Seahawks President/Senior Personnel Executive Scot McCloughan served as the GM of the 49ers from 2005-2009, running their Drafts and free agency, and like any GM of any NFL team, a lot of the credit or blame for how the team is doing can be heaped upon him. Mike Silver of Yahoo! Sports put together a really interesting piece on the stamp McCloughan put on the current 11-3 49er team and the players and talent he brought in that are finally producing.
One of those players is RB Frank Gore, who recently broke the 49ers franchise record for rushing yards. As Silver writes:
On the first Sunday of December, McCloughan spent the afternoon at Champions sports bar in the downtown Indianapolis Marriott while on a scouting trip. He asked the bartender to tune a small television near his table to the 49ers-Rams game and watched until the second quarter, when San Francisco halfback Frank Gore gained two yards on a seemingly nondescript carry.
The game stopped. Gore, 28, had surpassed Hall of Famer Joe Perry to become the leading rusher in franchise history. McCloughan became so emotional that he left and went back upstairs to his room.
"I got up and walked away," McCloughan recalls. "Just to know that he did it, it was so cool. And that's all I wanted to see. The guy deserved it. He blew out both knees and both shoulders, and the son of a gun still goes to work. He represents everything I tried to build."
Very interesting to see a guy that is now an exec with the rival Seahawks get emotional about a player he drafted into the league, especially after he was quoted in the same interview as saying, of the 49ers - "They come to our place Christmas Eve, and we're going to beat the hell out of ‘em."
It's a great piece by Silver and a must read for any 49er fan. Also interesting to Raiders fans is the hint in that article that McCloughan is possibly a candidate for the GM job in Oakland...