Jed York is on Twitter. He used Twitter to communicate with the fans after his team lost to the Seattle Seahawks on Thanksgiving.
Thank you #49ersfaithful for coming out strong tonight. This performance wasn’t acceptable. I apologize for that
— Jed York (@JedYork) November 28, 2014
Throughout the last few weeks, particularly in recent days when it became clear that there was no way Jim Harbaugh would coach the 49ers after 2014, York’s mentions have been a latrine fire. People even respond to some of my tweets with every insult in the book directed at @JedYork. York knows fans are angry. But even as a Twitter user himself, he dismisses the backlash as nothing more than screams from lunatic fringers who’d never dream of voicing their complaints/expletives in person.
“Listen, I’ve seen a lot of people … if you want to read my Twitter feed, you get a really good sense of the absolute, like, far end of just vitriol, like you’re the worst person in the world, like I get that. And I walked through the stadium yesterday, I walked on the field yesterday… you know, I laughed because one of the elevators was blocked off for the coaches, so we went down the concourse and I said, ‘great day to pick going down the concourse. I really appreciate that,’ with our stadium security staff,” York said.
“People were really nice and respectful with me in person. I think it’s very easy to have that nature of, reaching out and lashing out at people through Twitter. But personally, when you sit down and have a conversation with people, I think it was very reasonable yesterday and nobody came out, nobody attacked, nobody said anything. There were folks that voice their opinion of what they wanted to see happen.
“Jim is a very good football coach. I certainly understand why our fans would want him to stay and again, I’m not going to get back into the details but I certainly understand why they want him to stay.
“But I also understand that there’s a level of people that are commenting on articles, people that are sending Tweets. There’s no accountability in that, that you’re not going to hold somebody to, you’re not going to see that person — that guy in person. I don’t take that as personally as having conversations with folks. But I certainly understand why people feel like … they’re upset. I get it.”
***
One of the more surreal moments of the press conference came when Lowell Cohn brought up the tweet embedded above.
COHN: When you sent out that Tweet, was that acting with class on Thanksgiving? You’re the one who brought up the topic.
YORK: Yeah, when we invite 70,000 people to change their Thanksgiving day routines and rituals, and we perform the way we did, I’m disappointed by that. I apologized to our fans when we didn’t give them a reason to cheer. And they were there. They cheered and they stayed there for the entire game and they did an unbelievable job for us. And we didn’t…
COHN: I can tell you that I get a lot of mail from a lot of readers. Very few people defended you on that. You might have a reason, and Trent may agree with you. I can tell you that my readership really does not think you acted with class, then. And maybe when you mark as what you learned, that’s something you need to learn.
YORK: Thanks for the lesson, Lowell.
