One of the architects of the San Francisco 49ers' success this season is a 76-year-old intellectual who can only vaguely describe a touchdown.

This man didn't know the team was in the mix for Sunday's Super Bowl until two weekends ago, when he heard shouts from neighbors' houses. For most of the season, Andy Grove, the former chief executive of Intel , couldn't have named the team's coach.

But last week, after finding out that head coach Jim Harbaugh uses the 1996 management book he wrote as a sort of spiritual guide to football, Grove said he's suddenly earned a new flavor of respect from friends and family. For many years, he said, they'd always accused him of being "out to left field" when it came to sports. "I don't know much about the 49ers," Grove acknowledged in an interview last week. "One of my claims to fame is that I used to eat at a restaurant Joe Montana frequented, but I never saw him."

A chemical engineer by training, Grove is a Silicon Valley legend who built Intel into a computer chip giant during his tenure as CEO. He stepped down in 1998 but stayed on as chairman until 2005.

In 1996, while at the top of the chip-making game, Grove wrote "Only the Paranoid Survive," a book that introduced buzz phrases like "strategic inflection points" and stressed the value of paranoia. While it was a bestseller at the time, it has since faded a bit, selling about 30,000 copies since 1999, according to Nielsen BookScan.