by David Zizmor

SANTA CLARA–While it might be true that 49ers head coach Jim Harbaugh might not be the easiest guy to work with he’s not someone whose explosive or awful but he’s kind of high maintenance. The simple fact of the matter is he is already making quiet a bit of money where his contract calls for $5 million a season and he’s been incredibly successful.

His contract is up in 2015 so it not until two years that his contract will be up, Harbaugh in his first three seasons as NFL head coach saw that his team has gone to the Championship game, has lost in the Championship game twice and then made it to the Super Bowl. This is a first and nobody has ever done that before and he’s a competitive guy.

Harbaugh wants to one of the highest paid if not the highest paid coaches in the NFL and again this is a guy whose a high maintenance coach to deal with he has a general manager Trent Baalke in his own right and you have an owner Jed York and what probably happened Cleveland is the team where Harbaugh was supposed to go to.

In Cleveland it’s an absolute mess, let’s kind of remember that Cleveland is a terrible situation for any coach let alone a general manager and the owner is kind of ridiculous. So if the Browns went through their own crazy head coaching search this off season and as a result of a lackluster effort or a lackluster result nothing has worked right there.

The general manager for the Cleveland Browns Mike Lombardi got fired not long after the head coach was fired so a lot of crazy stuff was going on in Cleveland. This is one of those things that was frustrating the Niners front office in negoiating with Harbaugh. Lombardi who was the general manager at the time of the Browns coaching search has a bit of an inside source in the 49ers in that his son is a 49ers assistant.

Their was some tension between Hargaugh and the front office and the Niners tossed around the idea of trading Harbaugh because he wasn’t super happy and the negotiations weren’t going as smoothly as everybody would like. They kind of explored the situation whenever it got to a high level.

The 49ers realized that this was stupid and Harbaugh who heard about it said “are you kidding me why would I ever want want to go to Cleveland, the team is awful right now, their management situation is awful, there’s no way I would ever go there” to the extent that was it ever discussed at one point? You could say the words were tossed around, but no one ever seriously considered making this trade and the 49ers are denying it in the sense that they had any intentions of trading Harbaugh.

David Zizmor covers the NFL for Sportstalk Radio