wanted Jim H gone so he gave the media fodder. Jim T has a good relationship with Jed Y, maybe went behind Jim H’s back. So Jed Y and Trent B fire Jim H, then tells the media it was mutual. Interviews Adam G, offers him the job but stipulates that Jim T must become DC. He refuses so they hire Jim T. And expects to get away with it all.

Jed York thought that he could lie to the fans and to the sports media. He did something that wealthy people tend to do, he thought his money put him above everyone else. He thought his money made him impervious, it gave him a false sense of security in his ability to control a situation. He thought that he was the smartest guy in the room, but in the end money only makes you one thing: rich. But all of this does not answer the question of why? Why did he want to get rid of Harbaugh? In the NFL we have seen time and again that winning is what matters above all else, this time it did not. While we may never know his motivation for sure a guess can be made: the one thing that powerful men hold above winning is their egos. The 49ers were finding success but the face of that success was Harbaugh. The fans loved him, he had too much leverage and ultimately too much power. He would have asked for more money, and possibly some roster control. Jed could not let this happen so he got rid of him, he was petty and now Michigan has one of the best coaches in the game.

So if the 49ers miss the playoffs next year blame should be placed on Jed York. That is a giant if, it would not be surprising at all if this team is good next year, the talent level is just too high. But if they crash and burn the whole NFL will be there for their Viking burial. When Super Bowl 50 comes to town next year the 49ers absence will be conspicuous. Mr. York may begin to feel the heat that he has avoided for so long because if the team goes cold the office is going to get hot.