SANTA CLARA — There’s a lot of anxiety among 49ers fans, but I really do think this team is putting together a helluva NFL Europe coaching staff.

Wait. That’s a cheap shot, though not entirely way off point with the collection of names that new coach Jim Tomsula has so far assembled.

My point is that Jed York, Trent Baalke and Paraag Marathe set themselves up for this by treating Jim Harbaugh—and his achievements—as cavalierly as they did all last year and for convincing themselves that there would be no ill effects from it.

Wrong.

This is the broken relationship that will have a long and probably not very pretty aftermath for the team that plays in Levi’s Stadium.

Again, I ask: What was the 49ers’ plan here?

Now it’s clear: Letting go of Harbaugh was the plan. That’s it: Get rid of the guy who gave them all palpitations. Nothing more. There was no other thought put to this beyond dumping their nemesis and for that they planned and plotted and leaked for months and months.

Once they got rid of Harbaugh, you could see the relief washing over York and Baalke, and yet…

There was no plan beyond that.

Which is what happens when you work backwards from a prescribed result—get rid of Harbaugh—and use every ounce of energy to justify that decision in a way that doesn’t sound like petty high school stuff.

They knew they wanted Harbaugh out. They knew he was popular. They had to go backwards to figure out WHY they would publicly announce he was out.

Their solution:

-Talk about “winning with class”;

-Declare that any season ending without a Lombardi Trophy is a failure and a potential fire-able offense;

-Pretend it was a “mutual separation”;

-Let it be known that you’re talking to a lot of great candidates;

-Hire Tomsula, the comfortable in-house candidate who basically is the opposite of Harbaugh in all personal ways, especially in dealing with ownership;

-And, most fatefully of all, communicate to all that you don’t think the coach is that important, anyway.

But: OOPS!

When coaching candidates heard all that, especially that last thing, they realized it might be preferable to go anyplace else other than the 49ers, who don’t believe coaching matters much.

Again, the 49ers worked backwards: To justify dousing Harbaugh and to diminish the three trips to the NFC Championship Game, 49ers management had to decide that it was actually Baalke’s roster that achieved all that.

That it’s Baalke’s roster that will win this Super Bowl and the next one and the next one after that.

That it’s not about coaching because if it is, that means Harbaugh had value and the 49ers were never going to admit that.

Note: I don’t think everybody in 49ers management actually really, truly believes that—but they had to TELL themselves that to prove that they were wholly justified in running off Harbaugh, one of the best coaches in the game.

So with that in the air… with Baalke’s half-joking declaration of the team’s offensive style out there… with Tomsula’s stumbling media performances out there… with the overall sense that the 49ers were dismissive of the value of good coaching out there…

With the good assistants who left this staff — fired, jumped, whatever — landing on other staffs and telling everybody about the 49ers’ atmosphere…

Well, that’s how Adam Gase, Lane Kiffin and Chudzinski (among others) all can decide to pass on the 49ers.

Let that one settle in your brains, 49ers fans: It’s very likely that Lane Kiffin turned down the 49ers’ OC job.

This is, of course, very reminiscent of Mike Singletary’s baffling search for an OC in 2009, when Scott Linehan and Chudzinski bypassed the 49ers, knowing that Singletary would have a choke hold on that offense.

That year, the 49ers ended up with Jimmy Raye. They might end up with somebody better—maybe Geep Chryst, maybe somebody else—but the pattern is there.

It’s not usually how you build a quality staff, it’s not how Harbaugh did it in 2011, and it’s exactly what York and Baalke did to themselves, all to justify a personal issue with the best coach they could’ve possibly ever hired.

For more, see Tim Kawakami’s Talking Points at blogs.mercurynews.com/kawakami. Contact him at tkawakami@mercurynews.com.

Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/timkawakami.