Maybe it is a sparkling new start in 49ersland, but it still felt like the same, awkward, halting, dysfunctional ultra-drama on Sunday.
Chip Kelly stood in the exact same Levi's Stadium auditorium spot where Jim Tomsula stood a season ago, and where Jim Harbaugh stood a season before that, and Kelly answered the same questions about the same reports of his pending ouster as 49ers coach with the same shrugs and mini-soliloquies.
Another constant: No members of the York family visible or available for explanation.
Three straight years, three coaches taking the lonely march towards dismissal _ and this time it took owner Jed York two hours to formally announce that he had fired both Kelly and general manager Trent Baalke.
The more the 49ers try to change, the more things stay deranged.
The Baalke part of it, of course, is the larger piece, and the sign that the Yorks, finally, have acknowledged that they must change their insular way of doing business and open the franchise to new ideas and outside personalities and maybe a GM capable of drafting a decent quarterback and a few wide receivers.
But once again, the Yorks muffed the delivery by leaking the firings on Saturday night without first telling Kelly, then declining to formally give him word until after Sunday's loss to Seattle at Levi's, which gave the 49ers a 2-14 final record.
How can the Yorks make all the necessary, wholesale changes to this stultified franchise if they continue to try to play these heavy-handed public-relation games?
How is this team going to be any different if their owners continue to act like children?
"That stuff doesn't bother me," Kelly said of coaching a game after reports of his imminent firing. "I don't control what goes on and what doesn't go on. I just deal with it. I'm a face-to-face guy."
Kelly said he had a meeting upcoming with York; we all knew what was going to happen, but I asked Kelly: Will you make a case for yourself with Jed?
"No, I don't think I'm going to 'The People's Court'," Kelly said, grinning.
He knew the drill. This is all familiar if you've been watching the 49ers at all since the High Days of Harbaugh led to the self-destructive decision by the Yorks to fire Harbaugh and keep Baalke then all the tangled agendas and political tussles since.
It all started with firing Harbaugh, after he led this team to so much success. That's what led to Tomsula, which led to 5-11, and led to Kelly, and 2-14, and now the end of the Baalke regime.
The hard reality is that Baalke had to go because this roster was a wreck and because his icy personal style created a front office that couldn't adapt and expand from his original good run a few years ago.
And the harder reality is that even if it's not really fair to fire Kelly after only a single season with this terrible roster–and after York promised a year ago that Kelly would be the coach "a long time, period" _ it's much cleaner (though much more expensive) for the Yorks to clear the decks for a new GM to hire his own coach without any limitations.
By the way, the Yorks will be paying Tomsula another $7 million and will owe Kelly another $15 million or so (not counting potential offsets if and when he gets another coaching job), and then add in the costs of any multi-year deals on the old staff and Baalke's remaining guaranteed money ... and that's something close to $30 million to people who won't be working for the 49ers next season.
Then the Yorks will have to hire a GM, who won't come cheap given the recent chaos, and a coach, who absolutely won't come cheap after the Yorks have burned through three coaches in the three seasons at Levi's.
Which is the price of incompetence, right there.
So this isn't at all the cheap or expedient way to go, and for that the Yorks have to be credited after going cheap or expedient in so many previous important moments.
But will they get it right from here? The cloak-and-dagger approach to a couple of matter-of-fact firings was not a good start, and we shall see what Jed York says at his schedule media appearance on Monday morning.
On Sunday, this is how Kelly summed up his one 49ers campaign: "We were 2-14; that's how I would analyze the season."
Jed York has more to explain than just this season, of course. If he's up to it, he has to discuss how this franchise has sunk so low, wasted so many years, and provided such plentiful evidence of being so extraordinarily illogical.
And, again, if he is up to it, he has to tell 49ers fans how he'll go about fixing that.
One simple formula: Hire a good GM who is free to challenge the Yorks' orthodoxy, then step away and let the GM hire a good, creative coach.
That would be the baseline, and the 49ers haven't gotten that right in a long, long time.
If the Yorks can line that up, then the 49ers can find a quality QB, get better players, settle the franchise down... and act like grown-ups, not high-school drama queens.
It might take years. It might take gritting through some down times–the way Raiders owner Mark Davis stuck with GM Reggie McKenzie through three really shaky seasons because he knew McKenzie would get it right.
That isn't easy. The Yorks haven't proven they can do this, and on Sunday they showed once again how far away they still are, and might forever be.
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