San Francisco 49ers Tickets

The San Fransico 49ers drafted Maryland Tight End to give quarterback Alex Smith a short yardage target. The niners will be looking to rebound from consecutive sub 5 win seasons.

Staff Writer Russell Puntenney
The San Francisco 49ers are one of the most successful teams in the history of the National Football League, and boast an alumni that includes several of the league’s greatest players. When the Pittsburgh Steelers won their fifth Super Bowl title in 2006, they joined the only two other NFL teams that had accumulated the same amount: America’s team, the Dallas Cowboys, and the San Francisco 49ers.

The 49ers were formed in 1946, after trucking executive Tony Morabito spent five years petitioning the NFL for a franchise. For $25,000, Morabito finally got the 49ers their place as a charter member of the All-America Football Conference, and the team won its first game, 34-14 over the Chicago Rockets. A year later, the team became professional football’s first to sign an Asian American, and the team officially joined the elite NFL in 1950.

The team had winning records in four of its first five seasons, and fell just one game short of the NFL Championship in 1957, a very bizarre year for the 49ers. Aside from a series of close games and epic endings, the season was marked by the sudden heart attack of team owner Morabito, who collapse and died during a game in Chicago. In their last game of the season, playing for a spot in the NFL championship, the 49ers lead 27-7 in the third quarter, just to give up 24 unanswered points to the Detroit Lions.

The 49ers were one of just two teams that beat the Green Bay Packers in 1966, the year the Pack would eventually win the inaugural Super Bowl title, and San Francisco won its first division title in 1970 with a 10-3-1 record. They would go on to win their division again in ’71 and ‘72, only to fall into mediocrity afterwards. In 1979, however, things were ready to change again as O.J. Simpson ended his career in San Francisco and a young quarterback named Joe Montana began his.

Montana was a third round pick out of Notre Dame in the 1979 draft, known for a few impressive comebacks but not a very promising pick. His rookie season he threw just 96 yards and a single touchdown pass on 23 attempts. The next year, he reassured his doubters by orchestrating the biggest comeback in NFL history at the time, turning a 35-7 half time deficit into a 38-35 victory. And in 1981, in his first full season as a starter, Montana led the 49ers to their first Super Bowl victory over the Cincinnati Bengals, receiving MVP honors for the game and creating one of the most memorable scenes in sports along the way, when receiver Dwight Clark made “The Catch” to defeat Dallas in the NFC Championship.

Surrounded by future Hall-of-Famers, Montana executed then Coach of the Year Bill Walsh’s “West Coast offense” to near perfection, winning four Super Bowl titles in the 1980’s and earning himself MVP of three of the championships. The other Super Bowl MVP went to Jerry Rice, the dominant wide receiver Montana loved to throw to, who would eventually retire in 2005 unanimously recognized as the best wide out of all-time, and easily one of the best players in history. When Rice retired, he held career NFL records in total touchdowns, receiving touchdowns, receptions, receiving yards, total yards, and countless other categories. Before leaving San Francisco in 2001, Rice was also an integral part of the 1995 squad which won the city its record tying fifth Super Bowl. The MVP of that game was yet another 49er great, quarterback Steve Young, who set a Super Bowl record with six touchdown passes in the game and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2005.

The 49ers remained a legitimate force in the league, as another third round draft pick proved to possess more of a presence than was first assumed. In 2002, a wide receiver from the class of ’96 became a very explosive weapon, and the Terrell Owens saga began. Owens was a fantastic football player, but his talent was lost somewhere between hiding small objects in his equipment to create an amusing touchdown dance, like a hidden marker he removed from his sock to sign a ball during Monday Night Football, to disgracing the beloved star at the 50 yard line of Texas Stadium. He was traded to the Philadelphia Eagles in 2004, where he stirred so much trouble he did not play the last half of the 2005 season, and ironically enough, the next team ready to take the T.O. risk was none other than those same Dallas Cowboys Owens had insulted so infamously, when he signed as a free agent in 2006.

The team struggled after Owens’s departure, but the glory days of the past will always provide a rather distorted means of comparison. It’s very rare that teams are as good as the San Francisco 49ers were for as long as they were, winning each of their five Super Bowls in a period of only 13 years. In comparison, it took more than 20 years for both Dallas and Pittsburgh to win their fifth titles.

The Niners moved in to share the beautiful Monster Park, formerly “3Com Park” and before that “Candlestick Park”, with Major League Baseball’s San Francisco Giants in 1971. Overlooking the San Francisco Bay, the facility is one of the nation’s most visually pleasing, and has played host to plenty of significant moments in both sports and entertainment history: Willie Mays broke the all-time National League homerun record there in 1966, for example, just a few short months before the Beatles came to play their last concert ever.